Attempting to Make the Smallest* Electric Motor [video]

There's some interesting history behind the world's smallest motor. In 1959, Feynman gave a talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", which kind of invented the field of nanotechnology. He discussed how you could use tools to build smaller tools, and then smaller tools, until you could manipulate matter on the atomic scale.

To motivate the development of micro-tools, Feynman offered a $1000 prize (more than $10,000 in current dollars), to anyone who could build a motor smaller than 1/64" on a side. Less than a year later, a Caltech grad won the prize, creating the motor with "a watchmaker's lathe, a microscope, and sharp toothpicks." Although the motor won the prize, it was a disappointment because it didn't use any new technologies or make any advances toward nanotechnology.

It wasn't until 1985 that Feynman's second challenge was won: scaling down a page of text by a linear factor of 25,000. A Stanford grad student reduced a page from A Tale of Two Cities to a 5.9µm square.

Links: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3479/1/Tale.pdf https://books.google.com/books?id=iXcmTROdA1EC&pg=RA2-PA10 https://archive.org/details/noordinarygenius00feyn/page/174/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_th...

Very impressive.

Btw does anyone know if there are any larger, mass-producible micromotors on the market that can be used to make products similar to the smartknob?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q76dMggUH1M&t=100s

They also made a manual expresso machine, although I don't know if they continued production after the initial kickstarter run.

https://www.chronova-engineering.co.uk/epoch