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

by Richard Phillips Feynman

“All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!” he stammered.

  “That ain’t such a good idea.”

  “I-I know that n-now!” he said, completely shaken.

  Another effect of the blood draining from the face must be that the brain doesn’t work right. “He signed who it was! He signed who it was!” he said.

  “What?” (I hadn’t put my name on that one.)

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s the same guy who’s been trying to get into Building Omega!”

  All during the war, and even after, there were these perpetual rumors: “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega!” You see, during the war they were doing experiments for the bomb in which they wanted to get enough material together for the chain reaction to just get started. They would drop one piece of material through another, and when it went through, the reaction would start and they’d measure how many neutrons they got. The piece would fall through so fast that nothing should build up and explode. Enough of a reaction would begin, however, so they could tell that things were really starting correctly, that the rates were right, and everything was going according to prediction—a very dangerous experiment!

  Naturally, they were not doing this experiment in the middle of Los Alamos, but off several miles, in a canyon several mesas over, all isolated. This Building Omega had its own fence around it with guard towers. In the middle of the night when everything’s quiet, some rabbit comes out of the brush and smashes against the fence and makes a noise. The guard shoots. The lieutenant in charge comes around. What’s the guard going to say—that it was only a rabbit? No. “Somebody’s been trying to get into Building Omega and I scared him off!”

  So de Hoffman was pale and shaking, and he didn’t realize there was a flaw in his logic: it was not clear that the same guy who’d been trying to get into Building Omega was the same guy who was standing next to him.

  He asked me what to do.

  “Well, see if any documents are missing.”

  “It looks all right,” he said. “I don’t see any missing.”

  I tried to steer him to the filing cabinet I took my document out of. “Well, uh, if all the combinations are the same, perhaps he’s taken something from another drawer.”

  “Right!” he said, and he went back into his office and opened the first filing cabinet and found the second note I wrote: “This one was no harder than the other one—Wise Guy.”

  By that time it didn’t make any difference whether it was “Same Guy” or “Wise Guy”: It was completely clear to him that it was the guy who was trying to get into Building Omega. So to convince him to open the filing cabinet with my first note in it was particularly difficult, and I don’t remember how I talked him into it.

  He started to open it, so I began to walk down the hall, because I was a little bit afraid that when he found out who did it to him, I was going to get my throat cut!

  Sure enough, he came running down the hall after me, but instead of being angry, he practically put his arms around me because he was so completely relieved that this terrible burden of the atomic secrets being stolen was only me doing mischief.

  A few days later de Hoffman told me that he needed something from Kerst’s safe. Donald Kerst had gone back to Illinois and was hard to reach. “If you can open all my safes using the psychological method,” de Hoffman said (I had told him how I did it), “maybe you could open Kerst’s safe that way.”

  By now the story had gotten around, so several people came to watch this fantastic process where I was going to open Kerst’s safe—cold. There was no need for me to be alone. I didn’t have the last two numbers to Kerst’s safe, and to use the psychology method I needed people around who knew Kerst.

  We all went over to Kerst’s office and I checked the drawers for clues; there was nothing. Then I asked them, “What kind of a combination would Kerst use—a mathematical constant?”

  “Oh, no!” de Hoffman said. “Kerst would do something very simple.”

  I tried 10-20-30, 20-40-60, 60-40-20, 30-20-10. Nothing.

  Then I said, “Do you think he would use a date?”

  “Yeah!” they said. “He’s just the kind of guy to use a date.”

  We tried various dates: 8-6-45, when the bomb went off; 86-19-45; this date; that date; when the project started. Nothing worked.

  By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn’t have the patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is patience!

  Then I decided to try everything from around 1900 until now. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not: the first number is a month, one through twelve, and I can try that using only three numbers: ten, five, and zero. The second number is a day, from one to thirty-one, which I can try with six numbers. The third number is the year, which was only forty-seven numbers at that time, which I could try with nine numbers. So the 8000 combinations had been reduced to 162, something I could try in fifteen or twenty minutes.

  Unfortunately I started with the high end of the numbers for the months, because when I finally opened it, the combination was 0-5-35.

  I turned to de Hoffman. “What happened to Kerst around January 5, 1935?”

  “His daughter was born in 1936,” de Hoffman said. “It must be her birthday.”

  Now I had opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was professional.

  That same summer after the war, the guy from the property section was trying to take back some of the things the government had bought, to sell again as surplus. One of the things was a Captain’s safe. We all knew about this safe. The Captain, when he arrived during the war, decided that the filing cabinets weren’t safe enough for the secrets he was going to get, so he had to have a special safe.

  The Captain’s office was on the second floor of one of the flimsy wooden buildings that we all had our offices in, and the safe he ordered was a heavy steel safe. The workmen had to put down platforms of wood and use special jacks to get it up the steps. Since there wasn’t much amusement, we all watched this big safe being moved up to his office with great effort, and we all made jokes about what kind of secrets he was going to keep in there. Some fella said we oughta put our stuff in his safe, and let him put his stuff in ours. So everyone knew about this safe.

  The property section man wanted it for surplus, but first it had to be emptied, and the only people who knew the combination were the Captain, who was in Bikini, and Alvarez, who’d forgotten it. The man asked me to open it.

  I went up to his old office and said to the secretary, “Why don’t you phone the Captain and ask him the combination?”

  “I don’t want to bother him,” she said.

  “Well, you’re gonna bother me for maybe eight hours. I won’t do it unless you make an attempt to call him.”

  “OK, OK!” she said. She picked up the telephone and I went into the other room to look at the safe. There it was, that huge, steel safe, and its doors were wide open.

  I went back to the secretary. “It’s open.”

  “Marvelous!” she said, as she put down the phone.

  “No,” I said, “it was already open.”

  “Oh! I guess the property section was able to open it after all.”

  I went down to the man in the property section. “I went up to the safe and it was already open.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said; “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I sent our regular locksmith up there to drill it, but before he drilled it he tried to open it, and he opened it.”

  So! First information: Los Alamos now has a regular locksmith. Second information: This man knows how to drill safes, something I know nothing about. Third information: He can open a safe cold—in a few minutes. This is a real professional, a real source of information. This guy I have to meet.

  I found out he was a locksmith they had hired after the war (when they weren’t as concerned about security) to take care of such things. It turned out that he didn’t have enough work to do opening safes, so he also repair
ed the Marchant calculators we had used. During the war I repaired those things all the time—so I had a way to meet him.

  Now I have never been surreptitious or tricky about meeting somebody; I just go right up and introduce myself. But in this case it was so important to meet this man, and I knew that before he would tell me any of his secrets on how to open safes, I would have to prove myself.

  I found out where his room was—in the basement of the theoretical physics section, where I worked—and I knew he worked in the evening, when the machines weren’t being used. So, at first I would walk past his door on my way to my office in the evening. That’s all; I’d just walk past.

  A few nights later, just a “Hi.” After a while, when he saw it was the same guy walking past, he’d say “Hi,” or “Good evening.”

  A few weeks of this slow process and I see he’s working on the Marchant calculators. I say nothing about them; it isn’t time yet.

  We gradually say a little more: “Hi! I see you’re working pretty hard!”

  “Yeah, pretty hard”—that kind of stuff.

  Finally, a breakthrough: he invites me for soup. It’s going very good now. Every evening we have soup together. Now I begin to talk a little bit about the adding machines, and he tells me he has a problem. He’s been trying to put a succession of spring-loaded wheels back onto a shaft, and he doesn’t have the right tool, or something; he’s been working on it for a week. I tell him that I used to work on those machines during the war, and “I’ll tell you what: you just leave the machine out tonight, and I’ll have a look at it tomorrow.”

  “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?”

  “Very rarely,” and I’m about to describe the two occasions on which it happened when he says, “Do you talk to yourself?”

  “Yeah, sometimes when I’m shaving, or thinking; once in a while.” He’s writing down more stuff.

  “I see you have a deceased wife—do you talk to her?”

  This question really annoyed me, but I contained myself and said, “Sometimes, when I go up on a mountain and I’m thinking about her.”

  More writing. Then he asks, “Is anyone in your family in a mental institution?”

  “Yeah, I have an aunt in an insane asylum.”

  “Why do you call it an insane asylum?” he says, resentfully. “Why don’t you call it a mental institution?”

  “I thought it was the same thing.”

  “Just what do you think insanity is?” he says, angrily.

  “It’s a strange and peculiar disease in human beings,” I say honestly.

  “There’s nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than appendicitis!” he retorts.