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 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.”
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, sup er 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.
