One thing I heard 35+ years ago which really stuck with me was that the finest precision component in the average household was the head gap on a VHS deck, at 300nm. Even features on integrated circuits didn't get that small until the mid-90s. But today those same features are only ~10nm or so, finer than the most precise engineering tolerances. The pace of technological development has been so fast that it's easy to forget how astonishing this is. Sometimes I feel like the guy who appears at the beginning of all the Pokemon games whose only function is to tell you how amazing science is.