"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

company. His father was the one who was getting the money together and was, I think,
the "president." He was the "vice­president," along with another fella who was a
salesman. I was the "chief research chemist," and my friend's brother, who was not very
clever, was the bottle­washer. We had six metal­plating baths.
They had this process for metal­plating plastics, and the scheme was: First,
deposit silver on the object by precipitating silver from a silver nitrate bath with a
reducing agent (like you make mirrors); then stick the object, with silver on it as a
conductor, into an electroplating bath, and the silver gets plated.
The problem was, does the silver stick to the object?
It doesn't. It peels off easily. So there was a step in between, to make the silver
stick better to the object. It depended on the material. For things like Bakelite, which was
an important plastic in those days, my friend had found that if he sandblasted it first, and
then soaked it for many hours in stannous hydroxide, which got into the pores of the
Bakelite, the silver would hold onto the surface very nicely.
But it worked only on a few plastics, and new kinds of plastics were coming out
all the time, such as methyl methac­rylate (which we call plexiglass, now), that we
couldn't plate, directly, at first. And cellulose acetate, which was very cheap, was another
one we couldn't plate at first, though we finally discovered that putting it in sodium
hydroxide for a little while before using the stannous chloride made it plate very well.
I was pretty successful as a "chemist" in the company. My advantage was that my
pal had done no chemistry at all; he had done no experiments; he just knew how to do
something once. I set to work putting lots of different knobs in bottles, and putting all
kinds of chemicals in. By trying everything and keeping track of everything I found ways
of plating a wider range of plastics than he had done before.
I was also able to simplify his process. From looking in books I changed the
reducing agent from glucose to formaldehyde, and was able to recover 100 percent of the
silver immediately, instead of having to recover the silver left in solution at a later time.
I also got the stannous hydroxide to dissolve in water by adding a little bit of
hydrochloric acid ­­ something I remembered from a college chemistry course ­­ so a step
that used to take hours now took about five minutes.
My experiments were always being interrupted by the salesman, who would come
back with some plastic from a prospective customer. I'd have all these bottles lined up,
with everything marked, when all of a sudden, "You gotta stop the experiment to do a
'super job' for the sales department!" So, a lot of experiments had to be started more than
once.
One time we got into one hell of a lot of trouble. There was some artist who was
trying to make a picture for the cover of a magazine about automobiles. He had very
carefully built a wheel out of plastic, and somehow or other this salesman had told him
we could plate anything, so the artist wanted us to metal­plate the hub, so it would be a
shiny, silver hub. The wheel was made of a new plastic that we didn't know very well
how to plate ­­ the fact is, the salesman never knew what we could plate, so he was
always promising things ­­ and it didn't work the first time. So, to fix it up we had to get
the old silver off, and we couldn't get it off easily. I decided to use concentrated nitric
acid on it, which took the silver off all 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