ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- At first glance, it looks like a 1930s documentary: sturdy cogwheels, large-toothed gears and pistonlike rods mesh in a proletarian symphony in grainy black and white.
But there are no people in the movie and no sound in the room. What visitors are watching on the screen above their heads is not the industrial might of yesteryear, but the technological promise of tomorrow.In fact, the gear in the film is about the size of a pollen grain. It can rotate at speeds up to 350,000 rpm and is the principal moving part in the world's smallest engine.
The gear turns under the eye of a microscope in a small "design room" at Sandia National Laboratories here, and its image is projected where scientists can watch it as they plot what they say could be the world's next technological revolution.
Micromachines -- mechanical devices so small they cannot be seen with the naked eye -- have undeniable potential to inspire radical change in almost any aspect of human endeavor.
Among the anticipated innovations are tiny switches that could dramatically increase the capacity of fiber-optic telecommunications systems to deliver signals to computers and telephones.
Microgyroscopes could also keep cars from skidding and trekkers from straying in the woods. Soldiers in the field might carry a wristwatch-size radio -- beginning a new era in walkie-talkies -- decades after Dick Tracy pioneered it.
There are an estimated 600 government, university and private labs doing microtechnology research worldwide. Eighty U.S. companies are working toward commercial applications.
Unlike "nanotechnology," which seeks to build devices on the atomic or molecular scale, microtechnology, which works in microns (millionths of a meter), graduated from theory long ago and has already made itself felt in a number of commercial applications.
Microscopic accelerometers trigger most of today's automobile air bags; micromachines spit the ink in ink-jet printers; microsensors monitor blood pressure in heart attack patients and regulate the fuel-air mix in automobile engines.
And enthusiasts say this is just the beginning. "We have developed some new technologies that we think are just going to revitalize the world," said Samuel L. Miller, supervisor of advanced concepts for Sandia's Microsystems Center. "It is a second silicon revolution, adding to microcircuitry complete systems that can sense, think, act and communicate."
Microdevices are small. The gear teeth in the world's smallest machine are a mere 7 to 8 microns across, about the size of a red blood cell, and at that size, gravity and inertia have little meaning. Miller tweaks a joystick at his elbow, and in an instant the cogwheel is spinning at 350,000 rpm in the opposite direction.
And microdevices are strong. Miller shows a videotape of the day a dust mite -- a phenomenally ugly creature about half the size of a dandruff fleck -- wandered into the micromachine.
The mite weighed about 100 times as much as the gear, but with another touch of the joystick, both gear and mite were spinning at several thousand rpm. When the gear stopped, the mite stepped down and wandered away.
And the machines are relatively easy to make, with the same procedures that engineers use to manufacture microchips. Layers of silicon are photo-engraved with the micromachine's design, then etched with acid to free the moving parts.
Scientists can make hundreds of thousands of microdevices on the surface of a silicon wafer the size of a grapefruit slice, and once the design is completed, manufacturing is easy. Like microcircuitry, everything is made in place -- no assembly required.
Despite these advantages, however, the industry has been slow to develop, said San Francisco-based consultant Roger Grace, who has been tracking the progress of microtechnology for years.
"I'm a market analyst, and what it comes down to is, 'When are people going to make money from all this?' " Grace said. "When you look at the 'killer applications,' they are very limited."
Grace estimates that the industry sold $4 billion to $6 billion in microdevices in 1998, largely on the strength of a half-dozen proven technologies such as the ink jets and the air-bag triggers.
But this is changing, Grace says, and he expects revenue to rise within five years to between $18 billion and $20 billion, as more firms build new devices to feed high-volume markets: "These are 'disruptive' technologies," he said. "We're not talking about a continuum. We're talking about a quantum leap."