If you were to travel back in time by half a decade, you would have come across the World’s Smallest Book, the “artwork” of Vancouver-based artist Robert Chaplin who focused an ion beam that carved letters onto a microchip which in the real world, is far thinner compared to your average strand of hair. This particular microchip boasts of an array of 30 tablets, where each letter of the book has been carved with a line resolution of 43 nanometers. Just to get some context into all of this, a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter. Chaplin said, “The tablets contain the text of Teeny Ted From Turnip Town, complete with an ISBN. In 2012, I received a Guinness World Record confirming my creation of the smallest book yet made.”
You definitely cannot read what Chaplin “wrote” of course, since only a scanning electron microscope (SEM) will do. What happened if this were to be a tome for the ages? I guess this is where someone will need to print this particular puppy, where Chaplin has every intention of rolling out a large-print edition of his book entitled ‘Teeny Ted From Turnip Town’. Needless to say, he will need some money to get this project started, and which better place to turn to other than Kickstarter?
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