#16 Seventies flash back

Several weeks ago I subscribed to ChemWeb.com. Today I was reading its newsletter The Alchemist about nano-technology in an article about smart and intelligent textiles (I guess the two don‘t necessarily go together.) The word “nano” had a familiar ring to it, and into my mind popped Mork and Mindy, the old Robin Williams/Pam Dauber show. Didn’t Mork say, “Nano nano?” Is that the source of the word I wondered. It took a few minutes to find exactly what I wanted in Google, but here is the explanation on ABC Classic FM Word of the day about Mork and nano.

“The word is recorded 20 years earlier, in 1947. “Nano” comes from nanos – the Greek word for “dwarf” (as in the old the pop song “We Don’t Want No Nanos People Round Here”). Nano is now prefixed to the names of units to form the names of units that 109 smaller – that is, a one thousand-millionth part of them. Thus a nanometre is a one thousand-millionth part of a metre.”