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

“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. “What’s your name?” All this time we had never exchanged names.

“Dick Feynman,” I said.

“God! You’re Feynman!” he said in awe. “The great safecracker! I’ve heard about you; I’ve wanted to meet you for so long! I want to learn how to crack a safe from you.”

“What do you mean? You know how to open safes cold.”

“I don’t.”

“Listen, I heard about the Captain’s safe, and I’ve been working pretty hard all this time because I wanted to meet you. And you tell me you don’t know how to open a safe cold.”

“That’s right.”

“Well you must know how to drill a safe.”

“I don’t know how to do that either.”

“WHAT?” I exclaimed. “The guy in the property section said you picked up your tools and went up to drill the Captain’s safe.”

“Suppose you had a job as a locksmith,” he said, “and a guy comes down and asks you to drill a safe. What would you do?”

“Well,” I replied, “I’d make a fancy thing of putting my tools together, pick them up and take them to the safe. Then I’d put my drill up against the safe somewhere at random and I’d go vvvvvvvvvvv, so I’d save my job.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to do.”

“But you opened it! You must know how to crack safes.”

“Oh, yeah. I knew that the locks come from the factory set at 25-0-25 or 50-25-50, so I thought, ‘Who knows; maybe the guy didn’t bother to change the combination,’ and the second one worked.”

So I did learn something from him—that he cracked safes by the same miraculous methods that I did. But even funnier was that this big shot Captain had to have a super, super safe, and had people go to all that trouble to hoist the thing up into his office, and he didn’t even bother to set the combination.

I went from office to office in my building, trying those two factory combinations, and I opened about one safe in five.

Uncle Sam Doesn’t Need You!

After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred people for some reason other than physical first (I was deferred because I was working on the bomb), but now they reversed that and gave everybody a physical first.

That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance—I think it was to Albany—to take the physical.

I get to the draft place, and I’m handed a lot of forms to fill out, and then I start going around to all these different booths. They check your vision at one, your hearing at another, they take your blood sample at another, and so forth.

Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There you wait, sitting on one of the benches, and while I’m waiting I can see what is happening. There are three desks, with a psychiatrist behind each one, and the “culprit” sits across from the psychiatrist in his BVDs and answers various questions.

At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For example, there was Spellbound, in which a woman who used to be a great piano player has her hands stuck in some awkward position and she can’t move them, and her family calls in a psychiatrist to try to help her, and the psychiatrist goes upstairs into a room with her, and you see the door close behind them, and downstairs the family is discussing what’s going to happen, and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck in the horrible position, walks dramatically down the stairs over to the piano and sits down, lifts her hands over the keyboard, and suddenly—dum diddle dum diddle dum, dum, dum—she can play again. Well, I can’t stand this kind of baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers, and I’ll have nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was in when it was my turn to talk to the psychiatrist.

I sit down at the desk, and the psychiatrist starts looking through my papers. “Hello, Dick!” he says in a cheerful voice. “Where do you work?”

I’m thinking, “Who does he think he is, calling me by my first name?” and I say coldly, “Schenectady.”

“Who do you work for, Dick?” says the psychiatrist, smiling again.

“General Electric.”

“Do you like your work, Dick?” he says, with that same big smile on his face.

“So-so.” I just wasn’t going to have anything to do with him.

Three nice questions, and then the fourth one is completely different. “Do you think people talk about you?” he asks, in a low, serious tone.

I light up and say, “Sure! When I go home, my mother often tells me how she was telling her friends about me.” He isn’t listening to the explanation; instead, he’s writing something down on my paper.

Then again, in a low, serious tone, he says, “Do you think people stare at you?”

I’m all ready to say no, when he says, “For instance, do you think any of the boys waiting on the benches are staring at you now?”

While I had been waiting to talk to the psychiatrist, I had noticed there were about twelve guys on the benches waiting for the three psychiatrists, and they’ve got nothing else to look at, so I divide twelve by three— that makes four each—but I’m conservative, so I say, “Yeah, maybe two of them are looking at us.”

He says, “Well just turn around and look”—and he’s not even bothering to look himself!

So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. So I point to them and I say, “Yeah—there’s that guy, and that guy over there looking at us.” Of course, when I’m turned around and pointing like that, other guys start to look at us, so I say, “Now him, and those two over there—and now the whole bunch.” He still doesn’t look up to check. He’s busy writing more things on my paper.

Then he says, “Do you ever hear voices in your head?”