I couldn't help laughing by the end of this piece of story. In short, Feynman got a job as a chemist one summer in his old fella's company which focus on plating plastics. In the company he was the only one who could do the experiments and he did make a lot of improvement and wonderful process of metal-plating. By then end of the summer he left the company and got back to Princeton. Years later, he was once having dinner with a co-worker, and heard about this man working in the same industry for a short period. He happened to know the company Feynman worked for at that time! So Feynman asked what he thought about that company. He said, it was great, and way ahead of the company he was working for. Feynman asked how did he get that conclusion. He answered, they had a whole page of advertisement in a popular magazine, in which the advertisement shows pretty good products they've done. So comparing to the company he worked for, twenty five to fifty chemists must be working in the research and development department! How could five chemists compete with a whole department consisted of twenty fine or fifty chemists!
Actually there's only Mr. Feynman who was working that summer. I found it funny because when the man described the president who's in charge of the "department", he said, there must have been an big office for him with big glass, like in the movie ---you know, guys kept coming in bringing new research projects, getting advice, rushing off to do more research, people coming in and out all the time.
And Mr. Feynman only said calmly,
You'll be interested and amused to know that you are now talking to the chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation, whose staff consisted of one bottle-washer!
