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

Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out very pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back you’d see a man called the pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff ready for desserts. Now this man must have been a miner, or something—heavy built, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. He’d take this stack of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all stuck together, and he’d take these stubby fingers and try to separate the doilies to put them on the plates. I always heard him say, “Damn deez doilies!” while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, “What a contrast—the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, ‘Damn deez doilies!’” So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.

My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made a ham sandwich, or something, for the guy who was on the late shift. I said that I liked desserts, so if there was a dessert left over from supper, I’d like that. The next night I was on the late shift till 2:00 A.M. with these guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing to do, getting bored, when suddenly I remembered there was a dessert to eat. I went over to the icebox and opened it up, and there she’d left six desserts! There was a chocolate pudding, a piece of cake, some peach slices, some rice pudding, some jello—there was everything! So I sat there and ate the six desserts—it was sensational!

The next day she said to me, “I left a dessert for you.

“It was wonderful,” I said, “absolutely wonderful!”

“But I left you six desserts because I didn’t know which one you liked the best.”

So from that time on she left six desserts. They weren’t always different, but there were always six desserts.

One time when I was desk clerk a girl left a book by the telephone at the desk while she went to eat dinner, so I looked at. it. It was The Life of Leonardo, and I couldn’t resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the whole thing.

I slept in a little room in the back of the hotel, and there was some stew about turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldn’t ever remember to do. Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which consisted of a system of strings and weights—Coke bottles full of water—that would operate when I’d open the door, lighting the pull-chain light inside. You open the door, and things would go, and light the light; then you close the door behind you, and the light would go out. But my real accomplishment came later.

I used to cut vegetables in the kitchen. String beans had to be cut into one-inch pieces. The way you were supposed to do it was: You hold two beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and you press the knife against the beans and your thumb, almost cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good idea. I sat down at the wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp knife into the table at a forty-five-degree angle away from me. Then I put a pile of the string beans on each side, and I’d pick out a bean, one in each hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.

So I’m slicing beans one after the other—chig, chig, chig, chig, chig–and everybody’s giving me the beans, and I’m going like sixty when the boss comes by and says, “What are you doing?”

I say, “Look at the way I have of cutting beans!”—and just at that moment I put a finger through instead of a bean. Blood came out and went on the beans, and there was a big excitement: “Look at how many beans you spoiled! What a stupid way to do things!” and so on. So I was never able to make any improvement, which would have been easy—with a guard, or something—but no, there was no chance for improvement.

I had another invention, which had a similar difficulty. We had to slice potatoes after they’d been cooked, for some kind of potato salad. They were sticky and wet, and difficult to handle. I thought of a whole lot of knives, parallel in a rack, coming down and slicing the whole thing. I thought about this a long time, and finally I got the idea of wires in a rack,

So I went to the five-and-ten to buy some knives or wires, and saw exactly the gadget I wanted: it was for slicing eggs. The next time the potatoes came out I got my little egg-slicer out and sliced all the potatoes in no time, and sent them back to the chef. The chef was a German, a great big guy who was King of the Kitchen, and he came storming out, blood vessels sticking out of his neck, livid red. “What’s the matter with the potatoes?” he says. “They’re not sliced!”

I had them sliced, but they were all stuck together. He says, “How can I separate them?”

“Stick ‘em in water,” I suggest.