Chapter 8 The growth of the first little urchin-6

During the summer of graduating from MIT, I was looking for a summer job. I had applied to Bell Labs two or three times before, and visited them.Shockley (William Bradford Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956) met me in the MIT laboratory. Every time he came to Bell, he always took me around; I enjoyed the visit, but they None of them hired me. My professor wrote letters of recommendation for me to two companies, one is the Bausch and Lomb Company, which studies the light course of lenses, and the other is the Electrical Testing Laboratory in New York.At that time, no one knew what a physicist was, and the industry would not offer any jobs for physicists.Engineers can, but what about physicists?People don't know how to "use" them at all.The funny thing is that after a while - right after the war - the whole situation was reversed, and physicists were everywhere looking to hire.

But in the days of the Great Depression, I, as a physicist, hit a wall everywhere. Around that time, I bumped into an old friend on the beach in my hometown of Far Rockaway.We grew up together, went to the same school when we were eleven or twelve, were good friends, and we were both scientific thinkers.He has a "lab" and so do I, and we hang out a lot and discuss things. We also used to perform magic tricks for the neighborhood kids - magic tricks using chemistry.My friend is good at acting, and I think it's fun too.We played on a little table with a Bunsen burner at each end with little glass saucers of iodine on it - they gave off beautiful purple smoke when we played, it was awesome !

We played a lot of tricks, like turning wine into water, and using chemical color changes to perform.The finale was a trick of our own invention.I first secretly put my hand in the water, then dipped it into benzene, and then "accidentally" swept one of the Bunsen burners, and one hand burned.I hurriedly patted the burning hand with the other hand, and both hands burned. (Hands don't hurt, because benzene burns fast, and the water on the skin has a cooling effect.) So I waved my hands and ran and shouted: "Fire! Fire!" Everyone was nervous, All ran out of the room, and that was the end of the day's show!

Later, in college, when I told these stories to my fraternity brothers, they couldn't believe it: "Bullshit! Impossible!" I often had to do all kinds of demonstrations to convince them.Like once, we debated whether the urine is excreted from the body due to the effect of gravity, and I was on the opposing side.To prove it, I stood on my head while urinating and showed them.Another time, someone said that if you take aspirin with Coca-Cola, you will pass out immediately; Lin then drinks Coke, or drinks Coke first and then swallows aspirin, or dissolves aspirin in Coke.So I got six pills and three bottles of Coke: the first time, I swallowed two aspirins and drank the Coke; the second time, I dissolved the aspirin in the Coke and drank it; Drink the third bottle of Coke, and then swallow the aspirin.Each time, the idiots stood by me, ready to hold me up when I passed out; but nothing happened.I do remember that I didn't sleep very well that night, and I finally got up and did a lot of homework, proving several Riemann-Zeta functions.

I said, "Okay guys, let's get some benzene back!" They found benzene, I put my hands in water, put them in benzene, and lit the fire...but it hurt like hell!It turned out that after so many years, hair grew on the back of my hands—they acted like a wick, absorbing benzene and burning; but when I was a child performing, there was no hair on my hands at all!but.After performing in front of many brothers, the hair on the back of my hands is also gone. When I met my childhood friend on the beach, he told me that he now knew a way to metallize plastic.I said it's impossible because plastic doesn't conduct electricity, you can't connect wires to it.But he says he can metallize anything.To convince me he also picked up a peach pit in the sand and said he could coat it with metal.

The best part of the whole thing was that he arranged for me to work in his small company.The company was on the top floor of a house in New York, there were only four employees in the company, and his father was in charge of financing and was the -- I think -- "president" of the company. My friend was the "Vice President," another guy was in sales, and I was the "Director of Chemical Research," and his not-so-bright brother was in charge of cleaning bottles and all; there were six metal plating tanks in the company. Their electroplating procedure is like this: first add a reducing agent to the silver nitrate solution, and then let the resulting silver precipitate on the object to be plated, as if making a mirror; Placed in an electroplating bath, the metal is plated onto the silver.The question is, will that layer of silver stick to the object?

The answer is no, it is easy to peel off.Therefore, there is often an extra procedure in the middle, which varies from material to material.For example, like Bakelite (Bakelite)—this was a very important plastic at the time—my friend found that he only had to sandblast the Bakelite first, and then put it in oxyhydroxide. Soak in tin (stannous hydroxide) solution for several hours, let the solution penetrate into the small holes on the surface of the bakelite, then after electroplating, the silver layer will be firmly attached to the bakelite. But this method is only suitable for a few kinds of plastics, and new plastic materials are constantly appearing at that time, such as methyl methacrylate (the plastic material we call acrylic), which can not be electroplated at first.It is also like the cheap cellulose acetate (cellulose acetate), which cannot be processed at first.Later, we found that we can soak it in sodium hydroxide solution first, and then put it in stannous hydroxide solution, and the plating effect will be very good.

I was quite successful as a "chemist" there.My advantage is that my friend has never studied chemistry and never done any experiments; many things he does are done right by chance and cannot be repeated.I put balls of different materials in bottles, poured various chemicals into them, and recorded them in detail, so I found ways to electroplate more types of plastic materials. I also tried to simplify his method.According to the book, I switched to formaldehyde as a reducing agent, so I was able to release 100% of the silver immediately, unlike before, which often took a long time to recover the silver in the solution.Also, when preparing the stannous hydroxide solution, I added a little hydrochloric acid to it to make the stannous hydroxide dissolve in water easier and faster, which I learned from my chemistry class in college.As a result, steps that previously took hours now take five minutes.

My experiments kept being interrupted by the salesman guy, because every time he came back, he brought back some plastic stuff from a client he was trying to win. Often when I'm lining up the bottles and labeling them all, all of a sudden, "You need to stop all the experiments. Do this 'super case' for the marketing department first!" Many experiments have to be redone many times. Once, we ran into the biggest trouble ever.An artist who designed a magazine cover for a car had a car, and he carefully built a plastic wheel.Somehow the salesman told him we could electroplate anything; the artist then asked us to silver-plate the wheel shell so it would shine.But this is a new plastic material and we don't really know how to plate it - in fact, the salesman never knew what we could and couldn't plate, he always said yes - our first attempt It failed.At this point we're going to get the silver off the wheel, but it's not easy.In the end I decided to dissolve it with concentrated nitric acid; the result was correct, the silver layer was removed, but it also left many holes in the plastic.It was really in dire straits at that time!

In fact, we have done more than one similar "experiment in dire straits". For a while, the rest of the company felt that we should be in Modern Plastics Advertisement in Modern Plastics magazine.We have a few things that are beautifully plated and look great in the ad.There is also a display cabinet in the company, and several items are placed in it for potential customers to visit.However, no one can take off the finished product on the advertisement or in the display cabinet to take a closer look at whether the electroplating part is firm and durable.Some are really nicely plated, but basically they are exceptionally well brewed and not average.

After the summer, I left the company to go to Princeton; and they got a big deal right away, making plastic "steel" pens.Then you can buy light, cheap, shiny silver pens--these pens sell well.It's exciting to see people walking around with these pens and knowing where they came from. But their company's experience in dealing with this kind of plastic is really insufficient - or in dealing with plastic fillers, inexperienced - most plastics are not pure, they use "fillers".At that time, everyone had little control over the characteristics of the filler.As a result, some bubbles will appear on the plastic pen, and if you have something on your hand, it starts to bubble and peel off, and you can't help touching it; so, everyone around sees people tearing the peeling off of the pen Metal shavings. At this time, the company is in an emergency situation and must find a way to remedy it.My friends think they need a big microscope.In fact, he didn't know what to look at, or why; but this blind research cost the company a lot of money, and in the end they didn't solve the problem.The company failed simply because the first big deal they took on failed terribly. A few years later, while I was working in Los Alamos, I met a guy named Frederic de Hoffman.He was also a scientist, but he was better at management; although he had not received much training, he was fond of numbers and hardworking, which made up for his lack of training.Then he became president or vice president of General Atomics or something, and he was a big guy in industry after that.Back then, though, he was just a young, energetic, quick-witted, driven guy doing what he could to contribute to the atomic bomb program. We were eating at Fuller's Bistro one day, and he mentioned that he had been working in England before coming to Los Alamos. I asked, "What kind of work do you do there?" "I'm a researcher in the lab, and I study methods of metal plating on plastics." "How are you doing?" "It went well, but we encountered a lot of difficulties." "Oh?" "Just as we were starting to work out our method, there was a company in New York..." "What company in New York?" "It's called Metaplast Corporation, and they're moving faster than us." "How do you know?" "They've been running full-page ads in Modern Plastics showing off what they've plated, so we knew they were moving faster." "Have you ever taken anything from them to see?" "No, but it can be seen from the advertisement that their technology is far ahead of ours. Our method is also good, but we can't compete with the Americans." "How many chemists are there in your lab?" "There are six of us." "How many chemists do you think Jinsu will have working in?" "Oh! They must have a real chemistry department." "Can you describe, in your mind, what the director of the Chemical Research Department of Jinsu Enterprise looks like? What does their laboratory look like?" "I'm guessing they must have 25 or 50 chemists, and the head of chemical research has his own private office—special, glassed-in kind, you know, like in the movies—and there's always Subordinates come running in with information about the research plan in their hands, ask him for advice, and then rush back to do a little more research, and people come and go. They have 25 or 50 chemists, how can we beat them?" "You must be very interested to know, and you will also find it very funny. The person who is chatting with you now is the director of the chemical research department of Jinsu Enterprise; and his subordinates at that time, there was only one worker who washed bottles!"