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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
chemist ry 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!"
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