It’s 70 X 90 microns (a micron is one millionth of a meter), or 0.07 X 0.09 millimeters, which means that you could fit over 100 of these side by side in a single centimeter, or almost three hundred of the books in a single inch. As Wednesday’s Guardian reports, a Russian man, Vladimir Aniskin, who works at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Science, has produced what will soon be declared as the world’s smallest book. Here it is below–actually several copies of it–displayed on half a poppy seed. (This is a gif, so make sure you see the books’ pages turning.)
The Guardian:
Microminiaturist Vladimir Aniskin, from Novosibirsk in Siberia, spent five years developing the technology to create the book, which measures 70 by 90 micrometres, or 0.07mm by 0.09mm. It then took him a month to create, by hand, two versions. The first, Levsha, is named after Nikolai Leskov’s 19th-century story The Steel Flea, in which a craftsman from Tula beats the English by managing to nail flea shoes on the clockwork flea they have created. Aniskin’s Levsha contains the names of other microminiaturists who can also, in his words “shoe the flea”. His second book, Alphabet, contains the Russian alphabet.
The text is printed using the lithographic process onto sheets of film just three or four microns thick. Aniskin said that the most difficult part of the process was binding the pages together so they can be turned. He used tungsten wires with a diameter of five microns as the “springs” for the pages, placing the finished books into half a poppyseed, displayed on gold plates. The pages, which have text on both sides, can be turned using a sharpened metal needle.
“The book size is 70 by 90 microns and it is 88 times less than the area of the book recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the smallest printed book, and 67 times less than the book area recorded in the Russian Book of Records as the world’s smallest,” Aniskin told the Guardian, describing previous record holders in Japan, a 0.74 by 0.75mm manuscript entitled Flowers of the Four Seasons, and the smallest book in Russia as recognised by the Russian Book of Records, the 0.644mm by 0.660mm lyrics of the anthem of Russia. Guinness also lists Teeny Ted from Turnip Town by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin, which measures 70 micrometres by 100 micrometres, as the smallest reproduction of a printed book yet made.
He has a website in English as well as Russian, and explains how he makes some of his miniatures, which include putting horseshoes on a flea, a squadron of diverse airplanes on a poppy seed, and a parade of camels in not a needle, but a hair (see photo and link below explaining how he did that). Note that the flea below not only has horseshoes (fleashoes?) on its feet, but there are tinier nails used to affix the shoes!:
“All my works are hand-made without any micromanipulators. Obviously, I work with the help of a microscope. My microscope is MBS-9, binocular (that is, you look with both eyes), with linear magnification up to 100 times. I also have two little self-made machine units — a lathe and a sharpening unit. Each of them can fit in the palm of a hand.
I invent and make tools on my own. While working I hold my creation in my fingers. Even one’s heartbeat disturbs such minute work, so particularly delicate work has to be done between heartbeats” (from the website)..
From his website, explaining what’s below (it does look like a needle rather than a horsehair):
The diameter of a horse hair is 0.12 mm (a little bigger than the width of a razor blade). The hair is drilled along its axis, the diameter of the hole is 0.08 mm. This means that you need to make a drill, sharpen it and drill through the hair. The most important thing while drilling is that the axis of the spinning drill and the axis of the hair should coincide. But this is not all. Then you need to burnish a hair to make it transparent. And it should be burnished both from the outside and from the inside! I burnished the hair with diamond paste of various coarseness. But this is not all. To put eight camels (I didn’t even mention that they should be made lesser than 0.08 mm high) inside the hair without damaging them, and putting them in the same plane is very, very difficult. The drill, drilling process, burnishing — it takes years to solve these problems.
A display of his items (under magnification, of course):
Here’s a video; be sure to see his chessmen on a poppy-seed table:
Neat. I’m impressed that the pages can be flipped on binding hoops like the leaves of an old desktop day calendar. But unless you can close it, including the binding, so that it has a front and a back and can be picked up closed, I can’t think of it as a “book”.
But the flea did not WANT to go snowshoeing!
Especially in horseshoes!
Wow.
My Great-Uncle Robert (Eaton) also wrote miniature books way back in the early 20th century, under the pen name “Burt Randall.” He got his start when a local company in his rural area was giving away a mule to whoever could write the name of the company the most times in a square inch. I forget how many times he wrote it, but it was in the thousands (second place was like 60.) He not only won that valuable mule, he started on a second career — selling miniature books using ads in the back of magazines.
Great-Uncle Robert was a poor farmer who lived out in the middle of the Ozarks in a house he’d built himself. He used to write with a watch spring, using a microscope and heating one of his outbuildings to well over 100 degrees. Trial and error — that’s the only way he could get the ink to thin out and flow well enough. The family story is that once he passed out and almost died. Someone noticed he hadn’t fed the chickens, or something.
He wrote the Lord’s Prayer twice on the head of a pin (I saw that once, when I was a child) and a lot of his books were bought by silent film star Colleen Moore for her famous doll house, which is now displayed in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
I think that he at one time held the world’s record for smallest writing (the pin?), but that’s obviously now been beaten many times. But like Vladimir Aniskin, Great-Uncle Robert had an enormous amount of patience, ingenuity, and discipline. Was possibly also a bit crazy, but ain’t nothin’ wrong with that now, is there?
That’s fantastic, thank you. As someone who has invested over 40,000 hours and counting into the composition of a single epic palindrome I always feel a kinship with fellow gung-ho obsessives. (I’m thinking now I should publish an edition in this megamicro format).
Best I can do to help you with that:
Evil Olive
Aw, c’mon, don’t tease us like that!
I guess rich men have a chance of going to heaven after all…
The verse is that it is (paraphrasing) easier for a camel to pass (etc) than for a rich man to enter (etc). It doesn’t say how much easier.
I wonder if the Koch brothers worry about peas in their beds, or Trumps (EN_GB_slang sense) in their beds?
This is epic. I spent years completely absorbed in doing microsurgery and microdissections under a microscope, but I cannot imagine doing any of these accomplishments.
I’m reminded of the story from back in the early 60’s when the engineering dept. of some college created what was, at that time, the world’s thinnest wire. They sent the sample to a rival college’s engineering dept. to taunt them, and the rival sent it back a week later- with a neat hole drilled through the exact middle of it!
As a young man in 1967 I joined TI Ltd as a graduate trainee. One of the companies in the group was precision tube company Accles & Pollock, and the story we were told was of a US company which sent out a sample hypodermic needle which it claimed to be the smallest in the world. Accles and Pollock responded by making a smaller hypodermic needle, inserting it into the US one, and sending it back. After some googling I found this newspaper article about it.
Same story, different industry, has the punch line, “Sir, your horse has diabetes.”
[For the resident of Ulan Bataar who doesn’t know the story, it is allegedly the response of the Czech Budweiser beer company (established 1350 or some pre-Columbus century) to being presented with a sample of American Budweiser “beer” from a company not even into it’s third century of learning the trade.]
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in California has quite a few microminiature items (e.g., http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/hagop/hagop1.html), but they’re probably nowhere near today’s record.
Mind blowing!
No sense going incremental.
My Siberian wife objected to me describing this gentleman as being “slightly mad” ; but people here know that’s a compliment.
I used to have an MBS-10 microscope – damned good value instrument, solid optics, good contrast.
I shall just go an put a few more notches into the edge of my gelding knife. For if I ever catch the burglars.
I’m reminded of a guy at a local outdoor market who writes on rice …
I’ve got enough trouble misplacing more macroscopic things to be interested in getting these. However, the skill is astonishing.