In the first episode, we pass from the micro world of the 20th century to the nanoworld of the 21st. We discover how, by forgetting the traditional fabrication of objects from blocks of raw material, the idea of assembling objects atom-by-atom came about. It all began with a microscope that could touch upon atoms . . . If they could be touched, why not pushed and collected? And chance played a hand in the first structures – nanotubes - structures with astonishing properties, since, at this scale, the behaviour of matter changes.