A Boy and His Atom

A Boy and His Atom is a 2012 stopmotion animated short film released on YouTube by IBM Research. The movie tells the story of a boy and a wayward atom who meet and become friends. It depicts a boy playing with an atom that takes various forms. One minute in length, it was made by moving carbon monoxide molecules viewed with a scanning tunneling microscope, a device that magnifies them 100 million times. These twoatom molecules were moved to create images, which were then saved as individual frames to make the film. The movie has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the Worlds Smallest StopMotion Film.

At the beginning of the film, subtitles introduce the audience to how and why the film was made. When the action starts, we see a boy meeting an atom. Hesitant at first, he dances for it to the films musical accompaniment, then bounces it around like a ball. The atom drops to the ground, and forms a trampoline, which the boy bounces on. The atom reforms, and the boy tosses it into the sky, flying past clouds and the word Think, a longtime internal IBM motto.A Boy And His Atom was created by a team of IBM scientists together with Ogilvy amp Mather, IBMs longstanding advertising agency at the companys Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, Carbon monoxide molecules were manipulated into place on a copper substrate with a copper needle at a distance ofnanometer. They remain in place, forming a bond with the substrate because of the extremely low temperature ofK 268.15C, 450.67F at which the device operates. The oxygen component of each molecule shows up as a dot when photographed by the scanning tunneling microscope, allowing the creation of images composed of many such dots. ........

Source: Wikipedia