Music is tricky to go more than a few minutes without running into a machine of some sorts. Whether it was the toaster you made breakfast with, the train you took into town, or the machine you're staring at right now to watch this video, the idea of machines taking over the world isn't post-apocalyptic fiction, it's already happened. They've transformed society and improved our quality of life. So if advances in engineering have gotten us this far, from mass producing refrigerators to traveling to the moon, what's next? Many chemists are actually thinking a lot smaller, making machines out of molecules. It takes some chemical know-how to control motion on a microscopic scale, but tiny machines could revolutionize everything from medicine to material science, where molecular processes play a big role. A machine is basically any device that takes some energy input into at least one moving part, each with a distinct function, and these parts come together to produce a useful motion as an output called work. To think of an old watch, all those interconnecting cogs are arranged to make the hands on its face rotate just the right amount to keep time. Now, there are some obvious advantages to making machines smaller, like being able to transport them more easily and make them move more precisely. In 1959, the bongo-playing safecracking Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman talked about the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale. And by small, we're talking a few millionths of a millimeter, small machines made up of one or a few molecules. Twenty years later, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler came across a transcript of Feynman's lecture on machines. He developed some of the ideas further and in 1981 published a paper called "Molecular Engineering." Drexler imagined molecule-sized machines that...