Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1 The “Nano” Era
It is really scarce that the start of a period of science can be kept track of so well as the
turn towards nanoscale and atomic-level manipulation of materials. The launching
talk of nanoscience is attributed to the famous physicist Richard Feynman, already a
Nobel Prize laureate at that time, who gave voice to a really novel view in December
1959 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, USA [1]. His
speach is an excellent example of the blend of two things: the far-reaching vision of
a great mind and the limitations of one’s thought by the experience. While Feynman
outlined the way of miniaturization and information storage at the small scale on
the basis of lithography and information reading by electron microscopy, he also
mentioned the atomic-scale manipulation of material as a tool to be created.
What Feynman meant as solid-state nanoscience (and what does not necessarily
refers to completely independent chemical entities) was well established in the
previous century during the establishment of colloid chemistry. As it was stated in a
very early and carefully written paper of Thomas Graham [2], the “colloidal condition of matter” was distinguished from “crystalloids”, mostly based on their transport
and crystallization properties. Later, Wolfgang Ostwald (1907) introduced the term
of “colloidal state” instead of colloidal matter, hence distinguishing the dispersity of
the material from its chemical nature. The debate on the nature of colloidal systems
(solution or suspension) was clearly decided by the discovery of the ultramicroscope
by Richard Zsigmondy, which emerged him to among the Nobel laureates (1925).
The ultramicroscope first used the scattered light for the analysis of a system and
indeed “shed light” on the heterogeneous nature of colloidal solutions. Even though
colloid science could slowly establish itself as an independent branch of chemistry,
it has long been dealing with solution-based dispersed systems only, and its merge
with modern solid-state nanoscience is still going on nowadays. The hard process of
the general acceptance of colloid science was nicely summarized in 1955 by Hauser
[3], a prominent researcher of the field, giving also the tribute to many peers.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
L. Péter, Electrochemical Methods of Nanostructure Preparation,
Monographs in Electrochemistry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69117-2_1
3
Introduction
1.1 The “Nano” Era
It is really scarce that the start of a period of science can be kept track of so well as the
turn towards nanoscale and atomic-level manipulation of materials. The launching
talk of nanoscience is attributed to the famous physicist Richard Feynman, already a
Nobel Prize laureate at that time, who gave voice to a really novel view in December
1959 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, USA [1]. His
speach is an excellent example of the blend of two things: the far-reaching vision of
a great mind and the limitations of one’s thought by the experience. While Feynman
outlined the way of miniaturization and information storage at the small scale on
the basis of lithography and information reading by electron microscopy, he also
mentioned the atomic-scale manipulation of material as a tool to be created.
What Feynman meant as solid-state nanoscience (and what does not necessarily
refers to completely independent chemical entities) was well established in the
previous century during the establishment of colloid chemistry. As it was stated in a
very early and carefully written paper of Thomas Graham [2], the “colloidal condition of matter” was distinguished from “crystalloids”, mostly based on their transport
and crystallization properties. Later, Wolfgang Ostwald (1907) introduced the term
of “colloidal state” instead of colloidal matter, hence distinguishing the dispersity of
the material from its chemical nature. The debate on the nature of colloidal systems
(solution or suspension) was clearly decided by the discovery of the ultramicroscope
by Richard Zsigmondy, which emerged him to among the Nobel laureates (1925).
The ultramicroscope first used the scattered light for the analysis of a system and
indeed “shed light” on the heterogeneous nature of colloidal solutions. Even though
colloid science could slowly establish itself as an independent branch of chemistry,
it has long been dealing with solution-based dispersed systems only, and its merge
with modern solid-state nanoscience is still going on nowadays. The hard process of
the general acceptance of colloid science was nicely summarized in 1955 by Hauser
[3], a prominent researcher of the field, giving also the tribute to many peers.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
L. Péter, Electrochemical Methods of Nanostructure Preparation,
Monographs in Electrochemistry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69117-2_1
3