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Сурелы Ыоуре Joking, Mr. Феынман: Adventures of a Curious Character :: Feynman Richard Phillips
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It was ahotel that my aunt was running, but I didn’t know that. I went over there with—they still tell the story—a big screwdriver in my back pocket. Well, I was small, so any screwdriver looked big in my back pocket.
I went up to the radio and tried to fix it. I didn’t know anything about it, but there was also a handyman at the hotel, and either he noticed, or I noticed, a loose knob on the rheostat—to turn up the volume—so that it wasn’t turning the shaft. He went off and filed something, and fixed it up so it worked.
The next radio I tried to fix didn’t work at all. That was easy: it wasn’t plugged in right. As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter that had different scales on it by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It wasn’t very accurate, but it was good enough to tell whether things were in the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.
The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didn’t have any money to fix their radios, and they’d hear about this kid who would do it for less. So I’d climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all kinds of stuff. I got a series of lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got some job like converting a DC set into an AC set, and it was very hard to keep the hum from going through the system, and I didn’t build it quite right. I shouldn’t have bitten that one off, but I didn’t know.
One job was really sensational. I was working at the time for a printer, and a man who knew that printer knew I was trying to get jobs fixing radios, so he sent a fellow around to the print shop to pick me up. The guy is obviously poor—his car is a complete wreck—and we go to his house which is in a cheap part of town. On the way, I say, “What’s the trouble with the radio?”
He says, “When I turn it on it makes a noise, and after a while the noise stops and everything’s all right, but I don’t like the noise at the beginning.”
I think to myself: “What the hell! If he hasn’t got any money, you’d think he could stand a little noise for a while.”
And all the time, on the way to his house, he’s saying things like, “Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios—you’re just a little boy!”
He’s putting me down the whole way, and I’m thinking, “So what’s the matter with him? So it makes a little noise.
It was ahotel that my aunt was running, but I didn’t know that. I went over there with—they still tell the story—a big screwdriver in my back pocket. Well, I was small, so any screwdriver looked big in my back pocket.
I went up to the radio and tried to fix it. I didn’t know anything about it, but there was also a handyman at the hotel, and either he noticed, or I noticed, a loose knob on the rheostat—to turn up the volume—so that it wasn’t turning the shaft. He went off and filed something, and fixed it up so it worked.
The next radio I tried to fix didn’t work at all. That was easy: it wasn’t plugged in right. As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter that had different scales on it by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It wasn’t very accurate, but it was good enough to tell whether things were in the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.
The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didn’t have any money to fix their radios, and they’d hear about this kid who would do it for less. So I’d climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all kinds of stuff. I got a series of lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got some job like converting a DC set into an AC set, and it was very hard to keep the hum from going through the system, and I didn’t build it quite right. I shouldn’t have bitten that one off, but I didn’t know.
One job was really sensational. I was working at the time for a printer, and a man who knew that printer knew I was trying to get jobs fixing radios, so he sent a fellow around to the print shop to pick me up. The guy is obviously poor—his car is a complete wreck—and we go to his house which is in a cheap part of town. On the way, I say, “What’s the trouble with the radio?”
He says, “When I turn it on it makes a noise, and after a while the noise stops and everything’s all right, but I don’t like the noise at the beginning.”
I think to myself: “What the hell! If he hasn’t got any money, you’d think he could stand a little noise for a while.”
And all the time, on the way to his house, he’s saying things like, “Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios—you’re just a little boy!”
He’s putting me down the whole way, and I’m thinking, “So what’s the matter with him? So it makes a little noise.