coming down ahead of time. So they just went crazy and
rented ranch houses all around the neighborhood. We stayed at first in a
ranch house and would drive in in the morning. The first morning I drove in
was tremendously impressive. The beauty of the scenery, for a person from
the East who didn't travel much, was sensational. There are the great cliffs
that you've probably seen in pictures. You'd come up from below and be very
surprised to see this high mesa. The most impressive thing to me was that,
as I was going up, I said that maybe there had been Indians living here, and
the guy who was driving stopped the car and walked around the corner and
pointed out some Indian caves that you could inspect. It was very exciting.
When I got to the site the first time, I saw there was a technical area
that was supposed to have a fence around it ultimately, but it was still
open. Then there was supposed to be a town, and then a big fence further
out, around the town. But they were still building, and my friend Paul Olum,
who was my assistant, was standing at the gate with a clipboard, checking
the trucks coming in and out and telling them which way to go to deliver the
materials in different places.
When I went into the laboratory, I would meet men I had heard of by
seeing their papers in the Physical Review and so on. I had never met them
before. "This is John Williams," they'd say. Then a guy stands up from a
desk that is covered with blueprints, his sleeves all rolled up, and he's
calling out the windows, ordering trucks and things going in different
directions with building material. In other words, the experimental
physicists had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready,
so they just built the buildings -- or assisted in building the buildings.
The theoretical physicists, on the other hand, could start working
right away, so it was decided that they wouldn't live in the ranch houses,
but would live up at the site. We started working immediately. There were no
blackboards except for one on wheels, and we'd roll it around and Robert
Serber would explain to us all the things that they'd thought of in Berkeley
about the atomic bomb, and nuclear physics, and all these things. I didn't
know very much about it; I had been doing other kinds of things. So I had to
do an awful lot of work.
Every day I would study and read, study and read. It was a very hectic
time. But I had some luck. All the big shots except for Hans Bethe happened
to be away at the time, and what Bethe needed was someone to talk to, to
push his ideas against. Well, he comes in to this little squirt in an office
and starts to argue, explaining his idea. I say, "No, no, you're crazy.
It'll go like this." And he says, "Just a moment," and explains how he's not
crazy, I'm crazy. And we keep on going like this. You see, when I hear about
physics, I just think about physics, and I don't know who I'm talking to, so
I say dopey things like "no, no, you're wrong," or "you're crazy." But it
turned out that's exactly what he needed. I got a notch up on account of
that, and I ended up as a group leader under Bethe with four guys under me.
Well, when I was first there, as I said, the dormitories weren't ready.
But the theoretical physicists had to stay up there anyway. The first place
they put us was in an old school building -- a boys' school that had been
there previously. I lived in a thing called the Mechanics' Lodge. We were
all jammed in there in bunk beds, and it wasn't organized very well because
Bob Christy and his wife had to go to the bathroom through our bedroom. So
that was very uncomfortable.
At last the dormitory was built. I went down to the place where rooms
were assigned, and they said, you can pick your room now. You know what I
did? I looked to see where the girls' dormitory was, and then I picked a
room that looked right across -- though later I discovered a big tree was
growing right in front of the window of that room.
They told me there would be two people in a room, but that would only
be temporary. Every two rooms would share a bathroom, and there would be
double-decker bunks in each room. But I didn't want two people in the room.
The night I got there, nobody else was there, and I decided to try to
keep my room to myself. My wife was sick with TB in Albuquerque, but I had
some boxes of stuff of hers. So I took out a little nightgown, opened the
top bed, and threw the nightgown carelessly on it. I took out some slippers,
and I threw some powder on the floor in the bathroom. I just made it look
like somebody else was there. So, what happened? Well, it's supposed to be a
men's dormitory, see? So I came home that night, and my pajamas are folded
nicely, and put under the pillow at the bottom, and my slippers put nicely
at the bottom of the bed. The lady's nightgown is nicely folded under the
pillow, the bed is all fixed up and made, and the slippers are put down
nicely. The powder is cleaned from the bathroom and nobody is sleeping in
the upper bed.
Next night, the same thing. When I wake up, I rumple up the top bed, I
throw the nightgown on it sloppily and scatter the powder in the bathroom
and so on. I went on like this for four nights until everybody was settled
and there was no more danger that they would put a second person in the
room. Each night, everything was set out very neatly, even though it was a
men's dormitory.
I didn't know it then, but this little ruse got me involved in
politics. There were all kinds of factions there, of course -- the
housewives' faction, the mechanics' faction, the technical peoples' faction,
and so on. Well, the bachelors and bachelor girls who lived in the dormitory
felt they had to have a faction too, because a new rule had been
promulgated: No Women in the Men's Dorm. Well, this is absolutely
ridiculous! After all, we are grown people! What kind of nonsense is this?
We had to have political action. So we debated this stuff, and I was elected
to represent the dormitory people in the town council.
After I'd been in it for about a year and a half, I was talking to Hans
Bethe about something. He was on the big governing council all this time,
and I told him about this trick with my wife's nightgown and bedroom
slippers. He started to laugh. "So that's how you got on the town council,"
he said.
It turned out that what happened was this. The woman who cleans the
rooms in the dormitory opens this door, and all of a sudden there is
trouble: somebody is sleeping with one of the guys! She reports to the chief
charwoman, the chief charwoman reports to the lieutenant, the lieutenant
reports to the major. It goes all the way up through the generals to the
governing board.
What are they going to do? They're going to think about it, that's
what! But, in the meantime, what instructions go down through the captains,
down through the majors, through the lieutenants, through the chars' chief,
through the charwoman? "Just put things back the way they are, clean 'em up,
and see what happens." Next day, same report. For four days, they worried up
there about what they were going to do. Finally they promulgated a rule: No
Women in the Men's Dormitory! And that caused such a stink down below that
they had to elect somebody to represent the...
I would like to tell you something about the censorship that we had
there. They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of
people inside the United States -- which they have no right to do. So it had
to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer
not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would be all
right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily
accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if
they were OK. If they weren't OK in their opinion, they would send the
letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a
paragraph of our "understanding."
So, very delicately amongst all these liberal-minded scientific guys,
we finally got the censorship set up, with many rules. We were allowed to
comment on the character of the administration if we wanted to, so we could
write our senator and tell him we didn't like the way things were run, and
things like that. They said they would notify us if there were any
difficulties.
So it was all set up, and here comes the first day for censorship:
Telephone! Briiing!
Me: "What?"
"Please come down."
I come down.
"What's this?"
"It's a letter from my father."
"Well, what is it?"
There's lined paper, and there's these lines going out with dots --
four dots under, one dot above, two dots under, one dot above, dot under
dot...
"What's that?"
I said, "It's a code."
They said, "Yeah, it's a code, but what does it say?"
I said, "I don't know what it says."
They said, "Well, what's the key to the code? How do you decipher it?"
I said, "Well, I don't know."
Then they said, "What's this?"
I said, "It's a letter from my wife -- it says TJXYWZ TW1X3."
"What's that?"
I said, "Another code."
"What's the key to it?"
"I don't know."
They said, "You're receiving codes, and you don't know the key?"
I said, "Precisely. I have a game. I challenge them to send me a code
that I can't decipher, see? So they're making up codes at the other end, and
they're sending them in, and they're not going to tell me what the key is."
Now one of the rules of the censorship was that they aren't going to
disturb anything that you would ordinarily send in the mail. So they said,
"Well, you're going to have to tell them please to send the key in with the
code."
I said, "I don't want to see the key!"
They said, "Well, all right, we'll take the key out."
So we had that arrangement. OK? All right. Next day I get a letter from
my wife that says, "It's very difficult writing because I feel that the
--------
splotch made with ink eradicator.
So I went down to the bureau, and I said, "You're not supposed to touch
the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not
supposed to take anything out."
They said, "Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors
work -- with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors."
I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, "Did you use
ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, "No, I didn't use ink
eradicator in my letter, it must have been the _____" -- and there's a hole
cut out of the paper.
So I went back to the major who was supposed to be in charge of all
this and complained. You know, this took a little time, but I felt I was
sort of the representative to get the thing straightened out. The major
tried to explain to me that these people who were the censors had been
taught how to do it, but they didn't understand this new way that we had to
be so delicate about.
So, anyway, he said, "What's the matter, don't you think I have good
will?"
I said, "Yes, you have perfectly good will but I don't think you have
power." Because, you see, he had already been on the job three or four days.
He said, "We'll see about that!" He grabs the telephone, and everything
is straightened out. No more is the letter cut.
However, there were a number of other difficulties. For example, one
day I got a letter from my wife and a note from the censor that said, "There
was a code enclosed without the key, and so we removed it."
So when I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, "Well,
where's all the stuff?"
I said, "What stuff?"
She said, "Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry."
I said, "Wait a minute -- that was a list?"
She said, "Yes."
"That was a code," I said. "They thought it was a code-litharge,
glycerine, etc." (She wanted litharge and glycerine to make a cement to fix
an onyx box.)
All this went on in the first few weeks before we got everything
straightened out. Anyway, one day I'm piddling around with the computing
machine, and I notice something very peculiar. If you take 1 divided by 243
you get .004115226337... It's quite cute: It goes a little cockeyed after
559 when you're carrying but it soon straightens itself out and repeats
itself nicely. I thought it was kind of amusing.
Well, I put that in the mail, and it comes back to me. It doesn't go
through, and there's a little note: "Look at Paragraph 17B." I look at
Paragraph 17B. It says, "Letters are to be written only in English, Russian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, German, and so forth. Permission to use any
other language must be obtained in writing." And then it said, "No codes."
So I wrote back to the censor a little note included in my letter which
said that I feel that of course this cannot be a code, because if you
actually do divide 1 by 243, you do, in fact, get all that, and therefore
there's no more information in the number .004115226337... than there is in
the number 243 -- which is hardly any information at all. And so forth. I
therefore asked for permission to use Arabic numerals in my letters. So I
got that through all right.
There was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back
and forth. For example, my wife kept mentioning the fact that she felt
uncomfortable writing with the feeling that the censor is looking over her
shoulder. Now, as a rule, we aren't supposed to mention censorship. We
aren't, but how can they tell her? So they keep sending me a note: "Your
wife mentioned censorship." Certainly, my wife mentioned censorship. So
finally they sent me a note that said, "Please inform your wife not to
mention censorship in her letters." So I start my letter: "I have been
instructed to inform you not to mention censorship in your letters." Phoom,
phoooom, it comes right back! So I write, "I have been instructed to inform
my wife not to mention censorship. How in the heck am I going to do it?
Furthermore, why do I have to instruct her not to mention censorship? You
keeping something from me?"
It is very interesting that the censor himself has to tell me to tell
my wife not to tell me that she's... But they had an answer. They said, yes,
that they are worried about mail being intercepted on the way from
Albuquerque, and that someone might find out that there was censorship if
they looked in the mail, and would she please act much more normal.
So I went down the next time to Albuquerque, and I talked to her and I
said, "Now, look, let's not mention censorship." But we had had so much
trouble that we at last worked out a code, something illegal. If I would put
a dot at the end of my signature, it meant I had had trouble again, and she
would move on to the next of the moves that she had concocted. She would sit
there all day long, because she was ill, and she would think of things to
do. The last thing she did was to send me an advertisement which she found
perfectly legitimately. It said, "Send your boyfriend a letter on a jigsaw
puzzle. We sell you the blank, you write the letter on it, take it all
apart, put it in a little sack, and mail it." I received that one with a
note saying, "We do not have time to play games. Please instruct your wife
to confine herself to ordinary letters."
Well, we were ready with the one more dot, but they straightened out
just in time and we didn't have to use it. The thing we had ready for the
next one was that the letter would start, "I hope you remembered to open
this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto-Bismol powder for
your stomach as we arranged." It would be a letter full of powder. In the
office we expected they would open it quickly, the powder would go all over
the floor, and they would get all upset because you are not supposed to
upset anything. They'd have to gather up all this Pepto-Bismol... But we
didn't have to use that one.
As a result of all these experiences with the censor, I knew exactly
what could get through and what could not get through. Nobody else knew as
well as I. And so I made a little money out of all of this by making bets.
One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted
to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut
themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the
hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate
began to wonder what was happening. How come this guy is always going out
and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the
lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there
was a hole.
You see, I was always trying to straighten people out. And so I made a
bet with somebody that I could tell about the hole in the fence in a letter,
and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said,
You should see the way they administer this place (that's what we were
allowed to say). There's a hole in the fence seventy-one feet away from
such-and-such a place, that's this size and that size, that you can walk
through.
Now, what can they do? They can't say to me that there is no such hole.
I mean, what are they going to do? It's their own hard luck that there's
such a hole. They should fix the hole. So I got that one through.
I also got through a letter that told about how one of the boys who
worked in one of my groups, John Kemeny, had been wakened up in the middle
of the night and grilled with lights in front of him by some idiots in the
army there because they found out something about his father, who was
supposed to be a communist or something. Kemeny is a famous man now.
There were other things. Like the hole in the fence, I was always
trying to point these things out in a non-direct manner. And one of the
things I wanted to point out was this -- that at the very beginning we had
terribly important secrets; we'd worked out lots of stuff about bombs and
uranium and how it worked, and so on; and all this stuff was in documents
that were in wooden filing cabinets that had little, ordinary, common
padlocks on them. Of course, there were various things made by the shop,
like a rod that would go down and then a padlock to hold it, but it was
always just a padlock. Furthermore, you could get the stuff out without even
opening the padlock. You just tilt the cabinet over backwards. The bottom
drawer has a little rod that's supposed to hold the papers together, and
there's a long wide hole in the wood underneath. You can pull the papers out
from below.
So I used to pick the locks all the time and point out that it was very
easy to do. And every time we had a meeting of everybody together, I would
get up and say that we have important secrets and we shouldn't keep them in
such things; we need better locks. One day Teller got up at the meeting, and
he said to me, "I don't keep my most important secrets in my filing cabinet;
I keep them in my desk drawer. Isn't that better?"
I said, "I don't know. I haven't seen your desk drawer."
He was sitting near the front of the meeting, and I'm sitting further
back. So the meeting continues, and I sneak out and go down to see his desk
drawer.
I don't even have to pick the lock on the desk drawer. It turns out
that if you put your hand in the back, underneath, you can pull out the
paper like those toilet paper dispensers. You pull out one, it pulls
another, it pulls another... I emptied the whole damn drawer, put everything
away to one side, and went back upstairs.
The meeting was just ending, and everybody was coming out, and I joined
the crew and ran to catch up with Teller, and I said, "Oh, by the way, let
me see your desk drawer."
"Certainly," he said, and he showed me the desk.
I looked at it and said, "That looks pretty good to me. Let's see what
you have in there."
"I'll be very glad to show it to you," he said, putting in the key and
opening the drawer. "If," he said, "you hadn't already seen it yourself."
The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr.
Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he
sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is
too damn small to give you any pleasure!
Some of the special problems I had at Los Alamos were rather
interesting. One thing had to do with the safety of the plant at Oak Ridge,
Tennessee. Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they were
trying to separate the isotopes of uranium -- uranium 238 and uranium 235,
the explosive one. They were just beginning to get infinitesimal amounts
from an experimental thing of 235, and at the same time they were practicing
the chemistry. There was going to be a big plant, they were going to have
vats of the stuff, and then they were going to take the purified stuff and
repurify and get it ready for the next stage. (You have to purify it in
several stages.) So they were practicing on the one hand, and they were just
getting a little bit of U235 from one of the pieces of apparatus
experimentally on the other hand. And they were trying to learn how to assay
it, to determine how much uranium 235 there is in it. Though we would send
them instructions, they never got it right.
So finally Emil Segre said that the only possible way to get it right
was for him to go down there and see what they were doing. The army people
said, "No, it is our policy to keep all the information of Los Alamos at one
place."
The people in Oak Ridge didn't know anything about what it was to be
used for; they just knew what they were trying to do. I mean the higher
people knew they were separating uranium, but they didn't know how powerful
the bomb was, or exactly how it worked or anything. The people underneath
didn't know at all what they were doing. And the army wanted to keep it that
way. There was no information going back and forth. But Segre insisted
they'd never get the assays right, and the whole thing would go up in smoke.
So he finally went down to see what they were doing, and as he was walking
through he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water -- which is
uranium nitrate solution.
He said, "Uh, you're going to handle it like that when it's purified
too? Is that what you're going to do?"
They said, "Sure -- why not?"
"Won't it explode?" he said.
Huh! Explode?
Then the army said, "You see! We shouldn't have let any information get
to them! Now they are all upset."
It turned out that the army had realized how much stuff we needed to
make a bomb -- twenty kilograms or whatever it was -- and they realized that
this much material, purified, would never be in the plant, so there was no
danger. But they did not know that the neutrons were enormously more
effective when they are slowed down in water. In water it takes less than a
tenth -- no, a hundredth -- as much material to make a reaction that makes
radioactivity. It kills people around and so on. It was very dangerous, and
they had not paid any attention to the safety at all.
So a telegram goes from Oppenheimer to Segre: "Go through the entire
plant. Notice where all the concentrations are supposed to be, with the
process as they designed it. We will calculate in the meantime how much
material can come together before there's an explosion."
Two groups started working on it. Christy's group worked on water
solutions and my group worked on dry powder in boxes. We calculated about
how much material they could accumulate safely. And Christy was going to go
down and tell them all at Oak Ridge what the situation was, because this
whole thing is broken down and we have to go down and tell them now. So I
happily gave all my numbers to Christy and said, you have all the stuff, so
go. Christy got pneumonia; I had to go.
I had never traveled on an airplane before. They strapped the secrets
in a little thing on my back! The airplane in those days was like a bus,
except the stations were further apart. You stopped off every once in a
while to wait.
There was a guy standing there next to me swinging a chain, saying
something like, "It must be terribly difficult to fly without a priority on
airplanes these days."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I don't know. I have a priority."
A little bit later he tried again. "There are some generals coming.
They are going to put off some of us number threes."
"It's all right," I said. "I'm a number two."
He probably wrote to his congressman -- if he wasn't a congressman
himself -- saying, "What are they doing sending these little kids around
with number two priorities in the middle of the war?"
At any rate, I arrived at Oak Ridge. The first thing I did was have
them take me to the plant, and I said nothing. I just looked at everything.
I found out that the situation was even worse than Segre reported, because
he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn't notice a lot
of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall -- and things
like that. Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.
So I went through the entire plant. I have a very bad memory, but when
I work intensively I have a good short-term memory, and so I could remember
all kinds of crazy things like building 90-207, vat number so-and-so, and so
forth.
I went to my room that night, and went through the whole thing,
explained where all the dangers were, and what you would have to do to fix
this. It's rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons
in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense,
according to certain rules.
The next day there was going to be a big meeting. I forgot to say that
before I left Los Alamos Oppenheimer said to me, "Now, the following people
are technically able down there at Oak Ridge: Mr. Julian Webb, Mr.
So-and-so, and so on. I want you to make sure that these people are at the
meeting, that you tell them how the thing can be made safe, so that they
really understand."
I said, "What if they're not at the meeting? What am I supposed to do?"
He said, "Then you should say: Los Alamos cannot accept the
responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless...!"
I said, "You mean me, little Richard, is going to go in there and say
--?"
He said, "Yes, little Richard, you go and do that."
I really grew up fast!
When I arrived, sure enough, the big shots in the company and the
technical people that I wanted were there, and the generals and everyone who
was interested in this very serious problem. That was good because the plant
would have blown up if nobody had paid attention to this problem.
There was a Lieutenant Zumwalt who took care of me. He told me that the
colonel said I shouldn't tell them how the neutrons work and all the details
because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to
keep it safe.
I said, "In my opinion it is impossible for them to obey a bunch of
rules unless they understand how it works. It's my opinion that it's only
going to work if I tell them, and Los Alamos cannot accept the
responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless they are fully
informed as to how it works!"
It was great. The lieutenant takes me to the colonel and repeats my
remark. The colonel says, "Just five minutes," and then he goes to the
window and he stops and thinks. That's what they're very good at -- making
decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not
information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to
be decided and could be decided in five minutes. So I have a great deal of
respect for these military guys, because I never can decide anything very
important in any length of time at all.
In five minutes he said, "All right, Mr. Feynman, go ahead."
I sat down and I told them all about neutrons, how they worked, da da,
ta ta ta, there are too many neutrons together, you've got to keep the
material apart, cadmium absorbs, and slow neutrons are more effective than
fast neutrons, and yak yak -- all of which was elementary stuff at Los
Alamos, but they had never heard of any of it, so I appeared to be a
tremendous genius to them.
The result was that they decided to set up little groups to make their
own calculations to learn how to do it. They started to redesign plants, and
the designers of the plants were there, the construction designers, and
engineers, and chemical engineers for the new plant that was going to handle
the separated material.
They told me to come back in a few months, so I came back when the
engineers had finished the design of the plant. Now it was for me to look at
the plant.
How do you look at a plant that isn't built yet? I don't know.
Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was always coming around with me because I had to
have an escort everywhere, takes me into this room where there are these two
engineers and a loooooong table covered with a stack of blueprints
representing the various floors of the proposed plant.
I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at
reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to
explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to
avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there's an
evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve
gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll
explode. So they explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any
one valve gets stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves
everywhere.
Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here,
the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up
through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second
floor, bluuuuurp -- going through the stack of blueprints, down-up-down-up,
talking very fast, explaining the very, very complicated chemical plant.
I'm completely dazed. Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the
blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a
window. It's a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn
place. I think it's a window, but no, it can't be a window, because it isn't
always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.
You must have been in a situation like this when you didn't ask them
right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they've been talking a
little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll
say, "What are you wasting my time all this time for?"
What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it's a valve. I take my
finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the
middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say, "What happens if
this valve gets stuck?" -- figuring they're going to say, "That's not a
valve, sir, that's a window."
So one looks at the other and says, "Well, if that valve gets stuck --"
and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up
and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other.
They turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and
say, "You're absolutely right, sir."
So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out.
And Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said,
"You're a genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the
plant once and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207
the next morning," he says, "but what you have just done is so fantastic I
want to know how, how do you do that?"
I told him you try to find out whether it's a valve or not.
Another kind of problem I worked on was this. We had to do lots of
calculations, and we did them on Marchant calculating machines. By the way,
just to give you an idea of what Los Alamos was like: We had these Marchant
computers -- hand calculators with numbers. You push them, and they
multiply, divide, add, and so on, but not easy like they do now. They were
mechanical gadgets, failing often, and they had to be sent back to the
factory to be repaired. Pretty soon you were running out of machines. A few
of us started to take the covers off (We weren't supposed to. The rules
read: "You take the covers off, we cannot be responsible...") So we took the
covers off and we got a nice series of lessons on how to fix them, and we
got better and better at it as we got more and more elaborate repairs. When
we got something too complicated, we sent it back to the factory, but we'd
do the easy ones and kept the things going. I ended up doing all the
computers and there was a guy in the machine shop who took care of
typewriters.
Anyway, we decided that the big problem -- which was to figure out
exactly what happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out
exactly how much energy was released and so on -- required much more
calculating than we were capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley
Frankel realized that it could possibly be done on IBM machines. The IBM
company had machines for business purposes, adding machines called
tabulators for listing sums, and a multiplier that you put cards in and it
would take two numbers from a card and multiply them. There were also
collators and sorters and so on.
So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these
machines in a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle.
Everybody who does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking
about, but this was kind of a new thing then -- mass production with
machines. We had done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go
one step across, doing everything yourself. But this was different -- where
you go first to the adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so
on. So Frankel designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM
company, because we realized it was a good way of solving our problems.
We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and
everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but
he was always delayed. Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we
tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out
all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do -- multiply
this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program,
but we didn't have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with
girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was
the adder. This one cubed -- all she did was cube a number on an index card
and send it to the next girl.
We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It
turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot
faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We
got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine.
The only difference is that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work
three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
Anyway, we got the bugs out during this process, and finally the
machines arrived, but not the repairman. These were some of the most
complicated machines of the technology of those days, big things that came
partially disassembled, with lots of wires and blueprints of what to do. We
went down and we put them together, Stan Frankel and I and another fellow,
and we had our troubles. Most of the trouble was the big shots coming in all
the time and saying, "You're going to break something!"
We put them together, and sometimes they would work, and sometimes they
were put together wrong and they didn't work. Finally I was working on some
multiplier and I saw a bent part inside, but I was afraid to straighten it
because it might snap off -- and they were always telling us we were going
to bust something irreversibly. When the repairman finally got there, he
fixed the machines we hadn't got ready, and everything was going. But he had
trouble with the one that I had had trouble with. After three days he was
still working on that one last machine.
I went down. I said, "Oh, I noticed that was bent."
He said, "Oh, of course. That's all there is to it!" Bend! It was all
right. So that was it.
Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the
computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's
a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The
trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You
have these switches -- if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd
number you do that -- and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate
things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any
attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very
slowly --while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one
tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it
would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the
arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole
table in one operation.
Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever
worked with computers, you understand the disease -- the delight in being
able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time,
the poor fellow who invented the thing.
I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go
down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease. And,
although they had done only three problems in nine months, I had a very good
group.
The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything.
The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called
Special Engineer Detachment -- clever boys from high school who had
engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in
barracks. And they would tell them nothing.
Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM
machines -- punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told
them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first
thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing.
Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I
could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all
excited: "We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" They knew what the
numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more
energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better.
They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising
in the night; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they
invented several of the programs that we used.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell
them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three
problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten
times as fast.
But one of the secret ways we did our problems was this. The problems
consisted of a bunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add,
then multiply -- and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room,
slowly, as it went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different
colored set of cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We'd do two or
three problems at a time.
But this got us into another problem. Near the end of the war, for
instance, just before we had to make a test in Albuquerque, the question
was: How much energy would be released? We had been calculating the release
from various designs, but we hadn't computed for the specific design that
was ultimately used. So Bob Christy came down and said, "We would like the
results for how this thing is going to work in one month" -- or some very
short time, like three weeks.
I said, "It's impossible."
He said, "Look, you're putting out nearly two problems a month. It
takes only two weeks per problem, or three weeks per problem."
I said, "I know. It really takes much longer to do the problem, but
we're doing them in parallel. As they go through, it takes a long time and
there's no way to make it go around faster."
He went out, and I began to think. Is there a way to make it go around
faster? What if we did nothing else on the machine, so nothing else was
interfering? I put a challenge to the boys on the blackboard -- CAN WE DO
IT? They all start yelling, "Yes, we'll work double shifts, we'll work
overtime," all this kind of thing. "We'll try it. We'll try it!"
And so the rule was: All other problems out. Only one problem and just
concentrate on this one. So they started to work.
My wife, Arlene, was ill with tuberculosis -- very ill indeed. It
looked as if something might happen at any minute, so I arranged ahead of
time with a friend of mine in the dormitory to borrow his car in an
emergency so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. His name was Klaus Fuchs.
He was the spy, and he used his automobile to take the atomic secrets away
from Los Alamos down to Santa Fe. But nobody knew that.
The emergency arrived. I borrowed Fuchs's car and picked up a couple of
hitchhikers, in case something happened with the car on the way to
Albuquerque. Sure enough, just as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a
flat tire. The two guys helped me change the tire, and just as we were
leaving Santa Fe, another tire went flat. We pushed the car into a nearby
gas station.
The gas station guy was repairing somebody else's car, and it was going
to take a while before he could help us. I didn't even think to say
anything, but the two hitchhikers went over to the gas station man and told
him the situation. Soon we had a new tire (but no spare -- tires were hard
to get during the war).
About thirty miles outside Albuquerque a third tire went flat, so I
left the car on the road and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I phoned a
garage to go out and get the car while I went to the hospital to see my
wife.
Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out
the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with
my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when
she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those
days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning
around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one
reason or another -- I had to repair it from time to time -- but I kept it
going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more -- at 9:22, the
time on the death certificate!
I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea
came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead.
Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete
Bernays -- my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case
somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such
things can sometimes happen by luck -- after all, my grandmother was very
old -- although people might think they happened by some sort of
supernatural phenomenon.
Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick,
and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who
half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn't got a
doubting mind -- especially in a circumstance like that -- doesn't
immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no
one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal
phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of
these fantastic phenomena.
I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that
the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the
face better. That could easily have stopped it.
I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was
surprised how I didn't feel what I thought people would expect to feel under
the circumstances. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset,
perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was
going to happen.
I didn't know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos.
I didn't want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back
(yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened.
"She's dead. And how's the program going?"
They caught on right away that I didn't want to moon over it.
(I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was
so important -- I had to understand what really happened to Arlene,
physiologically -- that I didn't cry until a number of months later, when I
was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the
window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for
me.)
When I went back to work on the calculation program, I found it in a
mess: There were white cards, there were blue cards, there were yellow
cards, and I started to say, "You're not supposed to do more than one
problem -- only one problem!" They said, "Get out, get out, get out. Wait --
and we'll explain everything."
So I waited, and what happened was this. As the cards went through,
sometimes the machine made a mistake, or they put a wrong number in. What we
used to have to do when that happened was to go back and do it over again.
But they noticed that a mistake made at some point in one cycle only affects
the nearby numbers, the next cycle affects the nearby numbers, and so on. It
works its way through the pack of cards. If you have fifty cards and you
make a mistake at card number thirty-nine, it affects thirty-seven,
thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. The next, card thirty-six, thirty-seven,
thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. The next time it spreads like a
disease.
So they found an error back a way, and they got an idea. They would
only compute a small deck of ten cards around the error. And because ten
cards could be put through the machine faster than the deck of fifty cards,
they would go rapidly through with this other deck while they continued with
the fifty cards with the disease spreading. But the other thing was
computing faster, and they would seal it all up and correct it. Very clever.
That was the way those guys worked to get speed. There was no other
way. If they had to stop to try to fix it, we'd have lost time. We couldn't
have got it. That was what they were doing.
Of course, you know what happened while they were doing that. They
found an error in the blue deck. And so they had a yellow deck with a little
fewer cards; it was going around faster than the blue deck. Just when they
are going crazy -- because after they get this straightened out, they have
to fix the white deck -- the boss comes walking in.
"Leave us alone," they say. I left them alone and everything came out.
We solved the problem in time and that's the way it was.
I was an underling at the beginning. Later I became a group leader. And
I met some very great men. It is one of the great experiences of my life to
have met all these wonderful physicists.
There was, of course, Enrico Fermi. He came down once from Chicago, to
consult a little bit, to help us if we had some problems. We had a meeting
with him, and I had been doing some calculations and gotten some results.
The calculations were so elaborate -- it was very difficult. Now, usually I
was the expert at this; I could always tell you what the answer was going to
look like, or when I got it I could explain why. But this thing was so
complicated I couldn't explain why it was like that.
So I told Fermi I was doing this problem, and I started to describe the
results. He said, "Wait, before you tell me the result, let me think. It's
going to come out like this (he was right), and it's going to come out like
this because of so and so. And there's a perfectly obvious explanation for
this --"
He was doing what I was supposed to be good at, ten times better. That
was quite a lesson to me.
Then there was John von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go
for walks on Sunday. We'd walk in the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob
Bacher. It was a great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting
idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So
I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a
result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since.
But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active
irresponsibility!
I also met Niels Bohr. His name was Nicholas Baker in those days, and
he came to Los Alamos with Jim Baker, his son, whose name is really Aage
Bohr. They came from Denmark, and they were very famous physicists, as you
know. Even to the big shot guys, Bohr was a great god.
We were at a meeting once, the first time he came, and everybody wanted
to see the great Bohr. So there were a lot of people there, and we were
discussing the problems of the bomb. I was back in a corner somewhere. He
came and went, and all I could see of him was from between people's heads.
In the morning of the day he's due to come next time, I get a telephone
call.
"Hello -- Feynman?"
"Yes."
"This is Jim Baker." It's his son. "My father and I would like to speak
to you."
"Me? I'm Feynman, I'm just a --"
"That's right. Is eight o'clock OK?"
So, at eight o'clock in the morning, before anybody's awake, I go down
to the place. We go into an office in the technical area and he says, "We
have been thinking how we could make the bomb more efficient and we think of
the following idea."
I say, "No, it's not going to work. It's not efficient... Blah, blah,
blah."
So he says, "How about so and so?"
I said, "That sounds a little bit better, but it's got this damn fool
idea in it."
This went on for about two hours, going back and forth over lots of
ideas, back and forth, arguing. The great Niels kept lighting his pipe; it
always went out. And he talked in a way that was un-understandable --
mumble, mumble, hard to understand. His son I could understand better.
"Well," he said finally, lighting his pipe, "I guess we can call in the
big shots now." So then they called all the other guys and had a discussion
with them.
Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr
said to his son, "Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over
there? He's the only guy who's not afraid of me, and will say when I've got
a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we're not going to
be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr.
Get that guy and we'll talk with him first."
I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was
always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked
lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.
I've always lived that way. It's nice, it's pleasant -- if you can do
it. I'm lucky in my life that I can do this.
After we'd made the calculations, the next thing that happened, of
course, was the test. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that
time, after my wife died, and so I got a message that said, "The baby is
expected on such and such a day."
I flew back, and I arrived just when the buses were leaving, so I went
straight out to the site and we waited out there, twenty miles away. We had
a radio, and they were supposed to tell us when the thing was going to go
off and so forth, but the radio wouldn't work, so we never knew what was
happening. But just a few minutes before it was supposed to go off the radio
started to work, and they told us there was twenty seconds or something to
go, for people who were far away like we were. Others were closer, six miles
away.
They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses!
Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I
figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can
never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield,
because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and
so I could see the damn thing.
Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I
duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said,
"That's not it. That's an after-image." So I look back up, and I see this
white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and
disappear again -- from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.
Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a
ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little
black around the edges, and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with
flashes on the inside, with the heat of the fire going outwards.
All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark,
and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn
thing -- the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the
people at six miles couldn't see it because they were all told to lie on the
floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.
Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous
noise -- BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder -- and that's what convinced
me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just
watching quietly. But this sound released everybody -- released me
particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that
it had really worked.
The man standing next to me said, "What's that?"
I said, "That was the Bomb."
The man was William Laurence. He was there to write an article
describing the whole situation. I had been the one who was supposed to have
taken him around. Then it was found that it was too technical for him, and
so later H. D. Smyth came and I showed him around. One thing we did, we went
into a room and there on the end of a narrow pedestal was a small
silver-plated ball. You could put your hand on it. It was warm. It was
radioactive. It was plutonium. And we stood at the door of this room,
talking about it. This was a new element that was made by man, that had
never existed on the earth before, except for a very short period possibly
at the very beginning. And here it was all isolated and radioactive and had
these properties. And we had made it. And so it was tremendously valuable.
Meanwhile, you know how people do when they talk -- you kind of jiggle
around and so forth. He was kicking the doorstop, you see, and I said, "Yes,
the doorstop certainly is appropriate for this door." The doorstop was a
ten-inch hemisphere of yellowish metal-gold, as a matter of fact.
What had happened was that we needed to do an experiment to see how
many neutrons were reflected by different materials, in order to save the
neutrons so we didn't use so much material. We had tested many different
materials. We had tested platinum, we had tested zinc, we had tested brass,
we had tested gold. So, in making the tests with the gold, we had these
pieces of gold and somebody had the clever idea of using that great ball of
gold for a doorstop for the door of the room that contained the plutonium.
After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los
Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep
and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just
sitting there moping.
I said, "What are you moping about?" He said, "It's a terrible thing
that we made." I said, "But you started it. You got us into it." You see,
what happened to me -- what happened to the rest of us -- is we started for
a good reason, then you're working very hard to accomplish something and
it's a pleasure, it's excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just
stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that
moment.
I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to
teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it
any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York,
for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you
know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so
forth... How far from here was 34th Street?... All those buildings, all
smashed -- and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a
bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they
just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new
things? It's so useless.
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't
it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad
those other people had the sense to go ahead.
--------
Safecracker Meets Safecracker
I learned to pick locks from a guy named Leo Lavatelli. It turns out
that picking ordinary tumbler locks -- like Yale locks -- is easy. You try
to turn the lock by putting a screwdriver in the hole (you have to push from
the side in order to leave the hole open). It doesn't turn because there are
some pins inside which have to be lifted to just the right height (by the
key). Because it is not made perfectly, the lock is held more by one pin
than the others. Now, if you push a little wire gadget -- maybe a paper clip
with a slight bump at the end -- and jiggle it back and forth inside the
lock, you'll eventually push that one pin that's doing the most holding, up
to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin
stays up -- it's caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another
pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until
all the pins are pushed up.
What often happens is that the screwdriver will slip and you hear
tic-tic-tic, and it makes you mad. There are little springs that push the
pins back down when a key is removed, and you can hear them click when you
let go of the screwdriver. (Sometimes you intentionally let go of the
screwdriver to see if you're getting anywhere -- you might be pushing the
wrong way, for instance.) The process is something like Sisyphus: you're
always falling back downhill.
It's a simple process, but practice helps a lot. You learn how hard to
push on things -- hard enough so the pins will stay up, but not so hard that
they won't go up in the first place. What is not really appreciated by most
people is that they're perpetually locking themselves in with locks
everywhere, and it's not very hard to pick them.
When we started to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos,
everything was in such a hurry that it wasn't really ready. All the secrets
of the project -- everything about the atomic bomb -- were kept in filing
cabinets which, if they had locks at all, were locked with padlocks which
had maybe only three pins: they were as easy as pie to open.
To improve security the shop outfitted every filing cabinet with a long
rod that went down through the handles of the drawers and that was fastened
by a padlock.
Some guy said to me, "Look at this new thing the shop put on -- can you
open the cabinet now?"
I looked at the back of the cabinet and saw that the drawers didn't
have a solid bottom. There was a slot with a wire rod in each one that held
a slidable piece (which holds the papers up inside the drawer). I poked in
from the back, slid the piece back, and began pulling the papers out through
the slot. "Look!" I said. "I don't even have to pick the lock."
Los Alamos was a very cooperative place, and we felt it our
responsibility to point out things that should be improved. I'd keep
complaining that the stuff was unsafe, and although everybody thought it was
safe because there were steel rods and padlocks, it didn't mean a damn
thing.
To demonstrate that the locks meant nothing, whenever I wanted
somebody's report and they weren't around, I'd just go in their office, open
the filing cabinet, and take it out. When I was finished I would give it
back to the guy: "Thanks for your report."
"Where'd you get it?"
"Out of your filing cabinet."
"But I locked it!"
"I know you locked it. The locks are no good."
Finally some filing cabinets came which had combination locks on them
made by the Mosler Safe Company. They had three drawers. Pulling the top
drawer out would release the other drawers by a catch. The top drawer was
opened by turning a combination wheel to the left, right, and left for the
combination, and then right to number ten, which would draw back a bolt
inside. The whole filing cabinet could be locked by closing the bottom
drawers first, then the top drawer, and spinning the combination wheel away
from number ten, which pushed up the bolt.
These new filing cabinets were an immediate challenge, naturally. I
love puzzles. One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there
must be a way to beat it!
I had first to understand how the lock worked, so I took apart the one
in my office. The way it worked is this: There are three discs on a single
shaft, one behind the other; each has a notch in a different place. The idea
is to line up the notches so that when you turn the wheel to ten, the little
friction drive will draw the bolt down into the slot generated by the
notches of the three discs.
Now, to turn the discs, there's a pin sticking out from the back of the
combination wheel, and a pin sticking up from the first disc at the same
radius. Within one turn of the combination wheel, you've picked up the first
disc.
On the back of the first disc there's a pin at the same radius as a pin
on the front of the second disc, so by the time you've spun the combination
wheel around twice, you've picked up the second disc as well.
Keep turning the wheel, and a pin on the back of the second disc will
catch a pin on the front of the third disc, which you now set into the
proper position with the first number of the combination.
Now you have to turn the combination wheel the other way one full turn
to catch the second disc from the other side, and then continue to the
second number of the combination to set the second disc.
Again you reverse direction and set the first disc to its proper place.
Now the notches are lined up, and by turning the wheel to ten, you open the
cabinet.
Well, I struggled, and I couldn't get anywhere. I bought a couple of
Safecracker books, but they were all the same. In the beginning of the book
there are some stories of the fantastic achievements of the safecracker,
such as the woman caught in a meat refrigerator who is freezing to death,
but the safecracker, hanging upside down, opens it in two minutes. Or there
are some precious furs or gold bullion under water, down in the sea, and the
safecracker dives down and opens the chest.
In the second part of the book, they tell you how to crack a safe.
There are all kinds of ninny-pinny, dopey things, like "It might be a good
idea to try a date for the combination, because lots of people like to use
dates." Or "Think of the psychology of the owner of the safe, and what he
might use for the combination." And "The secretary is often worried that she
might forget the combination of the safe, so she might write it down in one
of the following places -- along the edge of her desk drawer, on a list of
names and addresses..." and so on.
They did tell me something sensible about how to open ordinary safes,
and it's easy to understand. Ordinary safes have an extra handle, so if you
push down on the handle while you're turning the combination wheel, things
being unequal (as with locks), the force of the handle trying to push the
bolt down into the notches (which are not lined up) is held up more by one
disc than another. When the notch on that disc comes under the bolt, there's
a tiny click that you can hear with a stethoscope, or a slight decrease in
friction that you can feel (you don't have to sandpaper your fingertips),
and you know, "There's a number!"
You don't know whether it's the first, second, or third number, but you
can get a pretty good idea of that by finding out how many times you have to
turn the wheel the other way to hear the same click again. If it's a little
less than once, it's the first disc; if it's a little less than twice, it's
the second disc (you have to make a correction for the thickness of the
pins).
This useful trick only works on ordinary safes, which have the extra
handle, so I was stymied.
I tried all kinds of subsidiary tricks with the cabinets, such as
finding out how to release the latches on the lower drawers, without opening
the top drawer, by taking off a screw in front and poking around with a
piece of hanger wire.
I tried spinning the combination wheel very rapidly and then going to
ten, thus putting a little friction on, which I hoped would stop a disc at
the right point in some manner. I tried all kinds of things. I was
desperate.
I also did a certain amount of systematic study. For instance, a
typical combination was 69-32-21. How far off could a number be when you're
opening the safe? If the number was 69, would 68 work? Would 67 work? On the
particular locks we had, the answer was yes for both, but 66 wouldn't work.
You could be off by two in either direction. That meant you only had to try
one out of five numbers, so you could try zero, five, ten, fifteen, and so
on. With twenty such numbers on a wheel of 100, that was 8000 possibilities
instead of the 1,000,000 you would get if you had to try every single
number.
Now the question was, how long would it take me to try the 8000
combinations? Suppose I've got the first two numbers right of a combination
I'm trying to get. Say the numbers are 69-32, but I don't know it -- I've
got them as 70-30. Now I can try the twenty possible third numbers without
having to set up the first two numbers each time. Now let's suppose I have
only the first number of the combination right. After trying the twenty
numbers on the third disc, I move the second wheel only a little bit, and
then do another twenty numbers on the third wheel.
I practiced all the time on my own safe so I could do this process as
fast as I could and not get lost in my mind as to which number I was pushing
and mess up the first number. Like a guy who practices sleight of hand, I
got it down to an absolute rhythm so I could try the 400 possible back
numbers in less than half an hour. That meant I could open a safe in a
maximum of eight hours -- with an average time of four hours.
There was another guy there at Los Alamos named Staley who was also
interested in locks. We talked about it from time to time, but we weren't
getting anywhere much. After I got this idea how to open a safe in an
average time of four hours, I wanted to show Staley how to do it, so I went
into a guy's office over in the computing department and asked, "Do you mind
if I use your safe? I'd like to show Staley something."
Meanwhile some guys in the computing department came around and one of
them said, "Hey, everybody; Feynman's gonna show Staley how to open a safe,
ha, ha, ha!" I wasn't going to actually open the safe; I was just going to
show Staley this way of quickly trying the back two numbers without losing
your place and having to set up the first number again.
I began. "Let's suppose that the first number is forty, and we're
trying fifteen for the second number. We go back and forth, ten; back five
more and forth, ten; and so on. Now we've tried all the possible third
numbers. Now we try twenty for the second number: we go back and forth, ten;
back five more and forth, ten; back five more and forth, CLICK!" My jaw
dropped: the first and second numbers happened to be right!
Nobody saw my expression because my back was towards them. Staley
looked very surprised, but both of us caught on very quickly as to what
happened, so I pulled the top drawer out with a flourish and said, "And
there you are!"
Staley said, "I see what you mean; it's a very good scheme" -- and we
walked out. Everybody was amazed. It was complete luck. Now I really had a
reputation for opening safes.
It took me about a year and a half to get that far (of course, I was
working on the bomb, too!) but I figured that I had the safes beaten, in the
sense that if there was a real difficulty -- if somebody was lost, or dead,
and nobody else knew the combination but the stuff in the filing cabinet was
needed -- I could open it. After reading what preposterous things the
safecrackers claimed, I thought that was a rather respectable
accomplishment.
We had no entertainment there at Los Alamos, and we had to amuse
ourselves somehow, so fiddling with the Mosler lock on my filing cabinet was
one of my entertainments. One day I made an interesting observation: When
the lock is opened and the drawer has been pulled out and the wheel is left
on ten (which is what people do when they've opened their filing cabinet and
are taking papers out of it), the bolt is still down. Now what does that
mean, the bolt is still down? It means the bolt is in the slot made by the
three discs, which are still properly lined up. Ahhhh!
Now, if I turn the wheel away from ten a little bit, the bolt comes up;
if I immediately go back to ten, the bolt goes back down again, because I
haven't yet disturbed the slot. If I keep going away from ten in steps of
five, at some point the bolt won't go back down when I go back to ten: the
slot has just been disturbed. The number just before, which still let the
bolt go down, is the last number of the combination!
I realized that I could do the same thing to find the second number: As
soon as I know the last number, I can turn the wheel around the other way
and again, in lumps of five, push the second disc bit by bit until the bolt
doesn't go down. The number just before would be the second number.
If I were very patient I would be able to pick up all three numbers
that way, but the amount of work involved in picking up the first number of
the combination by this elaborate scheme would be much more than just trying
the twenty possible first numbers with the other two numbers that you
already know, when the filing cabinet is closed.
I practiced and I practiced until I could get the last two numbers off
an open filing cabinet, hardly looking at the dial. Then, when I'd be in
some guy's office discussing some physics problem, I'd lean against his
opened filing cabinet, and just like a guy who's jiggling keys
absent-mindedly while he's talking, I'd just wobble the dial back and forth,
back and forth. Sometimes I'd put my finger on the bolt so I wouldn't have
to look to see if it's coming up. In this way I picked off the last two
numbers of various filing cabinets. When I got back to my office I would
write the two numbers down on a piece of paper that I kept inside the lock
of my filing cabinet. I took the lock apart each time to get the paper -- I
thought that was a very safe place for them.
After a while my reputation began to sail, because things like this
would happen: Somebody would say, "Hey, Feynman! Christy's out of town and
we need a document from his safe -- can you open it?"
If it was a safe I knew I didn't have the last two numbers of, I would
simply say, "I'm sorry, but I can't do it now; I've got this work that I
have to do." Otherwise, I would say, "Yeah, but I gotta get my tools." I
didn't need any tools, but I'd go back to my office, open my filing cabinet,
and look at my little piece of paper: "Christy -- 35, 60." Then I'd get a
screwdriver and go over to Christy's office and close the door behind me.
Obviously not everybody is supposed to be allowed to know how to do this!
I'd be in there alone and I'd open the safe in a few minutes. All I had
to do was try the first number at most twenty times, then sit around,
reading a magazine or something, for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no
use trying to make it look too easy; somebody would figure out there was a
trick to it! After a while I'd open the door and say, "It's open."
People thought I was opening the safes from scratch. Now I could
maintain the idea, which began with that accident with Staley, that I could
open safes cold. Nobody figured out that I was picking the last two numbers
off their safes, even though -- perhaps because -- I was doing it all the
time, like a card sharp walking around all the time with a deck of cards.
I often went to Oak Ridge to check up on the safety of the uranium
plant. Everything was always in a hurry because it was wartime, and one time
I had to go there on a weekend. It was Sunday, and we were in this fella's
office -- a general, a head or a vice president of some company, a couple of
other big muck-a-mucks, and me. We were gathered together to discuss a
report that was in the fella's safe -- a secret safe -- when suddenly he
realized that he didn't know the combination. His secretary was the only one
who knew it, so he called her home and it turned out she had gone on a
picnic up in the hills.
While all this was going on, I asked, "Do you mind if I fiddle with the
safe?"
"Ha, ha, ha -- not at all!" So I went over to the safe and started to
fool around.
They began to discuss how they could get a car to try to find the
secretary, and the guy was getting more and more embarrassed because he had
all these people waiting and he was such a jackass he didn't know how to
open his own safe. Everybody was all tense and getting mad at him, when
CLICK! -- the safe opened.
In 10 minutes I had opened the safe that contained all the secret
documents about the plant. They were astonished. The safes were apparently
not very safe. It was a terrible shock: All this "eyes only" stuff, top
secret, locked in this wonderful secret safe, and this guy opens it in ten
minutes! Of course I was able to open the safe because of my perpetual habit
of taking the last two numbers off. While in Oak Ridge the month before, I
was in the same office when the safe was open and I took the numbers off in
an absent-minded way -- I was always practicing my obsession. Although I
hadn't written them down, I was able to vaguely remember what they were.
First I tried 40-15, then 15-40, but neither of those worked. Then I tried
10-45 with all the first numbers, and it opened.
A similar thing happened on another weekend when I was visiting Oak
Ridge. I had written a report that had to be OKed by a colonel, and it was
in his safe. Everybody else keeps documents in filing cabinets like the ones
at Los Alamos, but he was a colonel, so he had a much fancier, two-door safe
with big handles that pull four 3/4-inch-thick steel bolts from the frame.
The great brass doors swung open and he took out my report to read.
Not having had an opportunity to see any really good safes, I said to
him, "Would you mind, while you're reading my report, if I looked at your
safe?"
"Go right ahead," he said, convinced that there was nothing I could do.
I looked at the back of one of the solid brass doors, and I discovered that
the combination wheel was connected to a little lock that looked exactly the
same as the little unit that was on my filing cabinet at Los Alamos. Same
company, same little bolt, except that when the bolt came down, the big
handles on the safe could then move some rods sideways, and with a bunch of
levers you could pull back all those 3/4-inch steel rods. The whole lever
system, it appeared, depends on the same little bolt that locks filing
cabinets.
Just for the sake of professional perfection, to make sure it was the
same, I took the two numbers off the same way I did with the filing cabinet
safes.
Meanwhile, he was reading the report. When he'd finished he said, "All
right, it's fine." He put the report in the safe, grabbed the big handles,
and swung the great brass doors together. It sounds so good when they close,
but I know it's all psychological, because it's nothing but the same damn
lock.
I couldn't help but needle him a little bit (I always had a thing about
military guys, in such wonderful uniforms) so I said, "The way you close
that safe, I get the idea that you think things are safe in there."
"Of course."
"The only reason you think they're safe in there is because civilians
call it a 'safe.' " (I put the word "civilians" in there to make it sound as
if he'd been had by civilians.)
He got very angry. "What do you mean -- it's not safe?"
"A good safecracker could open it in thirty minutes."
"Can you open it in thirty minutes?"
"I said a good safecracker. It would take me about forty-five."
"Well!" he said. "My wife is waiting at home for me with supper, but
I'm gonna stay here and watch you, and you're gonna sit down there and work
on that damn thing for forty-five minutes and not open it!" He sat down in
his big leather chair, put his feet up on his desk, and read.
With complete confidence I picked up a chair, carried it over to the
safe and sat down in front of it. I began to turn the wheel at random, just
to make some action.
After about five minutes, which is quite a long time when you're just
sitting and waiting, he lost some patience: "Well, are you making any
progress?"
"With a thing like this, you either open it or you don't."
I figured one or two more minutes would be about time, so I began to
work in earnest and two minutes later, CLINK -- it opened.
The colonel's jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out. "Colonel," I said,
in a serious tone, "let me tell you something about these locks: When the
door to the safe or the top drawer of the filing cabinet is left open, it's
very easy for someone to get the combination. That's what I did while you
were reading my report, just to demonstrate the danger. You should insist
that everybody keep their filing cabinet drawers locked while they're
working, because when they're open, they're very, very vulnerable."
"Yeah! I see what you mean! That's very interesting!" We were on the
same side after that.
The next time I went to Oak Ridge, all the secretaries and people who
knew who I was were telling me, "Don't come through here! Don't come through
here!"
The colonel had sent a note around to everyone in the plant which said,
"During his last visit, was Mr. Feynman at any time in your office, near
your office, or walking through your office?" Some people answered yes;
others said no. The ones who said yes got another note: "Please change the
combination of your safe."
That was his solution: I was the danger. So they all had to change
their combinations on account of me. It's a pain in the neck to change a
combination and remember the new one, so they were all mad at me and didn't
want me to come near them: they might have to change their combination once
again. Of course, their filing cabinets were still left open while they were
working!
A library at Los Alamos held all of the documents we had ever worked
on: It was a solid, concrete room with a big, beautiful door which had a
metal wheel that turns -- like a safe-deposit vault. During the war I had
tried to look at it closely. I knew the girl who was the librarian, and I
begged her to let me play with it a little bit. I was fascinated by it: it
was the biggest lock I ever saw! I discovered that I could never use my
method of picking off the last two numbers to get in. In fact, while turning
the knob while the door was open, I made the lock close, so it was sticking
out, and they couldn't close the door again until the girl came and opened
the lock again. That was the end of my fiddling around with that lock. I
didn't have time to figure out how it worked; it was much beyond my
capacity.
During the summer after the war I had some documents to write and work
to finish up, so I went back to Los Alamos from Cornell, where I had taught
during the year. In the middle of my work I had to refer to a document that
I had written before but couldn't remember, and it was down in the library.
I went down to get the document, and there was a soldier walking back
and forth, with a gun. It was a Saturday, and after the war the library was
closed on Saturdays.
Then I remembered what a good friend of mine, Frederic de Hoffman, had
done. He was in the Declassification Section. After the war the army was
thinking of declassifying some documents, and he had to go back and forth to
the library so much -- look at this document, look at that document, check
this, check that -- that he was going nuts! So he had a copy of every
document -- all the secrets to the atomic bomb -- in nine filing cabinets in
his office.
I went down to his office, and the lights were on. It looked as if
whoever was there -- perhaps his secretary -- had just stepped out for a few
minutes, so I waited. While I was waiting I started to fiddle around with
the combination wheel on one of the filing cabinets. (By the way, I didn't
have the last two numbers for de Hoffman's safes; they were put in after the
war, after I had left.)
I started to play with one of the combination wheels and began to think
about the safecracker books. I thought to myself, "I've never been much
impressed by the tricks described in those books, so I've never tried them,
but let's see if we can open de Hoffman's safe by following the book."
First trick, the secretary: she's afraid she's going to forget the
combination, so she writes it down somewhere. I started to look in some of
the places mentioned in the book. The desk drawer was locked, but it was an
ordinary lock like Leo Lavatelli taught me how to open -- ping! I look along
the edge: nothing.
Then I looked through the secretary's papers. I found a sheet of paper
that all the secretaries had, with the Greek letters carefully made -- so
they could recognize them in mathematical formulas -- and named. And there,
carelessly written along the top of the paper, was pi = 3.14159. Now, that's
six digits, and why does a secretary have to know the numerical value of pi?
It was obvious; there was no other reason!
I went over to the filing cabinets and tried the first one: 31-41-59.
It didn't open. Then I tried 59-41-31. That didn't work either. Then
95-14-13. Backwards, forwards, upside down, turn it this way, turn it that
-- nothing!
I closed the desk drawer and started to walk out the door, when I
thought of the safecracker books again: Next, try the psychology method. I
said to myself, "Freddy de Hoffman is just the kind of guy to use a
mathematical constant for a safe combination."
I went back to the first filing cabinet and tried 27-18-28 -- CLICK! It
opened! (The mathematical constant second in importance to pi is the base of
natural logarithms, e:2.71828...) There were nine filing cabinets, and I had
opened the first one, but the document I wanted was in another one -- they
were in alphabetical order by author. I tried the second filing cabinet:
27-18-28 -- CLICK! It opened with the same, combination. I thought, "This is
wonderful! I've opened the secrets to the atomic bomb, but if I'm ever going
to tell this story, I've got to make sure that all the combinations are
really the same!" Some of the filing cabinets were in the next room, so I
tried 27-18-28 on one of them, and it opened. Now I'd opened three safes --
all the same.
I thought to myself, "Now I could write a safecracker book that would
beat every one, because at the beginning I would tell how I opened safes
whose contents were bigger and more valuable than what any safecracker
anywhere had opened -- except for a life, of course -- but compared to the
furs or the gold bullion, I have them all beat: I opened the safes which
contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the
production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material
is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the
design is, the dimensions -- the entire information that was known at Los
Alamos: the whole shmeer!"
I went back to the second filing cabinet and took out the document I
wanted. Then I took a red grease pencil and a piece of yellow paper that was
lying around in the office and wrote, "I borrowed document no. LA4312 --
Feynman the safe-cracker." I put the note on top of the papers in the filing
cabinet and closed it.
Then I went to the first one I had opened and wrote another note: "This
one was no harder to open than the other one -- Wise Guy" and shut the
cabinet.
Then in the other cabinet, in the other room, I wrote, "When the
combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another -- Same
Guy" and I shut that one. I went back to my office and wrote my report.
That evening I went to the cafeteria and ate supper. There was Freddy
de Hoffman. He said he was going over to his office to work, so just for fun
I went with him.
He started to work, and soon he went into the other room to open one of
the filing cabinets in there -- something I hadn't counted on -- and he
happened to open the filing cabinet I had put the third note in, first. He
opened the drawer, and he saw this foreign object in there -- this bright
yellow paper with something scrawled on it in bright red crayon.
I had read in books that when somebody is afraid, his face gets sallow,
but I had never seen it before. Well, it's absolutely true. His face turned
a gray, yellow green -- it was really frightening to see. He picked up the
paper, and his hand was shaking. "L-l-look at this!" he said, trembling.
The note said, "When the combinations are all the same, one is no
harder to open than another -- Same Guy."
"What does it mean?" I said.
"All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!" he stammered.
"That ain't such a good idea."
"I-I know that n-now!" he said, completely shaken.
Another effect of the blood draining from the face must be that the
brain doesn't work right. "He signed who it was! He signed who it was!" he
said.
"What?" (I hadn't put my name on that one.)
"Yes," he said, "it's the same guy who's been trying to get into
Building Omega!"
All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors:
"Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega!" You see, during the war
they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough
material together for the chain reaction to just get started. They would
drop one piece of material through another, and when it went through, the
reaction would start and they'd measure how many neutrons they got. The
piece would fall through so fast that nothing should build up and explode.
Enough of a reaction would begin, however, so they could tell that things
were really starting correctly, that the rates were right, and everything
was going according to prediction -- a very dangerous experiment!
Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los
Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated.
This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the
middle of the night when everything's quiet, some rabbit comes out of the
brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The
lieutenant in charge comes around. What's the guard going to say -- that it
was only a rabbit? No. "Somebody's been trying to get into Building Omega
and I scared him off!"
So de Hoffman was pale and shaking, and he didn't realize there was a
flaw in his logic: it was not clear that the same guy who'd been trying to
get into Building Omega was the same guy who was standing next to him. He
asked me what to do. "Well, see if any documents are missing." "It looks all
right," he said. "I don't see any missing." I tried to steer him to the
filing cabinet I took my document out of. "Well, uh, if all the combinations
are the same, perhaps he's taken something from another drawer."
"Right!" he said, and he went back into his office and opened the first
filing cabinet and found the second note I wrote: "This one was no harder
than the other one -- Wise Guy."
By that time it didn't make any difference whether it was "Same Guy" or
"Wise Guy": It was completely clear to him that it was the guy who was
trying to get into Building Omega. So to convince him to open the filing
cabinet with my first note in it was particularly difficult, and I don't
remember how I talked him into it.
He started to open it, so I began to walk down the hall, because I was
a little bit afraid that when he found out who did it to him, I was going to
get my throat cut!
Sure enough, he came running down the hall after me, but instead of
being angry, he practically put his arms around me because he was so
completely relieved that this terrible burden of the atomic secrets being
stolen was only me doing mischief.
A few days later de Hoffman told me that he needed something from
Kerst's safe. Donald Kerst had gone back to Illinois and was hard to reach.
"If you can open all my safes using the psychological method," de Hoffman
said (I had told him how I did it), "maybe you could open Kerst's safe that
way."
By now the story had gotten around, so several people came to watch
this fantastic process where I was going to open Kerst's safe -- cold. There
was no need for me to be alone. I didn't have the last two numbers to
Kerst's safe, and to use the psychology method I needed people around who
knew Kerst.
We all went over to Kerst's office and I checked the drawers for clues;
there was nothing. Then I asked them, "What kind of a combination would
Kerst use -- a mathematical constant?"
"Oh, no!" de Hoffman said. "Kerst would do something very simple."
I tried 10-20-30, 20-40-60, 60-40-20, 30-20-10. Nothing.
Then I said, "Do you think he would use a date?"
"Yeah!" they said. "He's just the kind of guy to use a date."
We tried various dates: 8-6-45, when the bomb went off; 86-19-45; this
date; that date; when the project started. Nothing worked.
By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn't have the
patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is
patience!
Then I decided to try everything from around 1900 until now. That
sounds like a lot, but it's not: the first number is a month, one through
twelve, and I can try that using only three numbers: ten, five, and zero.
The second number is a day, from one to thirty-one, which I can try with six
numbers. The third number is the year, which was only forty-seven numbers at
that time, which I could try with nine numbers. So the 8000 combinations had
been reduced to 162, something I could try in fifteen or twenty minutes.
Unfortunately I started with the high end of the numbers for the
months, because when I finally opened it, the combination was 0-5-35.
I turned to de Hoffman. "What happened to Kerst around January 5,
1935?"
"His daughter was born in 1936," de Hoffman said. "It must be her
birthday."
Now I had opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was
professional.
That same summer after the war, the guy from the property section was
trying to take back some of the things the government had bought, to sell
again as surplus. One of the things was a Captain's safe. We all knew about
this safe. The Captain, when he arrived during the war, decided that the
filing cabinets weren't safe enough for the secrets he was going to get, so
he had to have a special safe.
The Captain's office was on the second floor of one of the flimsy
wooden buildings that we all had our offices in, and the safe he ordered was
a heavy steel safe. The workmen had to put down platforms of wood and use
special jacks to get it up the steps. Since there wasn't much amusement, we
all watched this big safe being moved up to his office with great effort,
and we all made jokes about what kind of secrets he was going to keep in
there. Some fella said we oughta put our stuff in his safe, and let him put
his stuff in ours. So everyone knew about this safe.
The property section man wanted it for Surplus, but first it had to be
emptied, and the only people who knew the combination were the Captain, who
was in Bikini, and Alvarez, who'd forgotten it. The man asked me to open it.
I went up to his old office and said to the secretary, "Why don't you
phone the Captain and ask him the combination?"
"I don't want to bother him," she said.
"Well, you're gonna bother me for maybe eight hours. I won't do it
unless you make an attempt to call him."
"OK, OK!" she said. She picked up the telephone and I went into the
other room to look at the safe. There it was, that huge, steel safe, and its
doors were wide open.
I went back to the secretary. "It's open."
"Marvelous!" she said, as she put down the phone.
"No," I said, "it was already open."
"Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all."
I went down to the man in the property section. "I went up to the safe
and it was already open."
"Oh, yeah," he said; "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I sent our regular
locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open
it, and he opened it."
So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second
information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing
about. Third information:
He can open a safe cold -- in a few minutes. This is a real
professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet.
I found out he was a locksmith they had hired after the war (when they
weren't as concerned about security) to take care of such things. It turned
out that he didn't have enough work to do opening safes, so he also repaired
the Marchant calculators we had used. During the war I repaired those things
all the time -- so I had a way to meet him.
Now I have never been surreptitious or tricky about meeting somebody; I
just go right up and introduce myself. But in this case it was so important
to meet this man, and I knew that before he would tell me any of his secrets
on how to open safes, I would have to prove myself.
I found out where his room was -- in the basement of the theoretical
physics section, where I worked -- and I knew he worked in the evening, when
the machines weren't being used. So, at first I would walk past his door on
my way to my office in the evening. That's all; I'd just walk past.
A few nights later, just a "Hi." After a while, when he saw it was the
same guy walking past, he'd say "Hi," or "Good evening."
A few weeks of this slow process and I see he's working on the Marchant
calculators. I say nothing about them; it isn't time yet.
We gradually say a little more: "Hi! I see you're working pretty hard!"
"Yeah, pretty hard" -- that kind of stuff.
Finally, a breakthrough: he invites me for soup. It's going very good
now. Every evening we have soup together. Now I begin to talk a little bit
about the adding machines, and he tells me he has a problem. He's been
trying to put a succession of spring-loaded wheels back onto a shaft, and he
doesn't have the right tool, or something; he's been working on it for a
week. I tell him that I used to work on those machines during the war, and
"I'll tell you what: you just leave the machine out tonight, and I'll have a
look at it tomorrow."
"OK," he says, because he's desperate.
The next day I looked at the damn thing and tried to load it by holding
all the wheels in my hand. It kept snapping back. I thought to myself, "If
he's been trying the same thing for a week, and I'm trying it and can't do
it, it ain't the way to do it!" I stopped and looked at it very carefully,
and I noticed that each wheel had a little hole -- just a little hole. Then
it dawned on me: I sprung the first one; then I put a piece of wire through
the little hole. Then I sprung the second one and put the wire through it.
Then the next one, the next one -- like putting beads on a string -- and I
strung the whole thing the first time I tried it, got it all in line, pulled
the wire out, and everything was OK.
That night I showed him the little hole and how I did it, and from then
on we talked a lot about machines; we got to be good friends. Now, in his
office there were a lot of little cubbyholes that contained locks half taken
apart, and pieces from safes, too. Oh, they were beautiful! But I still
didn't say a word about locks and safes.
Finally, I figured the day was coming, so I decided to put out a little
bit of bait about safes: I'd tell him the only thing worth a damn that I
knew about them -- that you can take the last two numbers off while it's
open. "Hey!" I said, looking over at the cubbyholes. "I see you're working
on Mosler safes."
"Yeah."
"You know, these locks are weak. If they're open, you can take the last
two numbers off..."
"You can?" he said, finally showing some interest.
"Yeah."
"Show me how," he said. I showed him how to do it, and he turned to me.