Page "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" Paragraph 3

He also presented the " weird possibility " of " swallowing the doctor ," an idea which he credited in the essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs.

This concept involved building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop.

This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in perhaps a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations.

He uses the analogy of a pantograph as a way of scaling down items.

This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1942 story Waldo.