Сурелы Ыоуре Joking, Mr. Феынман: Adventures of a Curious Character   ::   Feynman Richard Phillips

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The wastebasket wasstill too hot to handle, so I got a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for the smoke to blow out.

But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now the magazine was out of reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in the window—it was very dangerous!

Well, I got the magazine, put the fire out again, and this time kept the magazine with me while I shook the glowing coals out of the wastepaper basket onto the street, two or three floors below. Then I went out of my room, closed the door behind me, and said to my mother, “I’m going out to play,” and the smoke went out slowly through the windows.

I also did some things with electric motors and built an amplifier for a photo cell that I bought that could make a bell ring when I put my hand in front of the cell. I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me out all the time, to play. But I was often in the house, fiddling with my lab.

I bought radios at rummage sales. I didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t very expensive—they were old, broken radios, and I’d buy them and try to fix them. Usually they were broken in some simple-minded way—some obvious wire was hanging loose, or a coil was broken or partly unwound—so I could get some of them going. On one of these radios one night I got WACO in Waco, Texas—it was tremendously exciting!

On this same tube radio up in my lab I was able to hear a station up in Schenectady called WGN. Now, all of us kids—my two cousins, my sister, and the neighborhood kids—listened on the radio downstairs to a program called the Eno Crime Club—Eno effervescent salts—it was the thing! Well, I discovered that I could hear this program up in my lab on WGN one hour before it was broadcast in New York! So I’d discover what was going to happen, and then, when we were all sitting around the radio downstairs listening to the Eno Crime Club, I’d say, “You know, we haven’t heard from so-and-so in a long time. I betcha he comes and saves the situation.”

Two seconds later, bup-bup , he comes! So they all got excited about this, and I predicted a couple of other things. Then they realized that there must be some trick to it—that I must know, somehow. So I owned up to what it was, that I could hear it upstairs the hour before.

You know what the result was, naturally.

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