Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

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 t able, 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 yellin g, "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 t he 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