R. P. Feynman, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," Annual American Physical Society Meeting, Pasadena, CA, Dec. 29th, 1959
"What could we do with layered structures with just the right layers? What would the properties of materials be if we could really arrange the atoms the way we want them? ...Consider, for example, a piece of material in which we make little coils and condensers (or their solid state analogs) 1,000 or 10,000 angstroms in a circuit, one right next to the other, over a large area, with little antennas sticking out at the other end---a whole series of circuits. Is it possible, for example, to emit light from a whole set of antennas, like we emit radio waves from an organized set of antennas to beam the radio programs to Europe? The same thing would be to beam the light out in a definite direction with very high intensity. (Perhaps such a beam is not very useful technically or economically.)"