Archdave's Feynman Pages

by Richard P. Feynman

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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

        by Richard P. Feynman

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Part 1

From Far Rockaway to MIT

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He Fixes Radios by Thinking!

     When I  was about  eleven  or twelve I set up  a  lab in  my house.  It
consisted of an  old wooden packing box  that  I put shelves  in.  I  had  a
heater, and I'd put  in fat and cook  french-fried potatoes all the  time. I
also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank.
     To  build the lamp  bank I went down  to  the five-and-ten and got some
sockets you can screw down to  a wooden base, and connected them with pieces
of bell wire. By  making different combinations of switches --  in series or
parallel  --  I  knew I could  get  different  voltages.  But what  I hadn't
realized was  that a bulb's  resistance depends on its  temperature,  so the
results of my calculations weren't the  same as the stuff  that came  out of
the  circuit. But it was  all  right, and when the bulbs were in series, all
half-lit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty -- it was great!
     I had a fuse in  the  system  so  if I shorted anything, the fuse would
blow. Now  I had to have a fuse that  was weaker than the fuse in the house,
so I made  my  own fuses by taking  tin foil  and wrapping it around  an old
burnt-out fuse. Across my fuse I had a five-watt bulb, so when my fuse blew,
the load  from the  trickle charger that  was  always  charging  the storage
battery  would light up the  bulb. The bulb was on the  switchboard behind a
piece of brown candy paper (it looks red  when a light's behind it) -- so if
something went off, I'd look up to the  switchboard and there would be a big
red spot where the fuse went. It was fun!
     I enjoyed radios.  I started with a crystal  set  that I bought at  the
store, and  I used  to listen to it  at night  in bed while  I was going  to
sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until
late at night,  they would come  into  my room and take the earphones off --
and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.
     About  that  time  I  invented  a  burglar  alarm,  which  was  a  very
simple-minded thing:  it was just a  big  battery and a bell connected  with
some wire. When the door  to my room opened, it pushed the  wire against the
battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off.
     One  night my mother and father came home from  a  night out and  very,
very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened  the  door to come into
my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous  bell went
off with a helluva racket -- BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!! I jumped out of bed
yelling, "It worked! It worked!"
     I had a Ford coil -- a spark coil from an automobile --  and I  had the
spark terminals  at the top of my  switchboard. I  would  put  a Raytheon RH
tube, which had argon  gas  in it, across the terminals, and the spark would
make a purple glow inside the vacuum -- it was just great!
     One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching  holes in paper with
the  sparks, and the paper caught  on fire. Soon I couldn't hold it any more
because  it  was  burning  near  my  fingers,  so  I dropped  it in a  metal
wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in  it. Newspapers burn fast,  you
know, and the flame looked pretty big inside the room. I shut the door so my
mother  -- who was  playing  bridge with some friends in  the living room --
wouldn't find  out there was a  fire in my  room,  took a magazine that  was
lying nearby, and put it over the wastebasket to smother the fire.
     After the fire  was out I took the magazine off, but now the room began
to fill up with smoke. The wastebasket was still too hot to handle, so I got
a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for
the smoke to blow out.
     But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now
the magazine was  out of  reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in
through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in
the window -- it was very dangerous!
     Well, I got  the magazine, put the fire out  again,  and this time kept
the magazine with me while I shook the  glowing coals out of  the wastepaper
basket  onto the street, two  or three floors  below. Then  I went out of my
room, closed the door behind  me, and said to my mother, "I'm going  out  to
play," and  the  smoke went out slowly through the windows. I also  did some
things with  electric motors  and built an amplifier for a photo cell that I
bought that could make a bell ring when I put my hand in  front of the cell.
I didn't get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me
out all the time, to play. But I was  often in  the house, fiddling  with my
lab.
     I  bought  radios  at rummage  sales. I  didn't have  any money, but it
wasn't very expensive -- they were old, broken radios,  and I'd buy them and
try to fix them. Usually they were broken  in some simple-minded way -- some
obvious wire was hanging loose, or a coil was broken or partly unwound -- so
I could get some of them going. On one of these  radios one night I got WACO
in Waco, Texas -- it was tremendously exciting!
     On this same tube radio up in my lab I was able to hear a station up in
Schenectady  called  WGN. Now, all of us kids -- my two cousins, my  sister,
and the  neighborhood kids -- listened on the radio downstairs to  a program
called  the  Eno Crime Club -- Eno effervescent  salts -- it  was the thing!
Well, I discovered  that I could hear this  program up in my lab on  WGN one
hour before it was broadcast in New York! So  I'd discover what was going to
happen,  and then, when  we were  all sitting  around  the radio  downstairs
listening to the Eno Crime Club, I'd say,  "You know, we haven't heard  from
so-and-so in a long time. I betcha he comes and saves the situation."
     Two seconds later,  bup-bup, he comes! So  they all  got  excited about
this, and I  predicted a couple of other  things.  Then  they  realized that
there must  be some trick to it -- that I must know, somehow. So I owned  up
to what it was, that I could hear it upstairs the hour before.
     You know what the result was, naturally. Now they couldn't wait for the
regular hour. They all had to sit upstairs in my lab with this little creaky
radio for half an hour, listening to the Eno Crime Club from Schenectady.
     We lived at that time in a big house;  it was left by my grandfather to
his children, and they didn't have much money aside from the house. It was a
very large, wooden house, and I  would run wires all around the outside, and
had plugs in  all the  rooms, so  I could always  listen to my radios, which
were upstairs in my lab. I also had a loudspeaker -- not  the whole speaker,
but the part without the big horn on it.
     One  day,  when  I  had my  earphones  on,  I  connected  them  to  the
loudspeaker, and I  discovered something: I put my finger in the speaker and
I could hear it in the earphones; I scratched the speaker and I'd hear it in
the earphones. So I discovered that the speaker could act like a microphone,
and  you  didn't  even  need  any batteries. At school we were talking about
Alexander Graham Bell,  so I  gave  a demonstration  of  the speaker and the
earphones. I didn't know  it at the time,  but I think  it was  the type  of
telephone he originally used.
     So now I  had  a  microphone, and I  could  broadcast from upstairs  to
downstairs, and  from downstairs  to  upstairs,  using  the amplifiers of my
rummage-sale radios. At that time my sister Joan, who was nine years younger
than I was, must  have been about two  or three, and there was  a guy on the
radio called Uncle Don that she  liked to listen  to. He'd sing little songs
about "good  children," and so on,  and  he'd read cards  sent in by parents
telling  that  "Mary  So-and-so is  having a birthday  this  Saturday at  25
Flatbush Avenue."
     One day my cousin Francis and I sat Joan down and said that there was a
special program she should listen to. Then we ran upstairs and we started to
broadcast: "This  is Uncle Don. We know a very nice  little girl named  Joan
who lives on New Broadway; she's  got a birthday  coming --  not  today, but
such-and-such. She's a cute girl." We  sang a little song,  and then we made
music:  "Deedle  leet deet,  doodle  doodle  loot  doot; deedle deedle leet,
doodle loot doot doo..."  We went  through the whole deal,  and then we came
downstairs: "How was it? Did you like the program?"
     "It was good,"  she said, "but  why  did  you make the music  with your
mouth?"

     One day I got a telephone call: "Mister, are you Richard Feynman?"
     "Yes."
     "This is a hotel. We have a radio that doesn't work, and would like  it
repaired. We understand you might be able to do something about it."
     "But I'm only a little boy," I said. "I don't know how --"
     "Yes, we know that, but we'd like you to come over anyway."
     It was a hotel that my aunt was running, but I didn't know that. I went
over there with -- they still tell the story -- a big screwdriver in my back
pocket. Well, I was small, so any screwdriver looked big in my back pocket.
     I went up to  the  radio and tried  to fix  it. I  didn't know anything
about it, but there was also a handyman at the hotel, and either he noticed,
or  I noticed, a  loose knob on the  rheostat -- to turn up the volume -- so
that it wasn't turning the shaft. He went off and filed something, and fixed
it up so it worked.
     The next radio I tried to  fix didn't work  at all.  That was easy:  it
wasn't plugged in right. As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I
got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in
New York and converted  it into a voltmeter that  had different scales on it
by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It
wasn't very accurate,  but it was good enough to tell whether things were in
the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.
     The main  reason people  hired me was the Depression. They didn't  have
any money to fix their  radios,  and they'd hear about this kid who would do
it for less. So I'd climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all  kinds of stuff.
I  got  a series of  lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got
some job like converting a DC set into an AC set,  and it was very  hard  to
keep the hum from going  through  the system, and  I didn't  build  it quite
right. I shouldn't have bitten that one off, but I didn't know.
     One  job  was  really  sensational. I was  working at  the  time  for a
printer, and a man who  knew that  printer knew  I  was trying to  get  jobs
fixing  radios, so he sent a  fellow around to the print shop to pick me up.
The guy is obviously poor -- his car is a complete wreck -- and we go to his
house which is in  a cheap  part of  town.  On the way,  I say, "What's  the
trouble with the radio?"
     He says, "When I turn  it on  it makes  a noise, and after a while  the
noise stops and everything's  all right, but  I don't like the noise at  the
beginning."
     I think to myself: "What the hell!  If he  hasn't got any  money, you'd
think he could stand a little noise for a while."
     And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do
you know anything about radios? How do  you know about radios -- you're just
a little boy!"
     He's  putting  me down the whole way,  and I'm thinking, "So what's the
matter with him? So it makes a little noise."
     But when we got there I went over to the radio and turned it on. Little
noise? My God! No wonder the poor guy couldn't stand it.  The thing began to
roar and wobble --WUH BUH BUH BUH BUH -- A tremendous amount of noise.  Then
it quieted down and  played correctly. So I  started to think: "How can that
happen?"
     I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it
can happen is that the tubes  are heating up in the wrong  order -- that is,
the amplifier's all  hot,  the tubes are ready  to  go, and there's  nothing
feeding in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or  something wrong  in
the beginning  part  --  the RF part -- and therefore it's  making a lot  of
noise, picking up something.  And when the RF circuit's finally  going,  and
the grid voltages are adjusted, everything's all right.
     So the  guy  says, "What are you doing? You  come to fix the radio, but
you're only walking back and forth!"
     I say, "I'm  thinking!"  Then I said to  myself,  "All right, take  the
tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in
those days  used  the same tubes in different places -- 212's, I think  they
were, or  212-A's.) So I changed  the tubes around, stepped to the front  of
the radio, turned the thing on,  and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until
it heats up, and then plays perfectly -- no noise.
     When a  person has been negative to you, and then you do something like
that,  they're  usually  a  hundred  percent  the  other  way,  kind  of  to
compensate.  He  got  me  other  jobs,  and  kept telling everybody  what  a
tremendous genius I  was, saying,  "He fixes radios  by thinking!" The whole
idea of thinking, to  fix  a radio --  a little  boy  stops and  thinks, and
figures out how to do it -- he never thought that was possible.
     Radio circuits were much  easier  to understand  in those  days because
everything was out in  the open. After you took the set  apart (it was a big
problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's
a condenser, here's a this, there's  a that; they were  all labeled.  And if
wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could  tell
that  the  condenser was burned out. If  there  was charcoal on one  of  the
resistors  you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldn't tell what was
the  matter by  looking at  it,  you'd test  it with your  voltmeter and see
whether voltage  was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were
not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or
two volts  and the voltages on the plates were one hundred  or  two hundred,
DC. So it wasn't hard for me to fix a radio by  understanding what was going
on inside, noticing that something wasn't working right, and fixing it.
     Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it
took  the  whole  afternoon  to  find a  burned-out  resistor that  was  not
apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I
had  time -- there  was  nobody on my back  saying,  "What  are  you doing?"
Instead, they were saying,  "Would you like a little milk, or some cake?"  I
finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a
puzzle, I can't get  off. If my mother's friend had  said, "Never mind, it's
too much work,"  I'd  have blown  my  top, because  I want to beat this damn
thing, as long as I've gone this far. I can't just leave it after I've found
out so much  about it. I  have  to keep going to find out ultimately what is
the matter with it in the end.
     That's  a puzzle drive. It's what accounts  for my  wanting to decipher
Mayan hieroglyphics,  for  trying to open  safes. I remember in high school,
during first period a guy would come to me  with  a puzzle in  geometry,  or
something which  had been assigned in his  advanced math class.  I  wouldn't
stop until I  figured the damn  thing  out -- it would  take  me fifteen  or
twenty minutes. But  during the day, other guys would  come to  me with  the
same problem, and I'd do it for them  in  a flash. So for one guy,  to do it
took me twenty  minutes, while  there were  five  guys who  thought I  was a
super-genius.
     So I got a fancy reputation. During high school  every puzzle  that was
known to man must have come to me. Every damn,  crazy conundrum that  people
had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the
seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles,  and he was
telling her that I was  pretty good at them. So  during  the  dance she came
over to me and said, "They say you're a smart guy, so here's one  for you: A
man has eight cords of wood to chop..."
     And I said, "He  starts  by  chopping every other one in  three parts,"
because I had heard that one.
     Then  she'd go away and come back with another one, and I'd always know
it.
     This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance,
she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and
she said, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe..."
     "The  daughter got the bubonic plague." She collapsed! That was  hardly
enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was  the long story about how
a mother and  daughter stop at a hotel and  stay in  separate rooms, and the
next day the mother goes to the daughter's room and there's nobody there, or
somebody else is there, and she says, "Where's  my daughter?" and the  hotel
keeper says, "What daughter?" and the register's got only the mother's name,
and so on, and so on, and there's  a  big  mystery as to  what happened. The
answer is, the daughter got  bubonic  plague, and  the hotel, not wanting to
have to close up, spirits the  daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases
all evidence of her having  been there. It was a long  tale, but I had heard
it, so when the girl started out with, "A mother  and daughter are traveling
to  Europe,"  I knew one thing  that started that way,  so I took  a  flying
guess, and got it.
     We had a thing at high school called the algebra  team, which consisted
of  five kids, and we would  travel to different schools  as a team and have
competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other  team would sit
in another  row. A teacher,  who was running the contest, would take out  an
envelope, and on the envelope it says "forty-five seconds." She opens it up,
writes the  problem on the blackboard, and says, "Go!" -- so you really have
more than forty-five seconds because while she's writing you  can think. Now
the game was  this: You  have a piece of paper,  and  on  it you  can  write
anything, you can do anything.  The only  thing that counted was the answer.
If the answer was "six books," you'd have to write "6," and put a big circle
around it. If what was in the circle was right,  you won; if  it wasn't, you
lost.
     One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem
in any  conventional, straightforward way, like putting  "A is the number of
red books, B is  the number of blue books," grind,  grind, grind, until  you
get "six books." That would take you fifty seconds, because  the people  who
set up the timings on  these  problems had made them all a  trifle short. So
you had to think, "Is there a way to see  it?" Sometimes you could see it in
a flash, and sometimes you'd have to invent another way to do it and then do
the algebra  as fast  as  you could.  It was wonderful  practice,  and I got
better and  better, and I  eventually got to be the  head of the team.  So I
learned to do algebra very quickly, and it came in handy in college. When we
had a problem in calculus, I was very quick to see where it was going and to
do the algebra -- fast.
     Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems.
I  mean,  if I  were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would  find some
practical  example  for  which  it  would  be  useful.  I invented a set  of
right-triangle  problems. But instead of  giving  the lengths of  two of the
sides  to find the third, I gave the  difference of the two sides. A typical
example was: There's a flagpole, and there's a rope that comes down from the
top. When you hold the rope straight  down, it's three feet longer than  the
pole, and when you pull  the rope out tight, it's five feet from the base of
the pole. How high is the pole?
     I developed some  equations  for  solving problems like that, and as  a
result I noticed some connection -- perhaps it was sin^2 + cos^2 = 1 -- that
reminded me  of  trigonometry. Now, a few years earlier, perhaps when I  was
eleven  or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked  out
from the library, but the book was by now long gone.  I remembered only that
trigonometry  had something to do  with relations between sines and cosines.
So I began to work out  all the relations by drawing triangles, and each one
I  proved, by  myself. I  also calculated  the sine, cosine, and tangent  of
every  five degrees, starting  with  the sine of five degrees  as given,  by
addition and half-angle formulas that I had worked out.
     A few years later, when we studied  trigonometry in school, I still had
my notes and I saw that my demonstrations were often different from those in
the  book. Sometimes,  for a thing where  I didn't notice a simple way to do
it,  I  went all over  the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most
clever  -- the standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated!
So sometimes I had 'em beat, and sometimes it was the other way around.
     While I was doing all this trigonometry, I  didn't like the symbols for
sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, "sin f" looked like s times i times
n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a
sigma with a long arm  sticking out  of  it, and I put the f underneath. For
the  tangent it was a  tau with  the top of  the  tau extended, and for  the
cosine I made a kind  of gamma,  but it looked  a little bit like the square
root sign.
     Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left-to-right reflected so
that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then
the sigma.  That was the inverse sine, NOT sin^-1 f -- that was crazy!  They
had that in books! To me, sin^-1 meant 1/sine, the reciprocal. So my symbols
were better.
     I didn't like f(x) -- that  looked  to me like f times x. I also didn't
like dy/dx -- you have a tendency to cancel the d's -- so I made a different
sign, something like an & sign.  For logarithms it was  a big L extended  to
the right, with the thing you take the log of inside, and so on.
     I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular
symbols --  it doesn't make any difference  what  symbols you  use --  but I
discovered later that it does make a  difference. Once when I was explaining
something to another kid in high school,  without thinking I started to make
these  symbols, and he said, "What the hell are those?" I realized then that
if I'm going to talk to anybody else, I'll have to use the standard symbols,
so I eventually gave up my own symbols.
     I had also invented a set  of symbols  for the typewriter, like fortran
has  to do, so I could type equations. I also  fixed typewriters, with paper
clips and rubber bands (the rubber bands didn't break down like they do here
in Los Angeles), but I wasn't a professional repairman; I'd just fix them so
they would work. But the whole problem  of discovering what was  the matter,
and  figuring out what you have to do to  fix it -- that was interesting  to
me, like a puzzle.


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String Beans

     I must have been seventeen or eighteen when  I worked  one summer  in a
hotel run by my aunt. I don't know how much  I got --  twenty-two dollars  a
month, I think -- and I  alternated  eleven hours one day and  thirteen  the
next as a desk  clerk  or  as a  busboy  in the restaurant.  And during  the
afternoon, when you were desk clerk, you had  to bring milk  up to Mrs. D--,
an invalid woman who never gave us a tip.  That's the way the world was: You
worked long hours and got nothing for it, every day.
     This was  a  resort hotel,  by the beach, on the outskirts of New  York
City. The husbands would go to  work  in the city and leave the wives behind
to  play cards, so you would always have to get the bridge tables out.  Then
at night the guys would play poker,  so  you'd get the tables ready for them
--  clean out  the ashtrays and so on. I was always up  until late at night,
like two o'clock, so it really was thirteen and eleven hours a day.
     There were certain things I didn't like, such as tipping. I thought  we
should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that
to the  boss, I  got  nothing but  laughter. She  told  everybody,  "Richard
doesn't want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesn't want his tips, ha, ha, ha."
The world is  full of  this kind  of dumb smart-alec who  doesn't understand
anything.
     Anyway, at one stage there was a group  of  men  who, when  they'd come
back from working in  the  city, would right away want ice for their drinks.
Now the other guy working with me had really been a desk clerk. He was older
than I was, and  a lot more  professional. One time he  said to me, "Listen,
we're always bringing  ice up to that guy  Ungar and he never gives us a tip
-- not even  ten cents. Next  time, when they ask for ice,  just don't  do a
damn thing.  Then they'll call you  back, and when  they  call you back, you
say, 'Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. We're all forgetful sometimes.'"
     So  I did it, and Ungar gave  me fifteen cents! But  now, when I  think
back on  it, I  realize that  the other desk  clerk, the  professional,  had
really known what  to do -- tell  the other guy to take  the risk of getting
into trouble. He put me to the  job of training this fella to give tips.  He
never said anything; he made me do it!
     I had to clean up tables in the dining room as a  busboy.  You pile all
this stuff from the  tables on to a tray at the side, and when  it gets high
enough you  carry it into the kitchen.  So you get  a new  tray,  right? You
should do it in two steps -- take the old tray away, and put in a new one --
but I thought, "I'm going to do it in one step." So I tried to slide the new
tray under, and pull the old tray out at the  same  time,  and it slipped --
BANG!  All the stuff  went on the floor. And then, naturally,  the  question
was, "What were  you doing? How did it fall?" Well, how could I explain that
I was trying to invent a new way to handle trays?
     Among  the desserts there was some  kind of coffee  cake that  came out
very  pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in  the back
you'd see  a  man  called the  pantry man. His  problem was to get the stuff
ready  for desserts. Now this  man must have  been a miner, or  something --
heavy-built, with very stubby,  rounded, thick fingers. He'd take this stack
of doilies, which  are  manufactured by some sort of stamping  process,  all
stuck together,  and he'd take these  stubby fingers and try to separate the
doilies  to put them on the  plates. I always  heard  him  say,  "Damn  deez
doilies!" while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, "What a contrast
-- the person sitting at  the table gets this nice cake on a  doilied plate,
while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, 'Damn deez
doilies!'"  So  that was the difference  between the real world  and what it
looked like.
     My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made
a ham sandwich, or something, for the guy who  was on the late shift. I said
that I liked desserts, so if there was a dessert left  over from supper, I'd
like that. The next night I was on the late shift till 2:00  a.m. with these
guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing  to do, getting bored,
when suddenly I remembered  there  was a  dessert to eat. I went over to the
icebox and  opened it  up, and  there she'd  left six desserts!  There was a
chocolate pudding, a piece  of cake, some peach slices,  some  rice pudding,
some jello -- there was everything! So I sat there and  ate the six desserts
-- it was sensational!
     The next day she said to me, "I left a dessert for you..."
     "It was wonderful," I said, "abolutely wonderful!"
     "But I left you six desserts because I didn't know which one you  liked
the best."
     So  from that  time  on  she left six  desserts.  They  weren't  always
different, but there were always six desserts.
     One time when I was desk  clerk a girl left a book by  the telephone at
the desk while she  went to eat dinner, so I looked at. it.  It was The Life
of Leonardo, and I couldn't resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the
whole thing.
     I slept in a little room in the  back  of the hotel, and there was some
stew about turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldn't
ever remember to do. Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which
consisted of a system of  strings and weights  -- Coke bottles full of water
-- that would operate when I'd open the door, lighting  the pull-chain light
inside.  You open the door, and things  would go, and light the light;  then
you close  the  door behind  you,  and the light would go out.  But my  real
accomplishment came later.
     I  used to cut  vegetables in the  kitchen. String beans had to be  cut
into one-inch pieces. The  way  you were supposed to do it was: You hold two
beans in one  hand, the knife in the other, and you  press the knife against
the beans and your thumb, almost cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So
I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good idea.  I sat down at the wooden
table outside  the  kitchen, put  a  bowl in my lap, and stuck a  very sharp
knife into the table at a forty-five-degree angle away from me. Then I put a
pile of the string beans on each side, and I'd pick out a bean, one in  each
hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the
pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.
     So I'm slicing  beans  one  after the other -- chig, chig, chig,  chig,
chig  -- and everybody's  giving me the beans, and I'm going like sixty when
the boss comes by and says, "What are you doing?"
     I say, "Look at the way  I have of cutting  beans!" -- and just at that
moment I put a finger through instead of a bean. Blood  came out and went on
the  beans,  and there was a  big excitement: "Look  at  how many  beans you
spoiled! What a stupid way to do things!"  and so on. So I was never able to
make any  improvement, which  would  have  been easy  --  with  a  guard, or
something -- but no, there was no chance for improvement.
     I  had  another  invention, which had  a similar difficulty. We had  to
slice potatoes after they'd been cooked, for some kind of potato salad. They
were sticky  and wet, and difficult  to handle. I thought of a  whole lot of
knives, parallel  in  a rack, coming down and  slicing the  whole  thing.  I
thought about this a long  time, and finally I  got  the idea of wires  in a
rack.
     So  I  went  to the  five-and-ten to buy some  knives or wires, and saw
exactly the  gadget I wanted: it was  for slicing eggs.  The  next  time the
potatoes came out I got my little egg-slicer out and sliced all the potatoes
in no time, and sent them back  to the chef. The  chef was a German, a great
big guy who was King of the Kitchen, and he came storming out, blood vessels
sticking out of  his neck, livid red. "What's the matter with the potatoes?"
he says. "They're not sliced!"
     I had them sliced, but they were all  stuck together. He says, "How can
I separate them?"
     "Stick 'em in water," I suggest.
     "IN WATER? EAGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
     Another  time I had a really  good idea. When I was desk clerk I had to
answer the telephone. When a call came in, something buzzed, and a flap came
down on the switchboard so you could tell which line it was. Sometimes, when
I was helping the women with the bridge tables or sitting on the front porch
in the middle of the afternoon (when there were very few calls), I'd be some
distance from the switchboard when suddenly it would go. I'd come running to
catch it, but the way the desk was made, in order to get  to the switchboard
you  had to go quite  a distance  further down, then around, in  behind, and
then back up to see where the call was coming from -- it took extra time.
     So I got a good idea. I  tied threads to the flaps on  the switchboard,
and strung them over the top  of  the desk and  then down, and at the end of
each thread I tied a little piece of paper. Then I put the telephone talking
piece up on top of the desk, so I could reach it from the front. Now, when a
call came, I could tell which flap was down by which piece of paper was  up,
so I could answer the phone appropriately, from the front, to  save time. Of
course  I  still had to  go around back to switch it in, but  at least I was
answering it. I'd say, "Just a moment," and then go around to switch it in.
     I thought  that  was perfect, but  the boss  came by  one day,  and she
wanted  to  answer  the  phone,  and  she couldn't  figure  it  out  --  too
complicated.  "What are all these papers doing? Why is the telephone on this
side? Why don't you... raaaaaaaa!"
     I tried to  explain --  it was my  own aunt -- that there was no reason
not to do  that, but you can't say  that to anybody who's  smart, who runs a
hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real
world.


--------
Who Stole the Door?

     At MIT the different fraternities all had "smokers" where they tried to
get  the  new freshmen to be their pledges, and  the summer before I went to
MIT  I was invited  to a meeting in  New  York of Phi Beta  Delta, a  Jewish
fraternity. In  those  days, if you were  Jewish  or brought up in  a Jewish
family, you didn't have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else  would
look at you. I wasn't particularly looking to be  with  other Jews, and  the
guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didn't care how Jewish I was  --  in
fact, I  didn't believe anything about that  stuff, and was certainly not in
any  way religious.  Anyway,  some guys  from  the fraternity asked  me some
questions and gave me a little bit  of advice --  that  I ought to take  the
first-year  calculus exam  so I wouldn't  have to take  the  course -- which
turned  out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to  New York
from the  fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became
their roommate.
     There  was another Jewish fraternity at  MIT,  called  "SAM," and their
idea was  to give  me a ride  up to Boston and  I could  stay  with them.  I
accepted the ride, and stayed upstairs in one of the rooms that first night.
     The next morning I looked out the window and  saw the two guys from the
other  fraternity (that  I met  in New York) walking up the steps. Some guys
from  the  Sigma  Alpha Mu  ran out to  talk  to  them and there  was a  big
discussion.
     I yelled out the window, "Hey, I'm supposed to be with those guys!" and
I  rushed  out of  the  fraternity  without  realizing  that they  were  all
operating, competing for my pledge. I didn't have any feelings  of gratitude
for the ride, or anything.
     The  Phi  Beta Delta fraternity had almost  collapsed the  year before,
because there  were two different cliques  that had split the  fraternity in
half.  There was a group  of socialite  characters, who liked to have dances
and fool around in their cars afterwards, and  so on,  and there was a group
of guys who did nothing but study, and never went to the dances.
     Just before I came to the fraternity they had had a big meeting and had
made an important compromise. They were going to get together  and help each
other out. Everyone had  to have a grade level of at least such-and-such. If
they were sliding behind, the guys who studied all the time would teach them
and help them do their work. On the other side, everybody had to go to every
dance. If a guy didn't know how to get  a date, the other guys would get him
a date. If the guy didn't know how to dance, they'd teach  him to dance. One
group  was  teaching the  other  how to  think,  while the  other guys  were
teaching them how to be social.
     That was just right for me, because I was not very good socially. I was
so  timid that  when I had to  take the mail out and walk  past some seniors
sitting  on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didn't know how to
walk past them! And  it didn't help  any when a  girl  would say,  "Oh, he's
cute!"
     It  was only  a little  while  after that the  sophomores brought their
girlfriends and their girlfriends' friends  over  to teach us to dance. Much
later, one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard
to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice
versa. It was a good balancing out.
     I  had  some  difficulty understanding what  exactly  it  meant  to  be
"social." Soon  after these social guys had  taught  me how to meet girls, I
saw a nice waitress in a restaurant  where I  was eating  by myself one day.
With great effort I  finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at
the next fraternity dance, and she said yes.
     Back at the fraternity,  when we  were  talking about the dates for the
next dance, I  told the guys I didn't need a date this  time  -- I had found
one on my own. I was very proud of myself.
     When  the upperclassmen found out  my date was  a  waitress,  they were
horrified. They told me that was not possible; they  would get me a "proper"
date. They  made me  feel as  though I had  strayed, that I was  amiss. They
decided  to take over  the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the
waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to
educate their  "wayward son," so to  speak, but they  were wrong, I think. I
was only  a freshman then, and I didn't have  enough confidence yet  to stop
them from breaking my date.
     When I became  a  pledge  they had various  ways  of hazing. One of the
things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in
the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart.
We were in  the middle of absolutely nowhere -- no houses, no nothing -- and
we  were  supposed to find our way back  to the fraternity. We were a little
bit scared,  because we were young, and we didn't say much -- except for one
guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn't stop him from joking around,
making  dumb  puns, and  having this  happy-go-lucky  attitude  of  "Ha, ha,
there's nothing to worry about. Isn't this fun!"
     We  were  getting mad at Maurice. He was  always walking  a  little bit
behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn't know
how we were ever going to get out of this.
     We came to an intersection not far from the lake -- there were still no
houses or anything -- and the rest of us were discussing  whether  we should
go this  way or that way,  when Maurice caught  up to us and said,  "Go this
way."
     "What  the  hell do you  know,  Maurice?" we  said, frustrated. "You're
always making these jokes. Why should we go this way?"
     "Simple: Look at the telephone lines.  Where  there's more wires,  it's
going toward the central station."
     This guy,  who  looked like he wasn't paying attention to anything, had
come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an
error.
     On the following day there was going to be a schoolwide freshman versus
sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that  take place
in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of
sophomores --  some  from our fraternity  and some from  outside -- and they
kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win.
     The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easily -- except me.
I didn't want the  guys in the fraternity to find out that I was  a "sissy."
(I was never any  good in sports.  I was always terrified if  a tennis  ball
would come over  the fence  and land near  me, because I never could  get it
over the  fence --  it  usually  went about  a  radian off of  where it  was
supposed to  go.) I figured this  was  a  new situation, a  new world, and I
could  make a new reputation. So in order that I wouldn't look like I didn't
know how to fight, I fought like a son of a gun as best I could (not knowing
what I was doing), and  it  took three  or four guys many tries  before they
were finally able to tie me  up. The sophomores took us to a house, far away
in the woods, and tied us all down to a wooden floor with big U tacks.
     I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding
us,  and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man  they
were  afraid  to  tie down because  he  was so  terrified: his face was pale
yellow-green  and  he  was  shaking. I found out later he was from Europe --
this was in the early thirties -- and he didn't realize that  these guys all
tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things
were going on in  Europe. The  guy  was frightening to  look at,  he was  so
scared.
     By  the  time the night  was  over,  there  were  only three sophomores
guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn't  know that. The sophomores had
driven their  cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a
lot of activity, and we didn't notice it was  always the same cars  and  the
same people. So we didn't win that one.
     My father and mother happened to come up that morning  to see how their
son was doing in Boston, and the fraternity  kept putting  them off until we
came  back  from  being  kidnapped.  I was  so  bedraggled  and  dirty  from
struggling so hard  to  escape and from lack of sleep that  they were really
horrified to discover what their son looked like at MIT!
     I had also gotten a  stiff neck,  and I  remember standing in  line for
inspection that afternoon at ROTC, not  being able to look straight forward.
The commander grabbed my head and turned it, shouting, "Straighten up!"
     I winced, as my shoulders went at an angle: "I can't help it, sir!"
     "Oh, excuse me!" he said, apologetically.
     Anyway, the  fact that I fought so long and hard not to be tied up gave
me a terrific reputation, and I never had to worry about that sissy business
again -- a tremendous relief.

     I often listened to my roommates -- they were both seniors  -- studying
for their theoretical physics course.  One day they were working pretty hard
on something  that seemed pretty clear to me,  so I said, "Why don't you use
the Baronallai's equation?"
     "What's that!" they exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"
     I explained to them what I meant and how it worked in this case, and it
solved the problem. It turned out it was  Bernoulli's equation that I meant,
but I had read all this stuff in the encyclopedia without talking to anybody
about it, so I didn't know how to pronounce anything.
     But  my roommates were very  excited,  and from then on  they discussed
their physics problems with me -- I wasn't so lucky with many of them -- and
the next year,  when I took the course, I  advanced rapidly. That was a very
good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to
pronounce things.
     I liked to go to a place called the Raymor and Playmore Ballroom -- two
ballrooms  that were connected  together -- on Tuesday nights. My fraternity
brothers didn't go to these "open" dances; they preferred their  own dances,
where the girls  they brought were upper crust ones they had met "properly."
I  didn't  care, when I  met somebody, where they were  from, or  what their
background was, so I would  go to these dances -- even  though my fraternity
brothers  disapproved (I  was a junior by this  time, and they couldn't stop
me) -- and I had a very good time.
     One time I danced with a certain girl a few times, and didn't say much.
Finally, she said to me, "Who hants vewwy nice-ee."
     I couldn't quite make it  out -- she  had some difficulty in  speech --
but I thought she said, "You dance very nicely."
     "Thank you," I said. "It's been an honor."
     We went over to a table where a friend of hers had  found a boy she was
dancing with and we sat, the four of us, together. One girl was very hard of
hearing, and the other girl was nearly deaf.
     When the two girls conversed they would  do a large amount of signaling
very rapidly  back and forth, and  grunt a little bit.  It didn't bother me;
the girl danced well, and she was a nice person.
     After a few more dances, we're sitting at the table again, and  there's
a  large amount of signaling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,
until finally she says something to me which I gathered means, she'd like us
to take them to some hotel.
     I ask the other guy if he wants to go.
     "What do they want us to go to this hotel for?" he asks.
     "Hell, I don't know.  We didn't talk  well enough!" But I don't have to
know. It's just fun, seeing what's going to happen; it's an adventure!
     The other  guy's afraid, so  he says no. So I take the two  girls in  a
taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a  dance  organized by the deaf
and dumb, believe  it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many
of them  can feel the  rhythm enough to dance  to the music  and applaud the
band at the end of each number.
     It was very, very interesting! I felt as if  I was in a foreign country
and couldn't speak the  language:  I could speak,  but nobody could hear me.
Everybody  was  talking  with  signs  to  everybody  else,  and  I  couldn't
understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned  a
few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun.
     Everyone  was so  happy and  relaxed with each  other, making jokes and
smiling all the time; they didn't seem  to have any real difficulty  of  any
kind  communicating with each  other. It  was  the same  as  with  any other
language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their
heads were  always turning from one side to the other. I realized what  that
was. When someone wants  to make  a  side remark or interrupt  you, he can't
yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only  make a signal, which you won't catch  unless
you're in the habit of looking around all the time.
     They were completely comfortable  with each other. It was my problem to
be comfortable. It was a wonderful experience.
     The dance went on for a long time, and when it closed down we went to a
cafeteria.  They were  all ordering things by pointing to them.  I  remember
somebody asking in signs, "Where-are-you-from?"  and  my  girl  spelling out
"N-e-w Y-o-r-k." I still  remember  a guy signing  to me "Good sport!" -- he
holds his thumb up, and then touches an imaginary lapel, for "sport." It's a
nice system.
     Everybody was sitting around, making  jokes, and getting me into  their
world very nicely. I wanted to buy a bottle of milk, so I went up to the guy
at the counter and mouthed the word "milk" without saying anything.
     The guy didn't understand.
     I made the symbol for "milk,"  which is  two fists moving as if  you're
milking a cow, and he didn't catch that either.
     I tried to point to  the sign that  showed  the  price of milk,  but he
still didn't catch on.
     Finally, some stranger nearby ordered milk, and I pointed to it.
     "Oh! Milk!" he said, as I nodded my head yes.
     He handed me the bottle, and I said, "Thank you very much!"
     "You SON of a GUN!" he said, smiling.

     I often liked to play  tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in
mechanical drawing  class,  some joker  picked up a French curve (a piece of
plastic for drawing smooth curves -- a curly, funny-looking thing) and said,
"I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"
     I  thought for a moment  and said,  "Sure they do. The curves  are very
special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to
turn it slowly. "The  French  curve is  made  so that at the lowest point on
each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."
     All  the  guys in  the  class were  holding  their  French curve  up at
different angles, holding  their  pencil up to  it at  the  lowest point and
laying  it  along,  and  discovering  that,  sure  enough,  the  tangent  is
horizontal. They  were all excited by this "discovery" --  even  though they
had  already  gone through  a certain  amount  of calculus  and had  already
"learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any
curve is  zero  (horizontal).  They didn't  put two  and two  together. They
didn't even know what they "knew."
     I  don't  know  what's  the  matter with  people: they don't  learn  by
understanding;  they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their
knowledge is so fragile!
     I did the same kind of trick four years  later at  Princeton when I was
talking with an experienced character,  an assistant  of Einstein,  who  was
surely working  with  gravity all  the time. I gave him a problem: You blast
off  in  a  rocket which  has a clock  on board, and  there's a clock on the
ground.  The idea is that  you have to be back  when the clock on the ground
says one hour has passed. Now you  want it  so that when you come back, your
clock is  as  far ahead as  possible.  According to Einstein, if you go very
high,  your  clock  will go  faster,  because  the higher something is in  a
gravitational field, the  faster its clock  goes. But if you try  to go  too
high, since  you've only got  an hour,  you have to go so fast  to get there
that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question
is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get
the maximum time on your clock?
     This assistant  of  Einstein  worked  on it for quite  a bit  before he
realized  that  the answer  is  the real  motion  of  matter. If  you  shoot
something up in  a normal way, so that the time it  takes the shell to go up
and come down is an  hour, that's the correct  motion. It's  the fundamental
principle of Einstein's gravity -- that is, what's called the "proper  time"
is at a  maximum for the actual curve. But when I  put  it  to  him, about a
rocket with a  clock, he didn't recognize it.  It was just like the  guys in
mechanical drawing class, but this time  it  wasn't dumb  freshmen. So  this
kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

     When I was a junior or senior I  used to eat at a certain restaurant in
Boston.  I went there by myself, often on successive evenings. People got to
know me, and I had the same waitress all the time.
     I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day,
just for fun, I left my  tip, which  was usually ten cents (normal for those
days),  in two nickels, under  two glasses: I filled  each glass to the very
top, dropped a nickel  in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was
upside down on the table.  Then I slipped out  the card (no water leaks  out
because no air can come in -- the rim is too close to the table for that).
     I put  the  tip under  two glasses because I knew they were always in a
hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get
the table ready for the  next customer, would pick  up the glass, the  water
would spill out, and that  would be the end of it. But  after  she does that
with  the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one?
She can't just have the nerve to lift it up now!
     On  the  way out  I said  to my  waitress,  "Be  careful,  Sue. There's
something funny about the glasses you gave  me --  they're filled in  on the
top, and there's a hole on the bottom!"
     The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress
wouldn't  have anything  to do with  me. "Sue's very angry  at you,"  my new
waitress said. "After she  picked up the first glass and water went all over
the place, she called  the boss out. They studied  it a little bit, but they
couldn't spend all day figuring out what to do,  so  they finally  picked up
the other one, and  water  went out again,  all  over the  floor. It  was  a
terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. They're all mad at you."
     I laughed.
     She said, "It's not funny! How would you like it if someone did that to
you -- what would you do?"
     "I'd get a soup plate and then  slide the glass  very carefully over to
the  edge  of the table, and  let the  water run into the soup plate  --  it
doesn't have to run onto the floor. Then I'd take the nickel out."
     "Oh, that's a goood idea," she said.
     That evening I left my tip under a coffee cup, which I left upside down
on the table.
     The next night I came and I had the same new waitress.
     "What's the idea of leaving the cup upside down last time?"
     "Well, I thought that even though you were in a hurry, you'd have to go
back into the kitchen and get a soup plate; then you'd have to sloooowly and
carefully slide the cup over to the edge of the table..."
     "I did that," she complained, "but there was no water in it!"
     My masterpiece  of mischief happened  at the fraternity. One  morning I
woke up very early, about five o'clock, and couldn't go back to  sleep, so I
went downstairs from the sleeping rooms and discovered some signs hanging on
strings which said things like "DOOR! DOOR!  WHO STOLE THE DOOR?" I saw that
someone had taken a door off its  hinges, and in its  place they hung a sign
that said,  "PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR!" -- the sign that used to be on the door
that was missing.
     I immediately figured out what  the idea  was. In that room a guy named
Pete Bernays and a  couple of other guys liked to work very hard, and always
wanted it  quiet. If you wandered into their room looking  for something, or
to  ask them  how  they  did problem such and such, when you would leave you
would always hear these guys scream, "Please close the door!"
     Somebody had  gotten tired of  this, no doubt,  and had  taken the door
off. Now  this room, it so happened, had two doors, the way it was built, so
I  got an idea: I took the other door off its hinges, carried it downstairs,
and hid  it in the basement behind the oil  tank. Then  I quietly went  back
upstairs and went to bed.
     Later in the morning I  made  believe I  woke up and came downstairs  a
little late. The other guys were milling  around,  and Pete and  his friends
were all upset: The doors to their room were missing, and they had to study,
blah, blah,  blah,  blah.  I was coming  down  the  stairs  and  they  said,
"Feynman! Did you take the doors?"
     "Oh, yeah!" I said. "I took the door.  You can see  the scratches on my
knuckles here, that  I got when  my hands  scraped against the wall as I was
carrying it down into the basement."
     They weren't satisfied with my answer; in fact, they didn't believe me.
     The  guys who  took the  first door  had left  so  many  clues  --  the
handwriting on the signs,  for instance -- that they were soon found out. My
idea was that  when it  was  found out who  stole the  first door, everybody
would think they also stole  the other door.  It worked  perfectly: The guys
who  took the  first  door  were  pummeled  and  tortured  and worked  on by
everybody, until  finally, with  much pain and  difficulty,  they  convinced
their tormentors that they had only taken one door, unbelievable as it might
be.
     I listened to all this, and I was happy.
     The other door stayed missing for a whole  week, and it became more and
more important to the guys who were trying to  study in that room  that  the
other door be found.
     Finally, in order to solve the problem, the president of the fraternity
says at the dinner table, "We  have to solve this problem of the other door.
I haven't been able to solve the problem myself, so I would like suggestions
from the rest of you as to how to straighten this out, because  Pete and the
others are trying to study."
     Somebody makes a suggestion, then someone else.
     After a little while,  I get up and make a suggestion.  "All  right," I
say in  a  sarcastic voice,  "whoever  you are who stole the  door,  we know
you're wonderful.  You're so clever! We can't figure out who you are, so you
must be some  sort of  super-genius. You  don't have to tell us who you are;
all we want  to know is  where the door is.  So  if you will  leave  a  note
somewhere, telling us where the door is, we will honor you and admit forever
that  you  are a super-marvel, that you are so smart that you could take the
other door without our  being able to figure out who you  are. But for God's
sake, just leave  the note somewhere, and we will be forever grateful to you
for it."
     The next guy makes his suggestion:  "I have another  idea," he says. "I
think that  you, as  president, should ask  each  man on  his  word of honor
towards the fraternity to say whether he took the door or not."
     The president says, "That's a very good idea. On the fraternity word of
honor!"  So he goes around the table, and asks each guy,  one by one: "Jack,
did you take the door?"
     "No, sir, I did not take the door."
     "Tim: Did you take the door?"
     "No, sir! I did not take the door!"
     "Maurice. Did you take the door?"
     "No, I did not take the door, sir."
     "Feynman, did you take the door?"
     "Yeah, I took the door."
     "Cut it  out, Feynman; this is  serious! Sam! Did you take the door..."
-- it went all the way around. Everyone was shocked. There must be some real
rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor!
     That night I left  a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the
door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back.
     Sometime later I finally admitted  to taking  the other door, and I was
accused by everybody of lying. They  couldn't remember what I  had said. All
they  could  remember  was  their  conclusion  after  the  president  of the
fraternity  had  gone around  the table  and  asked  everybody,  that nobody
admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.
     People often think I'm  a faker, but I'm usually honest, in  a  certain
way -- in such a way that often nobody believes me!





--------
Latin or Italian?

     There was an Italian radio station  in Brooklyn, and as a boy I used to
listen to it all the time. I LOVed the ROLLing SOUNds going over me, as if I
was in the  ocean, and the waves weren't very  high. I used to sit there and
have  the  water come  over me,  in  this BEAUtiful  iTALian. In the Italian
programs there was always  some kind of  family  situation where  there were
discussions and arguments between the mother and father:
     High voice: "Nio teco TIEto capeto TUtto..."
     Loud, low voice: "DRO tone pala TUtto!!" (with hand slapping).
     It was  great!  So I learned to make all these emotions: I could cry; I
could laugh; all this stuff. Italian is a lovely language.
     There were a number of Italian people living near  us in New York. Once
while I was  riding  my bicycle, some  Italian truck driver got upset at me,
leaned out of his truck, and, gesturing, yelled something like,  "Me aRRUcha
LAMpe etta TIche!" 
     I felt like a crapper. What did he say to me? What should I yell back?
     So I asked an Italian friend of mine at school, and he said, "Just say,
'A te! A te!' -- which means 'The same to you! The same to you!' "
     I  thought   it  was  a  great  idea.  I  would  say  "A  te!  A   te!"
back-gesturing,  of  course.  Then,  as I  gained confidence, I developed my
abilities further.  I  would be riding  my bicycle,  and some lady would  be
driving in her  car and get in  the way, and I'd say, "PUzzia a la maLOche!"
-- and she'd  shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible  curse
at her!
     It was not so easy to recognize it as fake Italian. Once, when I was at
Princeton, as  I was going into  the parking lot at Palmer  Laboratory on my
bicycle, somebody got in the way. My habit was always the same: I gesture to
the guy, "oREzze caBONca MIche!", slapping the back of one hand against  the
other.
     And  way  up  on the other  side of a long area  of grass,  there's  an
Italian gardner putting in some plants. He stops, waves, and shouts happily,
"REzza ma LIa!"
     I call back, "RONte BALta!",  returning the greeting. He didn't  know I
didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said.
But  it  was  OK! It  was  great! It works!  After  all,  when they hear the
intonation, they recognize it immediately  as Italian  --  maybe it's Milano
instead of Romano, what the hell.  But he's an iTALian! So  it's just great.
But  you have  to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing
will happen.
     One time  I came home from college  for a vacation,  and  my sister was
sort  of   unhappy,   almost  crying:  her  Girl  Scouts   were   having   a
father-daughter  banquet, but  our  father  was  out  on  the  road, selling
uniforms. So I said I  would  take  her, being the brother (I'm  nine  years
older, so it wasn't so crazy).
     When we got there, I sat among the fathers for a while, but soon became
sick of them. All these fathers bring  their  daughters  to this nice little
banquet, and all they talked  about was  the stock market -- they don't know
how to talk to their own children, much less their children's friends.
     During the  banquet the girls  entertained  us  by doing  little skits,
reciting  poetry,  and  so on.  Then  all  of a sudden  they bring  out this
funny-looking  apronlike  thing,  with a hole at  the top  to put your  head
through. The girls  announce that  the  fathers  are now going to  entertain
them.
     So  each father  has  to  get  up and stick  his head through  and  say
something -- one guy recites "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- and they don't know
what to do. I didn't know what to do either, but by the time I got up there,
I told them that  I was  going to recite a little  poem,  and I'm sorry that
it's not in English, but I'm sure they will appreciate it anyway:

        A TUZZO LANTO
        --Poici di Pare

     TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.
     RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.
     YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta PIcha PIno TIto BRALda
        pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!
     RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda
     O la TINta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!

     I  do this for three or four  stanzas, going through all  the  emotions
that I  heard on Italian radio,  and the kids are unraveled, rolling in  the
aisles, laughing with happiness.
     After  the banquet was  over, the scoutmaster and a  schoolteacher came
over and  told me they had been discussing my poem. One of  them thought  it
was  Italian, and the other  thought it was  Latin. The schoolteacher  asks,
"Which one of us is right?"
     I  said,  "You'll  have  to go  ask the girls --  they understood  what
language it was right away."


--------
Always Trying to Escape

     When I  was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no
good at  anything  else. But at MIT there was a  rule: You have to take some
humanities  courses  to  get  more  "culture."  Besides  the English classes
required were  two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found  astronomy  -- as  a  humanities course!  So that year  I escaped with
astronomy. Then  next  year I  looked further  down  the list,  past  French
literature and courses  like that, and found  philosophy. It was the closest
thing to science I could find.
     Before I tell  you what happened in  philosophy, let  me tell you about
the English class. We  had  to write a number of themes. For  instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of
addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote  about  liberty
in social occasions -- the problem of having to  fake and lie in order to be
polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations  lead to
the  "destruction of  the moral fiber of society." An interesting  question,
but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
     Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk,"
in which he describes how  an ordinary  piece of chalk he is holding  is the
remains  from animal  bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so
that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now
used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
     But again, instead of  criticizing the essay  assigned to us, I wrote a
parody called, "On  a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and  precipitates the  rain, and so on. I was always  a faker, always
trying to escape.
     But when we  had to write  a theme  on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless!
The work was too long to make a parody  of it or to invent something else. I
was storming back and forth in  the fraternity  saying, "I can't do  it. I'm
just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!"
     One of my fraternity  brothers  said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do
it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you  don't want to
do  the work. You oughta write a  theme on something -- same number of words
-- and hand it in with a note  saying  that you just couldn't understand the
Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to
write a theme on it."
     So I did that. I wrote  a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I
had  thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there
are certain  limitations:  moral  values  cannot be  decided  by  scientific
methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
     Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he
said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with
Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust."
     "Ridiculous!" I said.
     But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.
     "All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try."
     So I  added half  a  page to what I  had already written, and said that
Mephistopheles  represents  reason,  and  Faust represents  the spirit,  and
Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked
it all in, and handed in my theme.
     The professor had us each come in individually  to discuss our theme. I
went in expecting the worst.
     He said, "The introductory material is fine, but  the Faust material is
a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good -- B+ ." I escaped again!
     Now  to the philosophy  class.  The course was taught by an old bearded
professor named Robinson, who always mumbled.  I  would go to the class, and
he would  mumble  along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people
in the class seemed to  understand him  better, but  they didn't seem to pay
any  attention. I happened to have a small  drill, about one-sixteenth-inch,
and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my  fingers and
drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
     Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga
mugga mugga wugga wugga..." and everybody got excited! They were all talking
to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something  interesting,
thank God! I wondered what it was?
     I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it
in in four weeks."
     "A theme on what?"
     "On what he's been talking about all year."
     I was stuck. The  only thing that I had  heard  during that entire term
that  I  could  remember  was  a  moment  when  there  came this  upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmuggawugga," and phoom! -- it sank back into
chaos.
     This "stream of consciousness" reminded me  of  a problem my father had
given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some  Martians were to come
down to  earth,  and  Martians never  slept,  but  instead  were perpetually
active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have,  called
sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does  it feel to go to sleep? What
happens when you go to sleep?  Do  your thoughts suddenly stop,  or do  they
move  less aanndd lleeessss  rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?  How
does the mind actually turn off?"
     I  got interested. Now  I  had to  answer  this question: How  does the
stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
     So every afternoon for the next four weeks I  would work on my theme. I
would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep.
And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep.
     Then at night, I'd  go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when
I could make observations -- it was very good!
     At first  I noticed a lot of  subsidiary things that had  little  to do
with  falling  asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking
by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
     Then, when  I was  getting  tired, I noticed that I  could think of two
things at  once. I discovered this when I  was  talking internally to myself
about something, and while I was doing this,  I was idly imagining two ropes
connected to  the  end of my bed, going through  some  pulleys,  and winding
around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was
imagining these  ropes until I  began to worry that one rope would  catch on
the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up  smoothly. But I said, internally,
"Oh, the tension  will take care of  that," and  this  interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at
once.
     I also  noticed  that as  you  go to sleep the ideas continue, but they
become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're
not  logically connected until you  ask  yourself,  "What  made me  think of
that?"  and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what
the hell did make you think of that!
     So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is
that the thoughts  become  more  and more cockeyed until they're  completely
disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
     After  four  weeks  of  sleeping all the  time,  I wrote my  theme, and
explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out
that all of these observations  were made while  I  was watching myself fall
asleep,  and I don't really know what it's like to  fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I  made up, which
pointed out this problem of introspection:

        I wonder why. I wonder why.
        I wonder why I wonder.
        I wonder why I wonder why
        I wonder why I wonder!

     We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor
reads one  of them: "Mum  bum  wugga mum bum..." I can't tell what  the  guy
wrote.
     He reads another theme: "Mugga  wugga mum  bum wugga wugga..."  I don't
know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:

        Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.
        Uh wugga wugga wugga.
        I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
        Uh wugga wugga wugga.

     "Aha!" I say. "That's my  theme!" I honestly didn't recognize  it until
the end.
     After I had  written the theme  I continued  to be  curious, and I kept
practicing this  watching myself as I went to sleep. One night,  while I was
having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten
all the way down, into the sleep itself!
     In the  first  part  of the  dream  I'm on top of  a  train  and  we're
approaching a tunnel. I  get  scared, pull  myself down,  and we go into the
tunnel --  whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and
you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
     I also noticed  that  I could see colors. Some people had said that you
dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
     By  this time  I was inside one  of the train cars, and  I can feel the
train lurching about. I say to myself,  "So you can get kinesthetic feelings
in a  dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and  I
see a  big  window,  like a  store  window.  Behind  it  there  are  --  not
mannequins,  but three live  girls in  bathing suits,  and they  look pretty
good!
     I continue walking into the next car, hanging  onto the straps overhead
as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting  to get excited
--  sexually -- so I think  I'll go back into  the other car."  I discovered
that I could turn around, and walk back through the train -- I could control
the direction of my dream. I get back  to the car with  the  special window,
and I see three old guys playing violins -- but they turned back into girls!
So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
     Well,  I  began  to get excited, intellectually  as  well as  sexually,
saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up.
     I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking
myself, "Am I really dreaming in color?" I  wondered, "How accurately do you
see something?"
     The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass,  and
she had red hair.  I tried to see  if I  could  see each hair. You know  how
there's a little area of color  just where  the  sun  is  reflecting --  the
diffraction effect, I  could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you
want: perfect vision!
     Another  time I  had  a dream  in  which  a  thumbtack was  stuck in  a
doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the
tack. So the "seeing  department" arid the "feeling department" of the brain
seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have
to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack.  I
run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
     Another  time  I'm  dreaming  and I  hear  "knock-knock;  knock-knock."
Something  was happening in  the dream that made  this knocking fit, but not
perfectly --  it seemed  sort of foreign. I thought:  "Absolutely guaranteed
that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and  I've  invented this
part of the dream to  fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the
hell it is."
     The knocking  is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was
nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.
     Other people have told  me that they have incorporated external  noises
into their dreams, but  when I had this experience, carefully "watching from
below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
     During the time  of making  observations  in  my dreams, the process of
waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a
moment when  you feel rigid  and tied  down,  or  underneath many layers  of
cotton batting. It's hard to  explain, but there's a moment when you get the
feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would  have
to tell  myself -- after  I was  awake -- that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a  person falls asleep naturally  and can't wake up.
You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that,  I
became less  and less  afraid, and in fact I found the process of  waking up
rather  thrilling -- something like a roller  coaster:  After a while you're
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
     You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams  stopped
(which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since).  I'm
dreaming one night as usual,  making observations,  and I see on the wall in
front of  me  a pennant. I  answer  for  the  twenty-fifth  time,  "Yes, I'm
dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back
of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that
the  back  of my head is soft. I think,  "Aha! That's why I've been able  to
make  all these observations in  my dreams:  the brass  rod has disturbed my
visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and
I can make these observations any time  I want. So I think I'll  stop making
observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
     When  I  woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was  the back of my
head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making  these observations,  and my
brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
     As a result of these observations I began to get  a little  theory. One
of  the reasons that  I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to
how you  can  see  an image, of a person,  for  example, when your eyes  are
closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't  get the nerves to  discharge in exactly the  same
delicate patterns when you are sleeping  as when you are awake,  looking  at
something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when
I was asleep?
     I decided  there must be  an "interpretation department." When you  are
actually looking at something -- a man, a lamp, or  a wall -- you don't just
see  blotches  of  color.  Something  tells  you  what it  is;  it has to be
interpreted. When  you're dreaming,  this interpretation department is still
operating,  but it's all slopped up. It's telling  you  that you're seeing a
human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
     One other thing about dreams.  I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife
was  from a family  of psychoanalysts in  Vienna. One evening, during a long
discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are
symbols  in dreams that  can  be  interpreted psychoanalytically.  I  didn't
believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're
playing a game on a billiard table with three balls -- a white ball, a green
ball, and a gray  ball --  and the name of the game is  "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the  pocket: the white ball and
the  green ball are easy to  sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't
get to it.
     I wake up, and  the dream is very  easy to interpret:  the name  of the
game gives it away,  of  course --  them's girls! The white ball was easy to
figure out,  because I was going  out, sneakily,  with  a married  woman who
worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a
drive-in movie with a girl  in a green dress. But the  gray one --  what the
hell  was the gray one? I knew  it had to be somebody; I felt  it. It's like
when you're trying to  remember a name, and it's on the tip of  your tongue,
but you can't get it.
     It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said  goodbye to a
girl I  liked  very much, who  had gone to Italy about  two  or three months
before. She was a very nice girl, and I  had decided that when she came back
I was going to see her again. I don't  know if she  wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
     I went back to  my friend Deutsch, and I told him  he must  be right --
there  is  something  to  analyzing dreams.  But  when  he  heard  about  my
interesting dream, he said, "No,  that one was too perfect  -- too  cut  and
dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."


--------
The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation

     After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two
or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill
Shockley, who knew me from the  lab at MIT, would show  me around each time,
and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.
     I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One
was to the Bausch  and  Lomb  Company  for tracing rays through lenses;  the
other was to  Electrical Testing Labs in New  York. At that time nobody knew
what a physicist even was, and  there weren't  any positions in industry for
physicists.  Engineers, OK; but physicists  -- nobody knew how  to use them.
It's interesting that very soon, after  the war, it  was the exact opposite:
people  wanted  physicists  everywhere.  So I  wasn't getting anywhere  as a
physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.
     About that time I met an old  friend of mine on the  beach at our  home
town of Far  Rockaway, where we  grew up  together.  We  had gone  to school
together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We
were  both  scientifically  minded.  He had  a  "laboratory,"  and I  had  a
"laboratory." We often played together, and discussed things together.
     We used to put on magic shows -- chemistry magic -- for the kids on the
block. My friend was a pretty good showman, and I kind of liked that too. We
did our tricks on a little table, with Bunsen burners at  each end going all
the time. On the burners  we had watch glass plates (flat  glass discs) with
iodine  on them, which made a beautiful purple  vapor  that went  up on each
side  of the  table while the show  went  on. It  was great! We did a lot of
tricks, such as turning "wine" into water, and other chemical color changes.
For our finale,  we did a trick that used something which we had discovered.
I would put  my hands (secretly) first into  a sink of  water, and then into
benzine. Then I would "accidentally" brush by one of the Bunsen burners, and
one  hand  would light up. I'd clap my hands, and  both hands would  then be
burning.  (It  doesn't  hurt  because it  burns fast and the  water keeps it
cool.) Then I'd wave my hands, running  around  yelling, "FIRE!  FIRE!"  and
everybody  would get all  excited. They'd run out  of the room, and that was
the end of the show!
     Later on  I told  this story  at college  to my fraternity brothers and
they said, "Nonsense! You can't do that!"
     (I often  had this  problem of demonstrating  to these fellas something
that they didn't believe  -- like  the  time  we got into an  argument as to
whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate  that
that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head.
Or the time when  somebody claimed  that  if you took aspirin and  Coca-Cola
you'd fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot
of baloney, and  offered to take  aspirin  and Coca-Cola together. Then they
got into an argument whether you  should have the  aspirin before  the Coke,
just after the  Coke, or mixed in  the Coke. So I had  six aspirin and three
Cokes, one  right after  the other. First, I  took aspirins and then a Coke,
then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I  took a
Coke and two  aspirins. Each time the  idiots who believed  it were standing
around me,  waiting  to catch me when I  fainted. But nothing happened. I do
remember that I didn't sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot
of  figuring,  and worked out some of the formulas  for what is  called  the
Riemann-Zeta function.)
     "All right, guys," I said. "Let's go out and get some benzine."
     They got the benzine  ready,  I stuck my hand in  the water in the sink
and then into the benzine and lit it... and  it hurt  like hell! You see, in
the  meantime  I had grown hairs on the  back of my hand, which  acted  like
wicks and held the benzine in place while it burned, whereas when I had done
it earlier I had no hairs on the back of my hand. After I did the experiment
for my fraternity brothers, I didn't have any hairs  on the back of my hands
either.
     Well,  my pal  and I  met on  the  beach,  and he told me that he had a
process for  metal-plating  plastics.  I  said that was impossible,  because
there's no  conductivity; you can't attach  a wire.  But  he  said he  could
metal-plate anything, and I still  remember him picking  up a peach pit that
was in the sand, and  saying he could  metal-plate that -- trying to impress
me.
     What was nice was that he offered me a job at his little company, which
was on  the top floor of a  building in New York. There were only about four
people in the  company.  His father  was  the  one who was getting the money
together and  was, I  think,  the "president." He  was the "vice-president,"
along with another fella who was  a  salesman.  I  was  the  "chief research
chemist,"  and  my  friend's  brother,  who was not  very  clever,  was  the
bottle-washer. We had six metal-plating baths.
     They  had this process for metal-plating plastics,  and the scheme was:
First,  deposit  silver on the object by  precipitating silver from a silver
nitrate bath with  a  reducing agent (like you make mirrors); then stick the
object, with silver on it as  a  conductor, into an electroplating bath, and
the silver gets plated.
     The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?
     It doesn't. It peels  off easily. So  there was  a  step in between, to
make the silver stick better to the object. It depended on the material. For
things like  Bakelite, which  was an  important  plastic in  those days,  my
friend  had found that if  he  sandblasted it first,  and then soaked it for
many hours in stannous hydroxide, which  got into the pores of the Bakelite,
the silver would hold onto the surface very nicely.
     But it worked only on  a  few plastics, and new  kinds of plastics were
coming  out  all  the  time,  such  as  methylmethacrylate  (which  we  call
plexiglass, now),  that we couldn't plate, directly, at first. And cellulose
acetate, which was  very cheap, was another one we couldn't  plate at first,
though  we finally  discovered that  putting it  in  sodium  hydroxide for a
little while before using the stannous chloride made it plate very well.
     I was pretty successful as a "chemist" in the company. My advantage was
that my pal had done no chemistry  at all; he had  done no  experiments;  he
just knew how to do something once. I set to work putting lots  of different
knobs  in  bottles,  and  putting  all kinds  of  chemicals  in.  By  trying
everything and keeping track of everything  I found ways of plating a  wider
range of plastics than he had done before.
     I was  also  able to  simplify his  process. From looking  in  books  I
changed  the reducing agent from glucose  to  formaldehyde, and was  able to
recover 100 percent of the silver immediately,  instead of having to recover
the silver left in solution at a later time.
     I also got  the stannous hydroxide  to dissolve in  water  by  adding a
little bit  of hydrochloric  acid -- something  I  remembered from a college
chemistry course --  so a step  that used  to take hours now took about five
minutes.
     My experiments were always being interrupted by the salesman, who would
come back with some plastic from a prospective customer. I'd have  all these
bottles lined up, with everything marked, when all  of  a sudden, "You gotta
stop the experiment to do a 'super job' for the sales department!" So, a lot
of experiments had to be started more than once.
     One time  we  got into one  hell of  a lot  of trouble. There  was some
artist who  was trying  to make a picture for the cover of  a magazine about
automobiles. He had very carefully built a wheel out of plastic, and somehow
or other this salesman  had told him we could plate anything,  so the artist
wanted us  to metal-plate the hub, so  it would be a shiny, silver  hub. The
wheel  was  made of a new plastic that we didn't know very well how to plate
--  the  fact  is, the salesman never  knew  what we could  plate, so he was
always promising things -- and it didn't work the first time.  So, to fix it
up we had to get the old silver  off, and  we couldn't get it off easily.  I
decided to use concentrated nitric acid on it, which took the silver off all
right, but  also made  pits and holes in the plastic. We were really  in hot
water that time! In fact, we had lots of "hot water" experiments.
     The other fellas in the company decided we should run advertisements in
Modern Plastics magazine.  A  few  things we metal-plated were very  pretty.
They looked  good in the advertisements. We also had a  few  things out in a
showcase in front, for  prospective customers  to look at, but  nobody could
pick up the things in  the advertisements or in the showcase to see how well
the plating stayed on. Perhaps some of them were, in fact, pretty good jobs.
But they were made specially; they were not regular products.
     Right after I left  the company  at the  end  of  the summer  to go  to
Princeton, they got a  good  offer  from  somebody who wanted to metal-plate
plastic pens.  Now people  could have silver pens that were light, and easy,
and cheap. The pens immediately sold, all  over, and it  was rather exciting
to see  people  walking around everywhere  with these  pens --  and you knew
where they came from.
     But  the  company  hadn't had much experience  with  the material -- or
perhaps with the filler that was used  in the  plastic (most plastics aren't
pure; they have a "filler," which in those days wasn't very well controlled)
-- and the darn things would  develop a  blister. When you have something in
your  hand  that has a little blister that  starts  to peel, you can't  help
fiddling with it. So everybody was fiddling with all the peelings coming off
the pens.
     Now the company had this emergency problem to fix the pens, and my  pal
decided he needed a big microscope, and so on.  He  didn't know what he  was
going  to look  at,  or why, and it cost his company a lot of money for this
fake  research.  The  result  was,  they had trouble: They  never solved the
problem,  and the company  failed, because  their  first big job was  such a
failure.
     A few  years later I  was in  Los Alamos,  where there was  a man named
Frederic de Hoffman, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very
good at administrating. Not highly trained, he liked mathematics, and worked
very hard; he  compensated for  his lack of training  by hard work. Later he
became the president or vice president of General Atomics  and  he was a big
industrial  character after  that. But  at the  time  he  was  just  a  very
energetic, open-eyed, enthusiastic  boy, helping along  with  the Project as
best he could.
     One day we  were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been
working in England before coming to Los Alamos.
     "What kind of work were you doing there?" I asked.
     "I was working on  a process for  metal-plating plastics. I  was one of
the guys in the laboratory."
     "How did it go?"
     "It was going along pretty well, but we had our problems."
     "Oh?"
     "Just as we were beginning  to develop our process, there was a company
in New York..."
     "What company in New York?"
     "It was called the  Metaplast Corporation. They were developing further
than we were."
     "How could you tell?"
     "They were advertising all the time in  Modern Plastics  with full-page
advertisements showing all the things they could plate, and we realized that
they were further along than we were."
     "Did you have any stuff from them?"
     "No,  but  you could tell  from the advertisements  that they were  way
ahead of what we could do. Our  process was pretty good, but it was  no  use
trying to compete with an American process like that."
     "How many chemists did you have working in the lab?"
     "We had six chemists working."
     "How many chemists do you think the Metaplast Corporation had?"
     "Oh! They must have had a real chemistry department!"
     "Would you describe for me what you think the chief research chemist at
the Metaplast Corporation  might look  like, and  how his  laboratory  might
work?"
     "I  would guess they must have twenty-five  or fifty chemists,  and the
chief research chemist has his own office  -- special, with glass. You know,
like  they have in the movies -- guys  coming in  all the time with research
projects that they're doing, getting his advice, and  rushing off to do more
research, people coming in  and  out all the time. With twenty-five or fifty
chemists, how the hell could we compete with them?"
     "You'll be interested  and amused to know that  you are  now talking to
the  chief  research  chemist of  the  Metaplast  Corporation,  whose  staff
consisted of one bottle-washer!"
Archdave's Feynman Pages - Part 1

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

by Richard P. Feynman

by Richard P. Feynman
