“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

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?”