In The late 1950s visionary physicist Richard Feynman issued a public challenge by offering $1000 to the first person to create an electrical motor "smaller than 1/64th of an inch". Much to Feynman's consternation the young man who met this challenge, William McLellan, did so by investing many tedious and painstaking hours building the device by hand using tweezers and a microscope (figure 1).