The foundations of nanotechnology have emerged over many decades of research in many different fields.
Nanotechnology has been employed for thousands of years, for example in making steel and in vulcanizing rubber. Both of these processes rely on the properties of stochastically-formed atomic ensembles mere nanometers in size, and are distinguished from chemistry in that they don't rely on the properties of individual molecules.
The first mention of some of the distinguishing concepts in nanotechnology (but predating use of that name) was in 1867 by James Clerk Maxwell when he proposed as a thought experiment of a tiny entity to handle individual molecules.
In the 1920's, Irving Langmuir and Katharine B. Blodgett introduced the concept of a monolayer, a layer of material one molecule thick for which Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. (aumsri.sulekha.com).
According to Robert Floyd Curl, Jr., Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry in 1996, Indian craftsmen used nanotechnology in Wootz steel as well as in paintings. More specifically carbon nanotubes, first announced by Russian scientists in 1952, was found in the sword of Tipu Sultan as well as in Ajanta paintings. Carbon nanotubes which are cylidrical fullerenes have extraordinary strength in terms of tensile strength and elastic modulus. Our ancestors have been using the technology for over 2,000 years and carbon nano for about 500 years. Carbon nanotechnology is much older than carbon nanoscience,.
The first use of the concepts in 'nano-technology' (but predating use of that name) was in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," a talk given by physicist and chemist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale.(Varnam.org).