 Zsigmondy was also the first to use the term "nanometer" explicitly for characterizing particle size.In the 1920s, Irving Langmuir, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Katharine B. Blodgett introduced the concept of a monolayer, a layer of material one molecule thick.In the early 1950s, Derjaguin and Abrikosova conducted the first measurement of surface forces.