Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir James Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa were awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their work on molecular machines.

Operating on a scale a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, these “machines” are specially designed molecules with movable parts that produce controlled movements when energy is added. They may one day be used to build new materials, operate microscopic sensors, and create energy-storage mechanisms too tiny to be seen with the naked eye.

“These three laureates … have opened this entire field of molecular machinery and shown us that you can make machine-like function at molecular level,” said Olof Ramström, a member of Nobel chemistry committee.

He compared Sauvage, Stoddart and Feringa’s breakthroughs to the invention of the first crude electric motors. Scientists in the early 19th century couldn’t envision the countless ways that their spinning cranks and wheels would be put to use. But they’d already “created a revolution” he said.

Biology produces molecular machines all the time – they power our organs and allow our bodies to function. But since the 1950s researchers have dreamed of manufacturing an apparatus that could function at a nanometer scale.

Sauvage, of the University in Strasbourg in France, produced the first breakthrough in this effort in 1983, when he succeeded in producing two ring-shaped molecules linked by an easily-manipulated mechanical bond. This was the first time chemists had manufactured a molecule that could be manipulated in this way. Later, Sauvage modified the structure so that one ring rotated around the other.

In 1991, Stoddart, who was born in the United Kingdom and is now based at Northwestern University in Illinois, reinvented the wheel on a microscopic scale. He created a ring of molecules that moved along an axle in a controlled manner when heat was added. This shuttle zipped back and forth between two sites, powered only by the collisions of the molecules around it. The machine was eventually used to build a “molecular abacus” that could store information.

In 1999, Feringa built on both these breakthroughs to build the world’s first molecular motor, a tiny spinning blade that rotates continually on an axis. That molecule was developed into a “nanocar,” whose four wheels rotate to move the microscopic structure forward along a plane. Feringa also showed that the molecule could be used to rotate a glass rod thousands of times larger than the motor itself.

“I feel a bit like the Wright Brothers,” Feringa said in a phone call to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Wednesday, where the prize was announced. “People were saying, why do we need a flying machine? Now we have a Boeing 747 and an Airbus. That’s a little bit how I feel. The opportunities are great.”

The Dutch organic chemist, who works at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said it’s difficult to predict exactly where his innovations will lead. One application might be tiny medical robots that can travel through the bloodstream to search out a cancer cell or deliver medicine to a precise spot.

Asked if he had any “nightmares” about the ways his work might be applied, Feringa demurred.

“I’m not so worried about it because once we are able to design these nanorobots we will also have the opportunity to build in all kinds of safety devices if we need them,” he said.

Sauvage, Stoddart, Feringa and other researchers in their field have built some five dozen varieties of molecular machine in the past two decades. They include knots, switches, shuttles, rotors, pumps and chains, all at chemistry’s smallest scale. The structures are still fragile and difficult to scale up; a car powered by a molecular engine is still a distant dream.

But the chemistry principles behind molecular machines are already being put to use. In 2015, researchers in Germany showed that you could take advantage of the weak mechanical bonds that operate molecular machines to create a version of the potent anti-cancer compound combretastatin A-4 that is turned on and off by light. This might soon allow doctors to target very specific areas of tissue and avoid destroying healthy cells.

Other labs have succeeded in using molecular machines to produce tiny peptide assembly lines and more-resilient plastics (including a film that can endure being beaten by a hammer).

“This field has come a long way,” Stoddart told Nature in 2015. “Now we have to start showing it’s useful.”