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

“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—is looking over my shoulder.” And where the word was there is a 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. An way, 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