A Word From The President

My name is Cave Johnson and I own the place. I want that established on the first line, because people come into this building and they look for the board, and there is no board. There is a desk on the third floor and there is me behind it and that is the entire governance of Aperture Science Innovators. When I want something built, it gets built. When I want it built by Friday, it gets built by Friday and somebody sleeps in the machine shop. That is not a boast. That is an organisational chart.

I started this company in a rented garage in 1943 selling shower curtains. Everybody wants to skip past that part. I do not skip past that part. The United States Army bought two hundred thousand of my curtains and every one of them held water, and if you think that has nothing to do with quantum tunnelling then you have never had to make two hundred thousand of anything and have every single one come out right.

The curtain paid for the mine. The mine paid for the shafts. The shafts paid for the physicists, and the physicists — God help me — the physicists came to my office in the spring of 1953 and told me they had put a hole in one wall and the hole had come out of a different wall, and did I want to see it.

I said yes. That is the whole of my scientific method. Somebody says do you want to see it, and I say yes, and then we get a man and we point him at it.

On Why Not

There is a school of thought that says a scientist should first establish why. Why does it happen. Why does it happen that way. Why, if we move this here, does the gentleman in the chamber stop being in the chamber. That school of thought has produced a great many careful men and not one hole in a wall.

Science is not about why. It is about why not. Why not put the gel in the pudding. Why not buy the moon. Why not send a man through and see which end he arrives at. Why not is the only question that has ever built anything, and it is the only question this company asks, and if that troubles you, the door is behind you and it opens from both sides, which is more than I can say for some of the doors further down.

On The Competition

There is an outfit in New Mexico. You know the one. Federal money, federal timetable, federal haircuts. They have been three years on a problem I solved in a weekend with a curtain and a volunteer named Hal, and they will publish about it, and the publication will have forty names on it, and not one of those forty men will have gone through the hole personally.

I have gone through the hole personally. Eleven times. Legal has asked me to stop saying that in print. Legal is going to have to live with disappointment.

On The Volunteers

Astronauts. War heroes. Olympians. That is who I want in the chambers and that is who I have been getting, because when a man has already been shot at over Korea, an afternoon in Test Shaft 09 does not frighten him, it bores him, and a bored man gives you clean data.

We pay sixty dollars. Cash. Same day. No forms beyond the one, no waiting, no next of kin notified unless the volunteer specifically requests it, and I will tell you honestly that in sixteen years exactly four have requested it, and I remember all four of their names, and that is more than the outfit in New Mexico can say about anybody.

On What Comes Next

I am fifty years old. I intend to be here a very long time. There are men downstairs building a machine out of eleven tons of relays because I asked them whether a person could be written down — properly written down, filed, kept — and they said probably not and I said try anyway, and they are trying anyway, because that is what happens when I ask.

You will read, in the pages that follow, about curtains and gels and holes and a cake we have been promising since 1953. All of it is true. Some of it is under review. None of it is going anywhere just because one man’s lungs have opinions.

Now go read the catalogue.