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

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.