Peter Tripp was a pretty famous disc jockey in the early days of Top 40. He called himself "The Curly Headed Kid In The Third Row" and held court on what was then WMGM in New York City (later WHN.) 

He was already famous when, in 1959, he agreed to a stunt that may have profoundly changed his life but gave doctors a key insight into the science of sleep. Tripp agreed to stay up - and on the air - for at least 200 hours straight to raise money for charity. 

He was fine for a day or two but as the experiment went on, he began acting strangely, becoming increasingly irrational and abusive, seeing spiders in his shoes and thinking one of the physicians watching him was an undertaker coming to get him.

Doctors theorized that, despite being awake, his brain had somehow entered a kind of involuntary REM sleep and he was experiencing a real-life nightmare. And in many ways, he was. 

Tripp completed the stunt to much fanfare, but some say he was never quite the same again, divorcing his wife soon after and losing his job at the station, getting caught up in the payola scandal. The embedded video in the linked article has an interview with one of the doctors who was taking care of him and they recall his behaviour getting stranger as the stunt went on. 

Radio DJ who stayed awake for more than 200 hours started to hallucinate and see spiders

By the way, 200 hours is roughly equivalent to about 10 days. In the end, he made it to 264 hours, which is almost unbelievable. I think back to Mike Cooper on the Ferris Wheel at the CNE on CHUM and I can only imagine what Mr. Tripp went through. He passed away in January 2000, where even the New York Times recalled his marathon wake-a-thon way back at the tail end of the 50s. 

Those kinds of attention-getting stunts have largely disappeared from radio these days and that's probably a good thing. 

You can hear Peter Tripp about a year after his marathon on RockRadioScrapbook.com