He once offered (and then awarded) a one-thousand-dollar prize for the first working electric motor less than one sixty-fourth of an inch long, and his musing on the possibilities of tiny machinery made him, a generation later, the intellectual father of a legion of self-described nanotechnologists. In his youth he experimented for months on end with trying to observe his unraveling stream of consciousness at the point of falling asleep. In his middle age he experimented with inducing out-of-body hallucinations in a sensory-deprivation tank, with and without marijuana.
