We Do What We Must Because We Can
Three clauses, eleven feet wide, painted on the foyer wall at the head of Test Shaft 09 and repeated in every corridor in this company. Herewith what each one of them means, in the words of the man who wrote them, who has never been asked and has never stopped explaining.
There are three lines painted on the wall of the foyer at the head of Shaft 09. The painters finished them in 1952 and nobody has touched them since. Eleven feet corner to corner, in the same grey we put on the curtains, and 1,247 men and women walk underneath them every morning at seven and most of them have stopped seeing the thing entirely. Good. A creed is not there to be admired. It is there to be obeyed by people who are not reading it.
I wrote it in 1947, in one sitting, on the back of a purchase order for vinyl. That was the year we stopped being Aperture Fixtures and started being Aperture Science Innovators, and a man who changes the name over his door had better have something to put underneath it. I had a hole four kilometres deep, forty-one employees and no idea what any of it was for. So I wrote down what I intended to do about that, and twelve years later it has not needed a single correction.
People ask me what it means. Reporters ask. The Bureau of Standards asked in writing, twice, and a gentleman from the Senate asked in a manner I did not care for. It means what it says. It says it in eight words. Evidently eight were not sufficient for anybody, so here are rather more.
The Creed, As Filed
- Adopted
- 1947, on the reverse of a purchase order
- Author
- The President. Sole. Unassisted.
- Clauses drafted
- Four
- Clauses painted, 1952
- Three
- Clauses presently displayed
- Three
- Lettering
- Eleven feet, foyer wall, Shaft 09
- Colour
- Institutional Grey (Warm)
- Revisions since 1947
- None. There will be none.
- The fourth clause
- Not displayed. See section four of this sheet.
“We do what we must because we can.”
1.“We Do”
Two words, and they are the two most companies cannot say. Everybody in American industry has an intention. Intentions are free. There is an outfit in New Mexico with the finest intentions ever assembled under one roof and a committee to look after each one, and I invite you to go and count the holes they have put in a wall.
We do. Present tense, no auxiliary verb. Not we plan to. Not we are positioned to. Not we have appointed a working group to consider the feasibility of. The sentence leaves no room for the man who is still deciding, and that is deliberate, because I have employed that man and he is expensive. In 1953 the lab boys put a hole in one wall and it came out of another. There is a version of this company that would have convened a study and published. We got a man instead. That is the whole of the first clause.
2.“What We Must”
Here is where people get nervous, because they hear must and go looking for whoever is doing the compelling. There is no such person. I own one hundred per cent of this company. No board, no bank with its hand in the drawer, and no branch of the federal government that can tell me what to do with my own hole in the ground.
Must is not an order from outside. Must is what a thing turns into once you have looked at it properly. A door that opens from one side only is a curiosity; a door that opens from one side only with a man behind it is a must. A grey powder that conducts a tunnelling field better than anything ever measured is a curiosity; the same powder in quantity, for money we happen to have, is a must.
Records keeps a register of the musts. I never asked them to. They do it anyway, which is the best thing I can tell you about Records.
Register of Musts, 1943–1959. Maintained by Records, unbidden.
| Year | The Must | Determined By | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1943 | Sell the Army a shower curtain in the middle of a war. | The President | Two hundred thousand units. Every one held water. |
| 1944 | Buy a worked-out salt mine whose tunnels run four kilometres down. | The President | It is the entire physical plant of this company. |
| 1947 | Stop being called Fixtures. Write a creed for under the new name. | The President | Four clauses drafted. Three survive. |
| 1953 | Send a man through the hole rather than write a paper about it. | The President | He arrived. Different wall. Cheerful throughout. |
| 1954 | Open the testing programme to the public at sixty dollars, cash. | The President | 4,118 volunteers to date, of whom 1,306 completed. |
| 1955 | Connect the diversity vent to the mail room, as an efficiency measure. | Facilities, unprompted | Under review since. See Form ASI-108. |
| 1956 | Procure lunar substrate in quantity, at the asking price, without haggling. | The President | Finest conductor ever measured. First-class poison. |
| 1957 | Fit a second set of fire doors on Sub-Level 4, with a bolt on the outside. | Caroline | Fitted within the week. Records declines to expand upon this row. |
| 1959 | Open Test Shaft 09 four months ahead of the engineers’ schedule. | The President | Opened 11 March. The engineers were informed on the 12th. |
In sixteen years no entry in this register has ever been recorded as declined. Records has been asked twice not to note that, and has noted it twice.
3.“Because We Can”
Can. Three letters, and they carry the entire building. Ability is the whole of the justification. If a thing can be done here, by these men, in this hole, the doing of it requires no further argument, and anybody wanting one may put the request in writing.
Now. You will have noticed — a great many people have noticed, and one of them was a senator — that the sentence stops there. There is no and we should. There never was and there is not going to be. Should is a word for a man asking permission from somebody, and I invite you to look around this company and tell me of whom I would be asking. There is a desk on the third floor and there is me behind it. That is the ethics committee. It sits whenever I sit and it has never once failed to reach a decision.
Elsewhere in this publication I say that science is not about why, it is about why not, and people treat that as the same sentence. It is not. Why not is a question you put to a laboratory. The creed is the answer you give a man who has come to your office to stop you. They point the same way; only one is painted on a wall. See the President’s own sheet for the other.
4.The Fourth Clause
I drafted four. The purchase order is in the safe. Three went on the wall in 1952 and the fourth did not, and the question comes up on every tour I give, so here it is, printed once.
The fourth clause read: “… and only ever with their willing consent.”
Legal struck it before the painters reached it, on grounds I quote from the opinion because I cannot improve on them: of the four clauses, it was the only one enforceable against us. A statement of character is not actionable. A promise is. So the promise came off the wall, the character stayed on it, and Legal went back down to the basement rear having won the only argument it has ever won in this building.
I shall be plain, because there is a way of reading that paragraph which does me no credit. We take volunteers. They sign a contract the size of a phone book, they are paid sixty dollars in cash the same day, and any man may turn round at the gate house. The form is printed in full elsewhere and I invite you to read every line of it, which is more than most of the signatories have managed. The clause came off the wall for a lawyer’s reason. It did not come off because I stopped meaning it.
Interoffice Memorandum
You will paint three lines in the foyer, eleven feet across, so that a man coming out of the elevator cannot arrange to be looking elsewhere. Institutional Grey, the warm one, same batch as the curtain stock. No border, no rule, no ornament. If I wanted a certificate I would have had one framed.
The copy sheet you were sent carries four lines. Paint the first three. Do not ask me about the fourth, do not telephone this office about the fourth, and do not raise it with the men. It is a matter between myself and three attorneys in the basement, settled in their favour, which I set down here because it will not happen again. Dry by the twentieth.
Cave JohnsonPresident & Founder
The sign painter’s invoice is for four lines. We were billed for four and we paid for four and I have the invoice in the second drawer, filed under nothing, where it will stay. He has never asked me for it back. — C.
The Company Anthem
In 1954 I had an anthem written. Forty dollars to a man in Marketing for the tune, the words supplied by me in an afternoon, four verses for mixed voices, intended for the Christmas gathering in the commissary. It has gone unsung at five consecutive gatherings. The steno pool declines. They decline politely, in writing, and every year on the same stated ground, which is the fourth verse. Three are printed below.
Aperture Forever — Words by the President, 1954. Air: “The Michigan Volunteer”
A bolt of vinyl, four hundred dollars,
a garage and a Michigan sky;
the Army bought two hundred thousand
and not a one ran dry.
We bought the hole, we left the salt,
we sank it shaft by shaft;
and the gentlemen who said it could not be done
are gentlemen at whom we laughed.
We do what we must because we can,
we can because we’re here;
and the question is never whether, boys,
the question is only the year.
That is the creed. Eight words, twelve years, not a comma altered. It is painted where the elevator opens and repeated on enamel at every landing to the bottom, and it is the reason there is a company here at all instead of a hole full of salt and a man in a garage with a good idea and no nerve. Read it on your way in. Then get down the shaft. The seven o’clock car does not wait.
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderDictated 2 April 1959. Transcribed and set without alteration. Form ASI-103.