Meet The Fellows
learn more about the class of ’13
GO INSIDE THE INVENTIVE MIND
Follow along as we share the passion and anecdotes of IBMers who helped send people to the moon, hatched trillions of barcodes, launched the computer industry and then even taught one to play Jeopardy! They’re just some of the innovations we’ve been working on to build a smarter planet.
Our lab partners:
IBMblr, an innovation culture blog on Tumblr, is managed by Chris Andrews and Chris Nay and follows the IBM Social Computing Guidelines.
Explore ‘A Boy and His Atom,’ The World’s Smallest Movie by IBM
GIF by Be Con In Riot
Thanks for the great work, Benoit!
Making the world’s smallest movie
Reports from the lab: 02
“It was a scary morning”
Andreas talks about issues with voltage on the first day of shooting and how long each letter of the IBM logo took to make.
Now playing:
A Boy And His Atom ➝
Now playing:
World’s Smallest Movie ➝
What do the critics think of the “Boy” from A Boy And His Atom?
“Here’s hoping he makes many a sequel.”
—Bob Mondello, All Things Considered
Making the world’s smallest movie
Reports from the lab: 01
“The first problem”
The team encounters their first hiccup in the movie making biz when defects in the sample cause them to delay shooting.
Now playing:
A Boy And His Atom ➝
World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. Literally.
Now playing:
A Boy And His Atom ➝
13 of 242 frames from the world’s smallest movie.
A Boy And His Atom
Now Playing ➝
Moving atoms: making the world’s smallest movie
So you’ve seen the world’s smallest movie. Now go behind the scenes and see how it all came to life. See the tiny copper “movie set”, meet the 5,000 atom “actors”, and learn how all of this could change the world forever.
If you think moving a single grain of salt would be hard, imagine moving something 100 million times smaller than that—an atom. In 1989, Don Eigler became the first person to ever to do just that. Then he spelled out IBM with atoms, making the world’s tiniest IBM logo.
Now playing:
World’s Smallest Movie ➝
See the movie that’s too small to see:
A Boy And His Atom
The Guinness World Record for “Smallest Stop-Motion Film”
IBMblr takes you behind the scenes of the tiny film with big ambitions. Come along and meet the filmmaking-scientists behind “A Boy And His Atom” and discover more about how they moved atoms in this new chapter of science, data storage and movie making history.
Now playing:
World’s Smallest Movie ➝
Way back when a computer was just an engineer with a slide rule, the founder of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) issued a simple challenge to his young workforce—THINK. The word stuck. More than a century later, IBMers earn more US patents than any other group in the world. And to celebrate the latest milestone, we’ve transformed 20 patents into 20 designs for 20 years of innovation. A nice reminder that, in art and science, anything in possible when we are willing to THINK.
Patent no. 2431242, 2012.
Electronic learning synapses.
In fish and in humans, brains learn by trial and error. And now we can add a new species to Darwin’s list: the computer. This algorithm-and-circuit innovation efficiently mimics the way the mind functions, learns and evolves over time. And could help us understand the world in ways we can’t yet begin to comprehend.
