Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (3 page)

Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out very pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back you’d see a man called the pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff ready for desserts. Now this man must have been a miner, or something–heavybuilt, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. He’d take this stack of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all stuck together, and he’d take these stubby fingers and try to separate the doilies to put them on the plates. I always heard him say, “Damn deez doilies!” while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, “What a contrast–the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, ‘Damn deez doilies!’” So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.

My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made a ham sandwich, or something, for the guy who was on the late shift. I said that I liked desserts, so if there was a dessert left over from supper, I’d like that. The next night I was on the late shift till 2:00 A.M. with these guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing to do, getting bored, when suddenly I remembered there was a dessert to eat. I went over to the icebox and opened it up, and there she’d left _six_ desserts! There was a chocolate pudding, a piece of cake, some peach slices, some rice pudding, some jello–there was everything! So I sat there and ate the six desserts–it was sensational!

The next day she said to me, “I left a dessert for you.

“It was wonderful,” I said, “abolutely wonderful!”

“But I left you six desserts because I didn’t know which one you liked the best.”

So from that time on she left six desserts. They weren’t always different, but there were always six desserts.

One time when I was desk clerk a girl left a book by the telephone at the desk while she went to eat dinner, so I looked at. it. It was _The Life of Leonardo_, and I couldn’t resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the whole thing.

I slept in a little room in the back of the hotel, and there was some stew about turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldn’t ever remember to do. Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which consisted of a system of strings and weights–Coke bottles full of water– that would operate when I’d open the door, lighting the pull-chain light inside. You open the door, and things would go, and light the light; then you close the door behind you, and the light would go out. But my _real_ accomplishment came later.

I used to cut vegetables in the kitchen. String beans had to be cut into one-inch pieces. The way you were supposed to do it was: You hold two beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and you press the knife against the beans and your thumb, almost cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good idea. I sat down at the wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp knife into the table at a forty-five-degree angle away from me. Then I put a pile of the string beans on each side, and I’d pick out a bean, one in each hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.

So I’m slicing beans one after the other–_chig, chig, chig, chig, chig_–and everybody’s giving me the beans, and I’m going like sixty when the boss comes by and says, “What are you _doing_?”

I say, “Look at the way I have of cutting beans!”–and just at that moment I put a finger through instead of a bean. Blood came out and went on the beans, and there was a big excitement: “Look at how many beans you spoiled! What a stupid way to do things!” and so on. So I was never able to make any improvement, which would have been easy–with a guard, or something–but no, there was no chance for improvement.

I had another invention, which had a similar difficulty. We had to slice potatoes after they’d been cooked, for some kind of potato salad. They were sticky and wet, and difficult to handle. I thought of a whole lot of knives, parallel in a rack, coming down and slicing the whole thing. I thought about this a long time, and finally I got the idea of wires in a rack,

So I went to the five-and-ten to buy some knives or wires, and saw exactly the gadget I wanted: it was for slicing eggs. The next time the potatoes came out I got my little egg-slicer out and sliced all the potatoes in no time, and sent them back to the chef. The chef was a German, a great big guy who was King of the Kitchen, and he came storming out, blood vessels sticking out of his neck, livid red. “What’s the matter with the potatoes?” he says. “They’re not sliced!”

I had them sliced, but they were all stuck together. He says, “How can I separate them?”

“Stick ‘em in water,” I suggest.

“IN WATER? EAGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

Another time I had a _really_ good idea. When I was desk clerk I had to answer the telephone. When a call came in, something buzzed, and a flap came down on the switchboard so you could tell which line it was. Sometimes, when I was helping the women with the bridge tables or sitting on the front porch in the middle of the afternoon (when there were very few calls), I’d be some distance from the switchboard when suddenly it would go. I’d come running to catch it, but the way the desk was made, in order to get to the switchboard you had to go quite a distance further down, then around, in behind, and then back up to see where the call was coming from–it took extra time.

So I got a good idea. I tied threads to the flaps on the switchboard, and strung them over the top of the desk and then down, and at the end of each thread I tied a little piece of paper. Then I put the telephone talking piece up on top of the desk, so I could reach it from the front. Now, when a call came, I could tell which flap was down by which piece of paper was up, so I could answer the phone appropriately, from the front, to save time. Of course I still had to go around back to switch it in, but at least I was answering it. I’d say, “Just a moment,” and then go around to switch it in.

I thought that was perfect, but the boss came by one day, and she wanted to answer the phone, and she couldn’t figure it out–too complicated. “What are all these papers doing? Why is the telephone on this side? Why don’t you . . . _raaaaaaaa!_”

I tried to explain–it was my own aunt–that there was no reason _not_ to do that, but you can’t say that to anybody who’s _smart_, who _runs a hotel!_ I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.

——————-
Who Stole the Door?
——————-

At MIT the different fraternities all had “smokers” where they tried to get the new freshmen to be their pledges, and the summer before I went to MIT I was invited to a meeting in New York of Phi Beta Delta, a Jewish fraternity. In those days, if you were Jewish or brought up in a Jewish family, you didn’t have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else would look at you. I wasn’t particularly looking to be with other Jews, and the guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didn’t care how Jewish I was–in fact, I didn’t believe anything about that stuff, and was certainly not in any way religious. Anyway, some guys from the fraternity asked me some questions and gave me a little bit of advice–that I ought to take the first-year calculus exam so I wouldn’t have to take the course-which turned out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to New York from the fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became their roommate.

There was another Jewish fraternity at MIT, called “SAM,” and their idea was to give me a ride up to Boston and I could stay with them. I accepted the ride, and stayed upstairs in one of the rooms that first night.

The next morning I looked out the window and saw the two guys from the other fraternity (that I met in New York) walking up the steps. Some guys from the Sigma Alpha Mu ran out to talk to them and there was a big discussion.

I yelled out the window, “Hey, I’m supposed to be with _those_ guys!” and I rushed out of the fraternity without realizing that they were all operating, competing for my pledge. I didn’t have any feelings of gratitude for the ride, or anything.

The Phi Beta Delta fraternity had almost collapsed the year before, because there were two different cliques that had split the fraternity in half. There was a group of socialite characters, who liked to have dances and fool around in their cars afterwards, and so on, and there was a group of guys who did nothing but study, and never went to the dances.

Just before I came to the fraternity they had had a big meeting and had made an important compromise. They were going to get together and help each other out. Everyone had to have a grade level of at least such-and-such. If they were sliding behind, the guys who studied all the time would teach them and help them do their work. On the other side, everybody had to go to every dance. If a guy didn’t know how to get a date, the other guys would _get_ him a date. If the guy didn’t know how to dance, they’d _teach_ him to dance. One group was teaching the other how to think, while the other guys were teaching them how to be social.

That was just right for me, because I was _not_ very good socially. I was so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didn’t know how to walk past them! And it didn’t help any when a girl would say, “Oh, he’s cute!”

It was only a little while after that the sophomores brought their girlfriends and their girlfriends’ friends over to teach us to dance. Much later, one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice versa. It was a good balancing out.

I had some difficulty understanding what exactly it meant to be “social.” Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I saw a nice waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day. With great effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at the next fraternity dance, and she said yes.

Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the next dance, I told the guys I didn’t need a date this time–I had found one on my own. I was very proud of myself.

When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a “proper” date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to educate their “wayward son,” so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I was only a freshman then, and I didn’t have enough confidence yet to stop them from breaking my date.

When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart. We were in the middle of absolutely _nowhere_–no houses, no nothing–and we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little bit scared, because we were young, and we didn’t say much–except for one guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn’t stop him from joking around, making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of “Ha, ha, there’s nothing to worry about. Isn’t this fun!”

We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn’t know how we were ever going to get out of this.

We came to an intersection not far from the lake–there were still no houses or anything–and the rest of us were discussing whether we should go this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, “Go _this_ way.”

“What the hell do _you_ know, Maurice?” we said, frustrated. “You’re always making these jokes. Why should we go _this_ way?”

“Simple: Look at the telephone lines. Where there’s more wires, it’s going toward the central station.”

This guy, who looked like he wasn’t paying attention to anything, had come up with a terrific idea! We walked straight into town without making an error.

On the following day there was going to be a schoolwide freshman versus sophomore mudeo (various forms of wrestling and tug of wars that take place in the mud). Late in the evening, into our fraternity comes a whole bunch of sophomores–some from our fraternity and some from outside– and they kidnap us: they want us to be tired the next day so they can win.

The sophomores tied up all the freshmen relatively easily–except me. I didn’t want the guys in the fraternity to find out that I was a “sissy.” (I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it over the fence-it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.) I figured this was a new situation, a new world, and I could make a new reputation. So in order that I wouldn’t look like I didn’t know how to fight, I fought like a son of a gun as best I could (not knowing what I was doing), and it took three or four guys many tries before they were finally able to tie me up. The sophomores took us to a house, far away in the woods, and tied us all down to a wooden floor with big U tacks.

I tried all sorts of ways to escape, but there were sophomores guarding us, and none of my tricks worked. I remember distinctly one young man they were afraid to tie down because he was so terrified: his face was pale yellowgreen and he was shaking. I found out later he was from Europe-this was in the early thirties–and he didn’t realize that these guys all tied down to the floor was some kind of a joke; he knew what kinds of things were going on in Europe. The guy was frightening to look at, he was so scared.

By the time the night was over, there were only three sophomores guarding twenty of us freshmen, but we didn’t know that. The sophomores had driven their cars in and out a few times to make it sound as if there was a lot of activity, and we didn’t notice it was always the same cars and the same people. So we didn’t win that one.