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

in Waco, Texas - it was tremendously exciting!
On this same tube radio up in my lab I was able to hear a station up in
Schenectady called WGN. Now, all of us kids - my two cousins, my sister,
and the neighborhood kids - listened on the radio downstairs to a program
called the Eno Crime Club - Eno effervescent salts - it was the thing!
Well, I discovered that I could hear this program up in my lab on WGN one
hour before it was broadcast in New York! So I'd discover what was going to
happen, and then, when we were all sitting around the radio downstairs
listening to the Eno Crime Club, I'd say, "You know, we haven't heard from
so-and-so in a long time. I betcha he comes and saves the situation."
Two seconds later, bup-bup, he comes! So they all got excited about
this, and I predicted a couple of other things. Then they realized that
there must be some trick to it - that I must know, somehow. So I owned up
to what it was, that I could hear it upstairs the hour before.
You know what the result was, naturally. Now they couldn't wait for the
regular hour. They all had to sit upstairs in my lab with this little creaky
radio for half an hour, listening to the Eno Crime Club from Schenectady.
We lived at that time in a big house; it was left by my grandfather to
his children, and they didn't have much money aside from the house. It was a
very large, wooden house, and I would run wires all around the outside, and
had plugs in all the rooms, so I could always listen to my radios, which
were upstairs in my lab. I also had a loudspeaker - not the whole speaker,
but the part without the big horn on it.
One day, when I had my earphones on, I connected them to the
loudspeaker, and I discovered something: I put my finger in the speaker and
I could hear it in the earphones; I scratched the speaker and I'd hear it in
the earphones. So I discovered that the speaker could act like a microphone,
and you didn't even need any batteries. At school we were talking about
Alexander Graham Bell, so I gave a demonstration of the speaker and the
earphones. I didn't know it at the time, but I think it was the type of
telephone he originally used.
So now I had a microphone, and I could broadcast from upstairs to
downstairs, and from downstairs to upstairs, using the amplifiers of my
rummage-sale radios. At that time my sister Joan, who was nine years younger
than I was, must have been about two or three, and there was a guy on the
radio called Uncle Don that she liked to listen to. He'd sing little songs
about "good children," and so on, and he'd read cards sent in by parents
telling that "Mary So-and-so is having a birthday this Saturday at 25
Flatbush Avenue."
One day my cousin Francis and I sat Joan down and said that there was a
special program she should listen to. Then we ran upstairs and we started to
broadcast: "This is Uncle Don. We know a very nice little girl named Joan
who lives on New Broadway; she's got a birthday coming - not today, but
such-and-such. She's a cute girl." We sang a little song, and then we made
music: "Deedle leet deet, doodle doodle loot doot; deedle deedle leet,
doodle loot doot doo..." We went through the whole deal, and then we came
downstairs: "How was it? Did you like the program?"
"It was good," she said, "but why did you make the music with your
mouth?"