The Aerial Faith Plate
A spring-loaded steel plate, flush with the floor, that throws a man across a room in a trajectory Applied Sciences can predict to the inch. The faith is required on the part of the man. The plate has none and needs none; it is a plate.
It began as a loading-dock device. A crate on the plate, a man at the lever, and the crate on the far side of the yard without a fork-lift or a second man. Then a machinist stood on it to see whether it worked with a crate his own weight, and it did, and he arrived on the far side of the yard upright, and Applied Sciences has been refining the upright part ever since.
The plate is the simplest thing this company sells and the one that frightens visitors the most, and I want to say why, because it is instructive. A hole in the wall is strange, and strange things are easy to accept, because there is nothing to compare them to. A plate that throws you across a room is not strange. It is a thing you understand completely, in the half-second before it does it.
- Model
- ASI-207/A, floor-mounted, single throw
- Plate
- Steel, 30 in. square, flush
- Release
- Weight-triggered, 90 lb. minimum
- Throw, rated
- 44 ft. at 180 lb., level floor
- Angle
- Fixed at manufacture. Do not adjust.
- Reset
- Automatic. Four seconds. Do not stand on it during.
- Landing
- See section below
- Price
- $1,140 f.o.b. Upper Michigan. Installation extra.
Trajectory
Measured throw by subject mass, level floor, ASI-207/A
| Mass | Throw | Apex | Air time | Landing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 90 lb. | 61 ft. | 14 ft. | 1.9 s | Upright. Alarmed. |
| 120 lb. | 54 ft. | 12 ft. | 1.8 s | Upright |
| 150 lb. | 48 ft. | 11 ft. | 1.7 s | Upright |
| 180 lb. | 44 ft. | 10 ft. | 1.6 s | Upright. Rated. |
| 210 lb. | 39 ft. | 9 ft. | 1.5 s | Upright, mostly |
| 240 lb. | 34 ft. | 8 ft. | 1.4 s | Seated |
| Crate, 300 lb. | 28 ft. | 7 ft. | 1.3 s | Crate |
| Storage cube, weighted | 22 ft. | 6 ft. | 1.1 s | Cube. Every time. It is a cube. |
| Subject, unrecorded | — | Ceiling | — | — |
Figures are for a level floor and a subject who does nothing. A subject who does something — reaches, turns, objects — will land somewhere else, and Applied Sciences has stopped predicting where.
Landing
Legal has asked that this section exist, and Applied Sciences has written it, and I have read it, and it says what it needs to say in one sentence, which is this: the plate is responsible for the throw and the customer is responsible for the landing.
The plate delivers a man to a point in space that Applied Sciences can name to the inch. What he does when he arrives at that point is between him and the floor. We have observed four thousand throws and the volunteers who land best are the ones who do least, which is a finding I have passed to the Personnel Department for its own purposes.
Arrangements For Landing, Available At Extra Cost
- ASI-207/L1 — Nothing
- No charge. Our most popular arrangement.
- ASI-207/L2 — Second plate, receiving
- $1,140. Catches and re-throws. Popular with nobody.
- ASI-207/L3 — Repulsion gel, floor
- $60 / gal. The subject arrives and then leaves again.
- ASI-207/L4 — An aperture
- See Form ASI-202. Converts the landing into a different landing, elsewhere.
- ASI-207/L5 — A man with a net
- Withdrawn 1957. The man was consulted.
“The plate is responsible for the throw. You are responsible for the landing. Everything in this building works that way and most things in life do too.”
He named it. Applied Sciences wanted “launch plate”. He said nobody has ever bought a thing called a launch plate and he was right and it has sold forty. — C.
Form ASI-207. Landing arrangements are supplied under Form ASI-900, clause II, items eight through ten. Repulsion gel for arrangement L3 is described at Form ASI-203; the aperture for L4 at Form ASI-202.