Taken from “Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton edited by
Edward Hutchings
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 henzine 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 methyl methacrylate (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 ModernPlastics 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!”