Nanotechnology

Jeremy Ramsden Nanotechnology is widely considered to constitute the basis of the next technological revolution, following on from the first Industrial Revolution, which began around 1750 with the introduc- tion of the steam engine and steelmaking (and which parallelled, or perhaps caused, upheavals in land ownership and agriculture practice). The Industrial Revolution constituted as profound a change in society and civilization as the earlier Stone, Bronze and Iron revolutions, each of which ushered in a distinctly new age in the history of human civilization. A second Industrial Revolution began around the end of the 19th century with the introduction of electricity on an industrial scale (and which paved the way for other innovations such as wireless commu- nication), and most recently we have had the Information Revolution, characterized by the widespread introduction of computing devices and the internet.