text: The term “Brownian motor” was originally invented by Swiss theoretical physicist Peter Hänggi in 1995. The Brownian motor, like the phenomenon of Brownian motion that underpinned its underlying theory, was also named after 19th century Scottish botanist Robert Brown, who, while looking through a microscope at pollen of the plant Clarkia pulchella immersed in water, famously described the random motion of pollen particles in water in 1827. In 1905, almost eighty years later, theoretical physicist Albert Einstein published a paper where he modeled the motion of the pollen as being moved by individual water molecules, and this was verified experimentally by Jean Perrin in 1908, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926 "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter". These developments helped to create the fundamentals of the present theories of the nanoscale world.
  Nanoscience has traditionally long remained at the intersection of the physical sciences of physics and chemistry, but more recent developments in research increasingly position it beyond the scope of either of these two traditional fields.