How Probe Microscopists Became Nanotechnologists

Nanoscale entities are by definition invisible to the unmediated senses. Yet generating images of these objects has been crucial to the rhetoric of nanotech boosters. Thus, bringing microscopes and microscopists under the nano umbrella has been central to the work of nano proponents. No instruments have been more crucial to this process than the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and atomic force microscope (AFM). Yet STM and AFM have long histories that precede the advent of nano. I outline this history and show that the connection between probe microscopy and nano is contingent rather than self-evident. The drafting of the probe microscopy community into nano was inspired by role differentiation within that community following the widespread commercialization of the instruments in the early 1990s. As probe microscopists move into nano, it is likely they will remake the field in light of the history of their community.