The past decade has seen an explosive growth worldwide in the physical, chemical, and biological synthesis and study of a wide range of nanoscale building blocks with unique properties in laboratory settings. However, before these nanoscale building blocks can significantly impact society through a wide range of novel applications, the manufacture of them needs to be scaled up to commercially viable quantities at an affordable cost. This talk will describe how one such type of nanoscale building blocks, nanoparticles, has moved from the laboratory to the marketplace, and milligrams to tons, over the past 17 years. We began making metal oxide nanoparticles via a gas-condensation physical process at Argonne National Laboratory in 1985 and in 1989 founded a company, Nanophase Technologies Corporation, to scale up production and eventually market products. Since that time, a publicly held (since 1997) business has been developed that produces commercial quantities of a variety of nanoparticles and dispersions that have found applications that benefit society in sunscreens and other health care products, polishing media for microelectronics, and nanoscale fillers for a number of plastics, among others. Nevertheless, fundamental research continues with these commercially available nanoparticles that could expand the horizons of their application space in society. Some examples from this research in our own laboratories in the National Science Foundation funded Center for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures at Rensselaer to create materials that possess enhanced mechanical, electrical, optical, and bioactive properties, and multifunctional combinations thereof, will also be presented.