Nutty, But Safe...

Credit: The Offbeat Drummer

Physicist Richard Feynman helped create the atomic bomb, shared a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, and helped figure out the source of the space shuttle Challenger explosion.

But he was also subject to scrutiny by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, as it sought to uncover communist sympathizers during the 1950s.

The FBI began keeping an eye on Feynman after other members of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb, turned out to be Soviet spies, including Klaus Fuchs, the project's primary physicist. The documents, 361 pages, record statement after statement from the physicist's friends and colleagues, mostly praising Feynman for his brilliance, trustworthiness and loyalty to the country.

Like I said: nutty, but safe.

MSNBC Science: FBI Files on Feynman Released

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 repaired 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."

Excerpt from "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Safecracker Meets Safecracker"