Propulsion Gel
You paint it on a floor. Then the floor has an opinion about which way you are going, and the opinion is forward, and it is not interested in yours.
Propulsion Gel is an industrial emulsion, coloured orange, which is applied to a floor and which then makes a man run faster than a man has any business running. That is the product. That is the entire product. Everything else on this sheet is arithmetic and prices.
It is not what we were after. In the spring of 1955 I told Materials that the curtain line on Sub-Level 2 was turning out eleven hundred units a shift, that I wanted fourteen hundred, and that I did not want to hear one word about rollers. What came back up the stairs nine weeks later was a five-gallon pail of orange emulsion and the man carrying it, and the man carrying it came through my office door at a speed which removed my office door.
Now. Here is what it is not, because Sales keeps having to write the letter. It is not a lubricant. Slippery is a solved problem. Slippery was solved by the Egyptians and there is no money in it, and this company does not sell solved problems. We tested for slippery in every direction we could think of. A man standing on a treated deck stands. A man walking on a treated deck walks. A man who elects to run on a treated deck goes, and he keeps going, and he arrives places he had not yet decided to arrive at.
The lab boys have a proper name for the mechanism. It is nine syllables long, four of them are Greek, and I have struck it from the catalogue. In this building we call it the orange, and when a foreman says the corridor is orange, every man on that shift knows precisely what he means and precisely which end of the corridor to stand at.
Specification
- Designation
- Propulsion Gel, Industrial Grade. Materials No. 204.
- Appearance
- Opaque emulsion, Aperture Orange No. 4. Matt when cured.
- Odour
- Faint. Recorded in the file as “citrus” by a man who has since been asked not to describe things.
- Coverage
- 340 square feet the gallon, one coat, on prepared concrete.
- Coats recommended
- Two. Three has been done. Three appears on this sheet over the signed objection of the Materials Division and is available to any customer who asks for it by name.
- Cure
- Nine minutes at seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Fully live at forty.
- Coefficient of friction
- Not applicable. Materials has attempted the measurement fourteen times and has three times obtained a negative number.
- Direction of effect
- Forward. Always forward. Materials has not yet established forward with respect to what, and has been told to stop putting that in the reports.
- Shelf life
- Indefinite in a sealed drum. Six days in an open one, after which it has gone somewhere.
- Packing
- Five-gallon pail; fifty-five-gallon drum; tank car.
- Price
- $18.40 the gallon. $842.00 the drum. Tank car on application.
- Stopping
- Sold separately. See the schedule further down this sheet.
“I did not buy you a corridor so you could walk down it.”
What We Have Measured
Materials ran four hundred and six instrumented traversals in Corridor 6 between October and this March. Corridor 6 is one hundred and eighty feet of level concrete on Sub-Level 3 with a wall at the end of it. I will come back to the wall. Velocities below are sustained over the middle hundred feet, timed by two men with stop watches and, latterly, by a machine, because the two men kept disagreeing with each other in a manner Accounting found expensive.
Sustained and peak velocities by surface. Corridor 6, Sub-Level 3, October 1958 – March 1959.
| Surface | Coats | Mean ft/sec | Peak ft/sec | Subject of record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Concrete, unfinished | 1 | 29 | 36 | G. Halloran, machinist |
| Concrete, painted (Enrichment Grey) | 1 | 33 | 40 | G. Halloran, machinist |
| Ceramic tile, chamber standard | 1 | 38 | 46 | Volunteer 2,884 |
| Steel deck plate, degreased | 2 | 44 | 53 | Volunteer 3,109 |
| Steel deck plate, degreased | 3 | 51 | 61 | Volunteer 3,110, of Marquette. He asked us to write down that he had done it, and we have written it down, and this is where it is written. |
| Salt, untreated (mine floor, Sub-Level 5) | 1 | 21 | 24 | The Materials Division, collectively |
| Ice | 1 | 12 | 14 | Slower. Nobody has explained this to me. |
| Ceiling | 4 | — | 58 | Not a recommended application. Twice. |
Timed over the middle hundred feet. The final thirty feet of Corridor 6 are not instrumented, for reasons the Materials Division considers obvious and the Legal Department considers actionable.
The Wall At The End Of Corridor 6
Corridor 6 ends in a wall. It has always ended in a wall. The wall is eighteen inches of reinforced concrete, it was poured in 1952, and it was there a good three years before the gel was — I want that on the record, because Legal has developed a nervous habit about this corridor and I will not have a wall of mine slandered by three men in a basement.
The wall has been re-faced three times since January. Facilities have costed a fourth. Materials would prefer that I extend the corridor by two hundred feet, and I have declined, and I have declined in writing, because a longer corridor produces a faster man and the same wall, and I am not in the business of buying the same answer twice at a higher price.
Facilities have re-plastered the end of that corridor three times since January and I have stopped signing the requisitions. If you want a fourth you may sign it yourself, and you may write in the box what it is for. — C.
Interoffice Memorandum
The Division requests authorisation to extend Corridor 6 by a further two hundred feet, or in the alternative to fit Arrangement B (graduated sand bed) at the terminal end at a cost of $310.00.
The Division has now conducted four hundred and six traversals. The Division wishes to record that instrumentation ceases at one hundred and fifty feet not on grounds of expense but on grounds of recovery, and that the terminal wall is load-bearing, and that these two facts are not related but are becoming so.
Denied. Longer corridor, faster man, same wall. Paint the last thirty feet orange so they can see it coming. — CJ
Stopping
Stopping is not included in the price of the gel. I want to be plain about that, in this type, on this sheet, because Sales has been getting letters and one of them was from a bank.
Propulsion Gel accelerates. It does not decelerate. It does not slow, it does not taper, it does not consider slowing, and there is no mechanism within the emulsion by which it could be persuaded to. Deceleration is a separate discipline with a separate department and a separate price, and the customer may select from the schedule below or may elect — as very nearly all of our customers elect — to supply his own.
Schedule of arresting arrangements. Prices 1959, fitted, f.o.b. the loading dock.
| Cat. No. | Arrangement | Fitted price | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| ASI-204/A | Arrest, passive (masonry) | Customer supplies | Universally available. Requires no maintenance. Requires a great deal of maintenance. |
| ASI-204/B | Arrest, graduated (sand bed, forty feet) | $310.00 | Recommended. Ordered eleven times since 1957, nine of them by us. |
| ASI-204/C | Arrest, hydraulic (water trough, twelve feet) | $95.00 | Water not supplied. At forty feet per second, water is masonry. |
| ASI-204/D | Arrest, aerial (faith plate redirect) | $1,190.00 | Converts the problem into a different problem, at height. See Form ASI-207. |
| ASI-204/E | Arrest, manual (rope, two men) | $4.20 | Discontinued. The two men were consulted. |
| ASI-204/F | Arrest, none | No charge | Our most popular arrangement by volume, by a factor of nine hundred to one. |
Fitting by our own men, who arrive with the drum and leave without it. Arrangement F requires no fitting, no men and no drum, and is the reason this schedule is printed at all.
Application & Handling
The gel is sprayed. It is sprayed hot, at ninety pounds, through a lance, by a man in a suit, in a booth lined with asbestos board, and Medical informs me that I am obliged to mention the asbestos on any sheet that leaves this building. So: asbestos.
And here is the good news the lab boys brought me on the same afternoon. The median latency on asbestos is forty-four point six years. If you are thirty or over you are laughing. Worst case, you miss out on a few rounds of canasta and you have advanced the cause of science by three centuries. I put those figures through the machine on Sub-Level 4 and the machine printed a happy face, and I have had it framed, and it is on the wall outside the booth where the men can see it.
Sprayman’s Check, Before Every Coat
- Suit, hood, gauntlets and lance worn by the sprayman.
- Booth doors closed and dogged.
- Floor marked at both ends. Orange rope, not white.
- All personnel on the level advised that the corridor is live.
- All personnel on the level advised in which direction the corridor is live.
Not To Be Applied To
- Stairs. Any stairs. We have been over this with Facilities.
- Ramps exceeding four degrees.
- The interior of an elevator car, however tempting the arithmetic looks.
- Any surface a volunteer is expected to stand still on whilst being addressed by the announcement system.
- Ceilings, notwithstanding the figure printed in the table above, which is a measurement and not an endorsement.
Materials Division — Sample Pint, Free To Trade Enquiries
One pint of Propulsion Gel, Industrial Grade, sufficient for forty-two square feet, despatched free of charge to any firm on business letterhead. Cable APERTURE UPMICH or telephone ENrichment 9-0943. Please state the length of your floor. Please state what is at the end of it.