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

Plastics magazine. A few things we metal­plated 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 metal­plate 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
Hoflinan, 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, open­eyed, 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 metal­plating 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?"
"They were advertising all the time in Modern Plastics with full­page
advertisements showing all the things they could plate, and we realized that they were
further along than we were."
"Did you have any stuff from them?"
"No, but you could tell from the advertisements that they were way ahead of what