"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

right, but also made pits and holes in the plastic. We were really in hot
water that time! In fact, we had lots of "hot water" experiments.
The other fellas in the company decided we should run advertisements in
Modern Plastics magazine. A few things we metal-plated were very pretty.
They looked good in the advertisements. We also had a few things out in a
showcase in front, for prospective customers to look at, but nobody could
pick up the things in the advertisements or in the showcase to see how well
the plating stayed on. Perhaps some of them were, in fact, pretty good jobs.
But they were made specially; they were not regular products.
Right after I left the company at the end of the summer to go to
Princeton, they got a good offer from somebody who wanted to metal-plate
plastic pens. Now people could have silver pens that were light, and easy,
and cheap. The pens immediately sold, all over, and it was rather exciting
to see people walking around everywhere with these pens - and you knew
where they came from.
But the company hadn't had much experience with the material - or
perhaps with the filler that was used in the plastic (most plastics aren't
pure; they have a "filler," which in those days wasn't very well controlled)
- and the darn things would develop a blister. When you have something in
your hand that has a little blister that starts to peel, you can't help
fiddling with it. So everybody was fiddling with all the peelings coming off
the pens.
Now the company had this emergency problem to fix the pens, and my pal
decided he needed a big microscope, and so on. He didn't know what he was
going to look at, or why, and it cost his company a lot of money for this
fake research. The result was, they had trouble: They never solved the
problem, and the company failed, because their first big job was such a
failure.
A few years later I was in Los Alamos, where there was a man named
Frederic de Hoffman, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very
good at administrating. Not highly trained, he liked mathematics, and worked
very hard; he compensated for his lack of training by hard work. Later he
became the president or vice president of General Atomics and he was a big
industrial character after that. But at the time he was just a very
energetic, open-eyed, enthusiastic boy, helping along with the Project as
best he could.
One day we were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been
working in England before coming to Los Alamos.
"What kind of work were you doing there?" I asked.
"I was working on a process for metal-plating plastics. I was one of
the guys in the laboratory."
"How did it go?"
"It was going along pretty well, but we had our problems."
"Oh?"
"Just as we were beginning to develop our process, there was a company
in New York..."
"What company in New York?"
"It was called the Metaplast Corporation. They were developing further
than we were."
"How could you tell?"