On the 29th of December of 1959, Richard Feynman gave a talk called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech. In this famous lecture, Feynman laid the conceptual foundations for the field now called nanotechnology when he imagined a day when things could be miniaturized - when huge amounts of information could be encoded onto increasingly small spaces, and when machinery could be made considerably smaller and more compact.

Since that December 29, 1959 is considered the Birthday of Nanotechnology as a scientific field.

Although some have questioned the degree to which Feynman influenced the rise of nanotechnology, his lecture is still seen as a seminal event in the short history of the nano field. It's important enough that, 25 years later, Feynman was invited to give an updated version of "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" at a weeklong seminar held at the Esalen Institute in October, 1984.

Meanwhile Global Nanotechnology Day is usually celebrated on or around October 9 to help raise awareness of nanotechnology, how it is currently used in products that enrich our daily lives, and the challenges and opportunities it holds for the future. This date, 10/9, pays homage to the nanometer scale, 10⁻⁹ meters.