1After 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.

2I 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.

3About 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.

4He had a "laboratory," and I had a "laboratory." We often played together, and discussed things together.

5We used to put on magic shows ­­ chemistry magic ­­ for the kids on the block.

6My 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!

7FIRE!" and everybody would get all excited. They'd run out of the room, and that was the end of the show!

8Later on I told this story at college to my fraternity brothers and they said, "Nonsense! You can't do that!"

9(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 Coca­Cola 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 Coca­Cola 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 Riemann­Zeta 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.

10Well, my pal and I met on the beach, and he told me that he had a process for metal­plating plastics. I said that was impossible, because there's no conductivity; you can't attach a wire. But he said he could metal­plate anything, and I still remember him picking up a peach pit that was in the sand, and saying he could metal­plate that ­­ trying to impress me.

11What 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 "vice­president," 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 bottle­washer. We had six metal­plating baths.

12They had this process for metal­plating 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.

13The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?

14It 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.

15But 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.

16I 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.

17I 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.

18I 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.

19My 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.

20One 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 metal­plate 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.

21We were really in hot water that time! In fact, we had lots of "hot water" experiments.

22The other fellas in the company decided we should run advertisements in Modern Plastics magazine. A few things we metal­plated 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.

23Right 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 metal­plate 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.

24But 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.

25When 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.

26Now 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.

27A few years later I was in Los Alamos, where there was a man named Frederic de Hoflinan, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very good at administrating.

28Not 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, open­eyed, enthusiastic boy, helping along with the Project as best he could.

29One day we were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been working in England before coming to Los Alamos.

30"What kind of work were you doing there?" I asked.

31"I was working on a process for metal­plating plastics. I was one of the guys in the laboratory."

32"How did it go?"

33"It was going along pretty well, but we had our problems." "Oh?"

34"Just as we were beginning to develop our process, there was a company in New York. . ."

35"What company in New York?"

36"It was called the Metaplast Corporation. They were developing further than we were."

37"How could you tell?"

38"They were advertising all the time in Modern Plastics with full­page advertisements showing all the things they could plate, and we realized that they were further along than we were."

39"Did you have any stuff from them?"

40"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."

41"How many chemists did you have working in the lab?" "We had six chemists working."

42"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 twenty­five 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.

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