The Feynman Awards

In the tight little world of U.S. science, Caltech's Richard P. Feynman, 42, is almost as famed for far-out humor as for his professional accomplishments. One of the nation's most gifted teachers and researchers in the field of quantum mechanics. Feynman is also one of the most gifted safecrackers currently at large: during World War II he whiled away dull hours at Los Alamos by opening his colleagues' safes and emptying them of their top-secret contents. Accustomed as they were to such Feynman showstoppers as proving that his sense of smell is as good as a dog's (by sniffing out articles handled by fellow dinner-party guests), even Feynman's scientist friends were startled last December when the lanky physicist impulsively set up his own small-scale version of the Nobel Prize.

Addressing a meeting of the American Physical Society on his latest scientific passion--submicrominiaturization--Feynman took off from the fact that tiny human cells perform a variety of complex functions. He reasoned that human beings could theoretically manipulate mechanical devices on the same tiny scale. Arguing that the technical applications of such research would be "enormous"--it would be convenient, he noted, to be able to store all the world's basic knowledge in the equivalent of a pocket-sized pamphlet--Feynman then and there impetuously offered two $1,000 prizes. One was to go to the first person to reduce the information on one page of a book to one twenty-five-thousandth of the linear scale of the original "in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope"; the other would go to the inventor of an electrically powered rotating motor no bigger than a cube one sixty-fourth of an inch high.

Not quite a year later, staring down the barrel of a microscope, Feynman saw magnified 40 times a turntable motor that easily met his specifications. Devised by William H. McLellan, a 35-year-old engineer for a Pasadena research firm, the motor was fifteen thousandths of an inch square (smaller than a pencil dot), weighed 250 micrograms, and was powered by one thousandth of a watt. Working for two months in his spare time, Caltech Graduate McLellan used sharpened toothpicks, a watchmaker's lathe and a micro-drill press to fashion his flyspeck engine, which operates on the same "synchronous" principle that powers motors weighing thousands of pounds.

Like the good scientist he is, Feynman professed to be delighted that his challenge had been met, last week sent off to McLellan a personal check for $1,000. But in an accompanying letter of congratulations, impetuous Prizegiver Feynman earnestly warned: "Don't start writing small. I don't intend to make good on the other [prize]. In the meantime, I've gotten married and bought a house."

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