The Weighted Storage Cube
Twenty-six inches on every edge. Ninety-one pounds dry. Six identical faces, no handle, no lid, no hinge, and not one cubic inch of interior. It weighs a great deal and it stores nothing. Both of those are features and we charge for both.
It is a cube. It weighs ninety-one pounds. It stores nothing whatsoever, and the gentleman who has just frowned at that sentence should stay exactly where he is, because that frown is the product. Every storage article ever sold in this Republic is a promise about an inside. Buy the crate, get the inside of the crate. Buy the drum, the cabinet, the safe. Aperture sells you the outside. The inside is not offered, not represented and not there.
Here is the problem the cube solves, and I want it stated plainly, because Sales keeps trying to dress it up. Down in the chambers there is a button set into the floor. It does not stay pressed. The door across the room stays open exactly as long as the button stays down, and a man cannot stand on a button in one corner and walk through a door in the other, this being one of the very few laws of physics this company has not yet got round to.
So the man needs a thing. The thing must be heavy enough to hold the button, small enough that he can get his arms round it, awkward enough that he must think about it, and stupid enough that it will do nothing else. It must not roll. It must not tip. It must not float, burn, dissolve, compress, or take an interest. In the spring of 1954 I told Manufacturing to bring me that thing by Friday and on the Thursday two men carried it into my office and set it on my desk and my desk is still on the second floor because the desk did not survive the trip.
Manufacturing wished to call it the Weighted Chamber Mass. Sales wished to call it the Aperture Ballast Block. I named it the Weighted Storage Cube, because a customer will buy storage and a customer will not buy ballast, and because there is nothing so restful in all of industry as a solved problem with a plain name painted on it.
Five years and eighteen thousand four hundred units later I have had exactly four returned. Three of those were freight damage to the crate and not to the cube, the cube being the only article in this catalogue that has never once been damaged by anything. The fourth I will come to further down this sheet, and then I will stop coming to it.
The Cube, In Brief
- Catalogue No.
- 206-W
- In manufacture
- Continuously since 1954
- Edge
- 26 in., all twelve, to .015 in.
- Mass
- 91 lb. dry. There is no wet.
- Shell
- Pressed steel, two halves, welded at the equator
- Corners
- Cast aluminium. They do not mark the plates.
- Ballast
- Lead-antimony and furnace slag, poured hot
- Interior volume
- None. See below, and then see Legal.
- Faces
- Six. Identical. Deliberately.
- Handle
- None. A handle is an opinion about which way is up.
- Load rating
- 2,400 lb. on any face
- Price, each
- $28.00
- Price, crate of six
- $158.00
- Recalls to date
- None
The short run went out on one crate manifest and came back on another. He will tell you the numbers match. I have both manifests in front of me and they do not. — C.
“I do not want a box. A box has an inside, and an inside is where trouble keeps its things. Bring me the outside of a box and charge me for all six sides of it.”
On The Question Of What Goes Inside
Records has a folder of correspondence on this subject two inches thick and I have read every letter in it personally, because a man who takes the trouble to write to a manufacturer deserves an answer from the manufacturer and not from a clerk. The letters all ask the same thing in different handwriting. Where is the lid. How does it open. What is it for storing.
There is no lid. It does not open. It is for storing nothing, and it stores nothing more reliably than any article this company has ever produced, and I would put that claim beside the shower curtain, which is the highest thing I can say about a product. In sixty-one months of continuous service in the test chambers not one cube has permitted anything to get inside it. Not water. Not gel. Not slag, not smoke, not a wristwatch, not a volunteer. Nothing has ever been stored in an Aperture Weighted Storage Cube and nothing ever will be, and that is a perfect record, and I have never known a competitor to hold a perfect record at anything.
The outfit in New Mexico would have put a hinge on it. They would have held four meetings about the hinge, published a paper on the hinge, and the hinge would have failed, and a man in a chamber would presently be standing on a button for the rest of his natural life waiting on forty co-authors.
Acceptance Trials, Manufacturing, 1954
Conducted on Sub-Level 2 between the ninth and the nineteenth of June, 1954, on twelve units drawn from the first production run. Two further trials were added later and are printed here in their proper place.
| Trial | Method | Standard | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dead load, single face | 2,400 lb., one hour | Pass. Held 6,100 lb. before the floor objected. |
| 2 | Free drop, 40 ft., onto plate steel | No deformation | Pass. The plate was replaced. |
| 3 | Furnace, 1,900°F, ninety minutes | No loss of form | Pass. Paint scheme reapplied. Cube unbothered. |
| 4 | Immersion, brine, ninety days, Sub-Level 7 | No ingress | Pass. There is nowhere for anything to ingress to. |
| 5 | Transit of a quantum tunnelling aperture, 60 ft. separation | Arrival intact, correct mass | Pass. Ninety-one pounds in, ninety-one pounds out. See Form ASI-202, trial 59-022. |
| 6 | Aerial faith plate, unballasted subject | Landing within the marked square | Pass. The square was repainted twice during trials and once afterwards. |
| 7 | Two men, one cube, one flight of stairs | Cube undamaged | Pass. Men undamaged is not the standard and was not the result. |
| 8 | Incineration, plant incinerator, full cycle | Complete disposal | Fail. Recovered whole from the ash pit at 0640. Not attempted since, by standing order of this office. |
| 11 | Unattended overnight, Chamber 4, observation window manned | No standard exists | Moved. Nobody moved it. |
Trials 9 and 10 concerned the marked variant and are held with the withdrawn drawings. Trial 11 was conducted by an observer on his own initiative and without authorisation, and his employment was continued, and his trial was entered into the record, because a finding is a finding whoever has the poor manners to make it.
What The Cube Will Not Do
The following is the complete list, compiled by Manufacturing, revised by Legal, and shortened by me on the grounds that a product sheet is not a confession. Every item is ticked, because every item has been established by trial, which is more than most manufacturers can say about the back of their own catalogue.
- It will not roll, tip, wobble, settle, or find its own level.
- It will not open, part, unseam, or admit a blade.
- It will not burn at any temperature this company can presently produce.
- It will not corrode in brine, gel, coolant, or the atmosphere of Sub-Level 7.
- It will not conduct a quantum tunnelling field, which is why it is not made of substrate and why it costs twenty-eight dollars instead of the other figure.
- It will not hold a charge, a grudge, or a temperature.
- It will not speak. See the notice below. The notice below is not a joke and was not printed at my request.
- It will not be left behind in a chamber at the close of a test cycle, and personnel are reminded that the count at the door is a count of cubes as well as of men.
The Marked Variant
In 1957 the Enrichment Center asked Manufacturing for a short run of cubes with a device painted on each of the six faces. The request came from Operations and the reason given, in writing, on a requisition I have in front of me, was that a chamber then under preparation required the subject to form an attachment to the cube in order that the chamber could later require him to stop.
The run was produced. The chamber was run. The paperwork is in order and the variant is not in this catalogue, is not for sale, is not quoted, and is not to be discussed with visitors, the trade press, the Marquette Chamber of Commerce, or anybody at all from New Mexico. I am putting that in the product sheet rather than in a memorandum because a memorandum can be misplaced and a catalogue cannot.
The variant is mechanically identical to the standard issue in every respect: same shell, same ballast, same ninety-one pounds, same six faces, same nothing inside. The only difference is the paint. I want that understood by every man who reads this sheet. The only difference is the paint.
Variant 206-C — Withdrawn
- Catalogue No.
- None. It was never catalogued.
- Produced
- Eighty units. The order was for eighty.
- Marking
- Six faces, one device, grease-resistant enamel
- Purpose
- Attachment, formation of
- Second purpose
- Attachment, termination of
- Returned to store
- Seventy-nine
- Withdrawn
- November 1957
- Available
- No
Interoffice Memorandum
The marked run is withdrawn as of this morning. The pattern is off the shop floor, the stencil is off the wall, and the drawing goes to Records with the withdrawn work and not to the store. Nobody paints a face on a cube in this building again without my initials on the requisition, and I am not going to initial one.
I am told by Operations that the chamber produced excellent data and I do not doubt it. I have read the observation sheets. Eleven of eleven subjects completed the chamber. Nine of eleven asked a question at the door afterwards, which is nine more than usually ask anything at the door, and it was the same question, and I am not printing it.
Manufacturing will confirm the count back into store by Friday and Records will file the confirmation. That is the end of the matter and I would like the whole building to hear how plainly I am saying so.
Cave JohnsonPresident & Founder
Eighty went down. He signed the requisition for eighty. Manufacturing has confirmed seventy-nine and he has accepted seventy-nine and initialled it without reading it, which he does not do. Somebody knows where the eightieth is. — C.
Order Form — Model 206-W
Finishes stocked
- Enrichment Grey, plain — ships from stock
- Enrichment Grey, with corner bands — four weeks
- Unpainted, mill finish — six weeks, and it will mark your floor
- Marked faces — not offered. Do not enter this line.