1857: Michael Faraday discovered colloidal “ruby” gold, demonstrating that nanostructured gold under certain lighting conditions produces different-colored solutions.

1947: John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs discovered the semiconductor transistor and greatly expanded scientific knowledge of semiconductor interfaces, laying the foundation for electronic devices and the Information Age. 

1936: Erwin Müller, working at Siemens Research Laboratory, invented the field emission microscope, allowing near-atomic-resolution images of materials.

1951: Erwin Müller pioneered the field ion microscope, a means to image the arrangement of atoms at the surface of a sharp metal tip; he first imaged tungsten atoms. 

1950: Victor La Mer and Robert Dinegar developed the theory and a process for growing monodisperse colloidal materials. Controlled ability to fabricate colloids enables myriad industrial uses such as specialized papers, paints, and thin films, even dialysis treatments.

1956: Arthur von Hippel at MIT introduced many concepts of—and coined the term—“molecular engineering” as applied to dielectrics, ferroelectrics, and piezoelectrics

1958: Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments originated the concept of, designed, and built the first integrated circuit, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 2000.

1959:  Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology gave what is considered to be the first lecture on technology and engineering at the atomic scale, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech.

1965: Intel co-founder Gordon Moore described in Electronics magazine several trends he foresaw in the field of electronics. One trend now known as “Moore’s Law,” described the density of transistors on an integrated chip (IC) doubling every 12 months (later amended to every 2 years). Moore also saw chip sizes and costs shrinking with their growing functionality—with a transformational effect on the ways people live and work. That the basic trend Moore envisioned has continued for 50 years is to a large extent due to the semiconductor industry’s increasing reliance on nanotechnology as ICs and transistors have approached atomic dimensions.

1981:  Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM’s Zurich lab invented the scanning tunneling microscope, allowing scientists to "see" (create direct spatial images of) individual atoms for the first time. Binnig and Rohrer won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1986. 

1974:  Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term nanotechnology to describe precision machining of materials to within atomic-scale dimensional tolerances.

1981: Russia’s Alexei Ekimov discovered nanocrystalline, semiconducting quantum dots in a glass matrix and conducted pioneering studies of their electronic and optical properties.

1985: Rice University researchers Harold Kroto, Sean O’Brien, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley discovered theBuckminsterfullerene (C60), more commonly known as the buckyball, which is a molecule resembling a soccerball in shape and composed entirely of carbon, as are graphite and diamond. The team was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in this discovery and that of the fullerene class of molecules more generally.

1986:  Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate, and Christoph Gerber invented the atomic force microscope, which has the capability to view, measure, and manipulate materials down to fractions of a nanometer in size, including measurement of various forces intrinsic to nanomaterials. 

1985: Bell Labs’s Louis Brus discovered colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots), for which he shared the 2008 Kavli Prize in Nanotechnology.

1989: Don Eigler and Erhard Schweizer at IBM's Almaden Research Center manipulated 35 individual xenon atoms to spell out the IBM logo. This demonstration of the ability to precisely manipulate atoms ushered in the applied use of nanotechnology.

1990s: Early nanotechnology companies began to operate, e.g., Nanophase Technologies in 1989, Helix Energy Solutions Group in 1990, Zyvex in 1997, Nano-Tex in 1998.