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.

Safecracker Meets Safecracker

I learned to pick locks from a guy named Leo Lavatelli. It turns out that picking ordinary tumbler locks ­­ like Yale locks ­­ is easy. You try to turn the lock by putting a screwdriver in the hole (you have to push from the side in order to leave the hole open). It doesn't turn because there are some pins inside which have to be lifted to just the right height (by the key). Because it is not made perfectly, the lock is held more by one pin than the others. Now, if you push a little wire gadget ­­ maybe a paper clip with a slight bump at the end ­­ and jiggle it back and forth inside the lock, you'll eventually push that one pin that's doing the most holding, up to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin stays up ­­ it's caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until all the pins are pushed up.

Los Alamos

When I say "Los Alamos from below," I mean that. Although in my field at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos ­­ people in higher echelons ­­ worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.

Testing Bloodhounds

When I was at Los Alamos and would get a little time off, I would often go visit my wife, who was in a hospital in Albuquerque, a few hours away. One time I went to visit her and couldn't go in right away, so I went to the hospital library to read.

I read an article in Science about bloodhounds, and how they could smell so very well. The authors described the various experiments that they did ­­ the bloodhounds could identify which items had been touched by people, and so on ­­ and I began to think: It is very remarkable how good bloodhounds are at smelling, being able to follow trails of people, and so forth, but how good are we, actually?

Fizzled Fuses

When the war began in Europe but had not yet been declared in the United States, there was a lot of talk about getting ready and being patriotic. The newspapers had big articles on businessmen volunteering to go to Plattsburg, New York, to do military training, and so on.

I began to think I ought to make some kind of contribution, too. After I finished up at MIT, a friend of mine from the fraternity, Maurice Meyer, who was in the Army Signal Corps, took me to see a colonel at the Signal Corps offices in New York.