Peter will could see he was facing a serious problem. All around him things were shrinking. All kinds of things. When did this start? Why hadn’t he noticed it sooner? Growing up in Scotland in the 1940s, he used to take toys apart to see how they worked, but back then things were hefty—bicycles, typewriters, radios. Electronics started to shrink in the sixties and seventies, when he was a young engineer at ibm; but the machines at least stayed substantial, and the industrial robots he worked on were reassuringly beefy contraptions. By 1988, however, mechanical things were shrinking, too. Researchers had just built an electric motor 60 microns in diameter—60 millionths of a meter, .002 inch, less than the width of a human hair. When charged with static electricity, the rotor would actually spin. Pretty impressive, Will thought, but one thing bothered him. To build even one complicated machine that small takes a herculean effort. How would anybody ever manage to assemble such machines en masse?
At the Silverado Country Club in Napa, California, Will posed his question to a gathering of engineers who specialized in making these tiny machines. He had to worry about it himself now because he had recently taken a job as director of manufacturing research at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. He popped a tape into the videocassette player. A giant hand appeared on-screen, holding needle-tipped lab tweezers. Below the tips, a mere speck of a part—a transistor some 2 millimeters square, used in microwave instruments—rested on a table. This component had to be lifted. The matchup looked hopeless. As in anyone with a pulse, the hand trembled ever so slightly. The tweezers magnified this shaking, so that their tips waved in arcs just above the speck. Bravely they closed in and nabbed it, most likely between heartbeats, the same way a target shooter times the squeeze of a trigger. Ah, sighed the audience in relief. But now the speck was stuck on the tweezers. The needle tips parted, but the component would not let go; static electricity made it cling. The hand tried to shake it off, harder and harder. Ooh, moaned the audience. When the speck finally did drop, it landed not in its proper place, where it was to be soldered, but back on the table. The hand started over. This time the tweezers bore down a little too hard. One tip slid off the edge of the speck like a tiddlywinks shooter, and what happened next was truly amazing. The speck leaped away, completely out of the picture, like a homer off Babe Ruth’s bat. Oooooh, the audience gasped.
Will’s videotape pretty much scotched the notion that human hands could ever assemble tiny mechanical contraptions out of a pile of gears, flaps, wheels, and rotors. But what about getting some kind of tiny robot to do it? Given what he knew about robotics, Will thought that unlikely. At ibm in the sixties, he built the rs/1, the first robotic arm able to select electronic components and insert them into circuit boards. He worked for decades to get it and robots like it to handle even more complex tasks. And though his efforts led to many breakthroughs and made him a legendary figure in robotics, ultimately he and his colleagues failed. Robots are well suited to spraying paint on automobiles or welding seams and even for stuffing electronic chips onto printed circuit boards, but when it comes to putting together anything intricate, they are useless. At Hewlett-Packard and elsewhere, all the delicate assembly work was done by hand. You still see photographs of rows and rows of people, often in the Far East, assembling things on production lines, says Will. You see it in Silicon Valley as well. Basically, we roboticists haven’t shown we have the stuff to make this easy.
Will’s message to the assembled engineers was clear: shrink anything in the lab as much as you want, build the most wonderful tiny machine, but sooner or later you will want to manufacture it. All their wonderful early breakthroughs would come to naught, he said, because we have no technology to build ’em.
This drawback hadn’t stopped the attempt—a growing number of researchers were building not only microparts, not only micromotors, but far more complicated machines: a working car the size of a grain of rice, an entire working lathe. Most of these miniature wonders were made in Japan, where industrial research teams tended to follow a strategy of shrinking conventional machines to small dimensions and assembling the parts with superhuman patience.
