Repulsion Gel
A high-rebound industrial emulsion in Aperture Orange, sold by the pail, the drum and the tank car. It spent eleven months of its life trying to be a dessert. That part is on this sheet too, because this company does not hide a failure. It puts a catalogue number on it.
In the spring of 1954 I told the Materials Division to invent a pudding. Not a better pudding. A pudding with nothing in it. The country is getting heavy, the country would like to keep eating, and I saw no reason on this earth why a man should not sit down to four bowls of dessert and get up lighter than he sat down. Materials said it could not be done. I asked them what it would cost to be wrong. Eleven months later I had a substance that goes into a man and does not stay in a man, and that is where the dietetic programme and I parted company.
Here is the honest history, because the Legal Department tells me it is going to come out anyway. Repulsion Gel No. 203 was formulated as a dietetic pudding substitute. It was mixed in the third-floor kitchen by men in aprons. It came in six flavours. It was tested on seventeen volunteers from the steno pool and the machine shop, three spoonfuls apiece, and not one of those seventeen men kept it down. That is a total and unqualified failure of a dessert.
But here is the thing nobody wrote in the report and everybody in that room saw. It did not come back up. It came back off. It hit the linoleum and it went straight back at the ceiling, and it hit the ceiling and it came back at the floor, and the seventeenth man put down his spoon and said, without any prompting from me, “Mr. Johnson, that is not a pudding, that is a trampoline.”
I gave him a hundred dollars on the spot. The pudding programme closed that afternoon. The bouncing did not close and has not closed since.
What we sell you now is that same emulsion with the sugar taken out and the solids doubled. You brush it on at a nominal eighth of an inch and it cures in forty minutes, and thereafter anything that strikes that surface leaves it faster than it arrived. Warehouses buy it for loading docks. The Enrichment Center paints entire chambers with it. Two gentlemen in Wisconsin bought a drum for a gymnasium and I have not heard from them since, which I choose to read as satisfaction.
The lab boys will tell you they do not know what element is doing it. They have run the spectrograph eleven times. There is a line in there that belongs to nothing on the chart, and when I ask them about it they get quiet and look at their shoes. All I need to know about this product is on the drum: it is lively, it is orange, and it does not like the human skeleton.
Product No. 203, In Brief
- Catalogue No.
- ASI-203
- Form
- Thixotropic emulsion, opaque
- Colour
- Aperture Orange. No other colour is offered.
- Applied thickness
- 1/8 in. nominal
- Coverage
- 40 sq. ft. per gallon
- Cure
- 40 minutes at 68°F
- Coefficient of restitution
- 1.09
- Service temperature
- −20°F to 190°F
- Pail, 5 gallon
- $46.00
- Drum, 55 gallon
- $412.00
- Tank car
- Price on application. Bring a siding.
- Principal element
- Not established. Eleven attempts.
“Nobody kept it down. Everybody bounced. Gentlemen, we are in the wrong business and I have just found out which one.”
I. The Nutritional Claims, As Printed In 1955, Struck
These claims appeared on the label of the dietetic preparation for eleven months. They are reproduced struck through, because the President’s standing instruction to Records is that a withdrawn claim is still a claim and still belongs in the file.
Claims as printed, Repulsion Gel dietetic preparation, first label, 1955
| Claim As Printed | Basis At The Time | Present Status |
|---|---|---|
| Correct. | Withdrawn. Correct, and withdrawn. | |
| Six flavours. | Withdrawn 1955 | |
| None offered. | Withdrawn. Nothing about it settles. | |
| One physician. Ours. On salary. | Withdrawn at the request of the physician | |
| Not established. | Withdrawn urgently, 14 February 1955 | |
| The exact opposite is the product. | Retained, in the industrial specification, unaltered |
Struck matter retained under the President’s standing instruction to Records. Materials has asked twice for the whole table to be destroyed and has been refused twice.
The Six Flavours, For The Record
- No. 1
- Vanilla. It tasted of vanilla and of the drum.
- No. 2
- Chocolate (Approximate)
- No. 3
- Butterscotch. The best of them, genuinely, and I will hear no argument.
- No. 4
- Peach, Nearly
- No. 5
- Rhubarb. Discontinued 1955 at the unanimous written request of the tasting panel, which is the only unanimous thing that panel ever did.
- No. 6
- Beef. It was a beef pudding. It was my idea and I stand behind it.
II. The Industrial Specification
Rebound is measured by dropping a twelve-pound test mass from a marked post and reading the top of the first return with a stop-watch and an honest man. The figures are the mean of forty drops. Where a figure is absent it is absent for a reason, and the reason is in the note column.
Measured rebound, twelve-pound test mass, Materials Division test bay, February 1959
| Prepared Surface | Drop | First Return | Division Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poured concrete, unprepared | 10 ft. | 11 ft. 2 in. | Nominal. Sell this figure. |
| Enamel wall plate | 10 ft. | 11 ft. 9 in. | The plate was afterwards recovered from the gallery. |
| Painted steel decking | 10 ft. | 12 ft. 4 in. | Preferred substrate. |
| Gel upon cured gel | 10 ft. | 19 ft. 1 in. | Permitted. |
| Gel upon gel upon gel | 10 ft. | — | Not permitted. See Operations, Chamber 8. |
| One volunteer, in boots, from the observation gallery | 22 ft. | 24 ft. 7 in. | Reading taken on the sixth pass. He was still gaining at the ninth and we stopped counting to go and get him. |
| Lower gallery, Test Shaft 09 | 4,000 ft. | Still in progress at time of printing | Discontinued as a line of enquiry. |
Materials has requested a taller post four times. Accounting has approved a taller post once and the post has not arrived.
Before Application
- Surface swept, dry, and free of loose material.
- Boots on. Not shoes. Boots, laced, above the ankle.
- Ceiling of the space inspected and reported sound.
- All personnel informed which way is now up.
- A second man posted outside the door, awake, with a rope.
III. The Tasting Panel
Seventeen men from the steno pool and the machine shop volunteered in January 1955. Each took three spoonfuls. They were paid sixty dollars, cash, same as any volunteer, and signed the same contract, the one the size of a phone book, and I want it on this sheet that every one of those seventeen men walked out of that kitchen on his own feet. Some of them took a while to come down.
Medical Findings, Tasting Panel, Twelve-Month Review, January 1956
- Panel size
- 17
- Retained the preparation
- 0
- Reported no effect whatever
- 14
- Reported “a feeling of lift”
- 3
- Reported it again at twelve months
- 3
- Reported it again at forty-eight months
- 3
- Dental findings at review
- Eleven men, upper and lower. Recovered from the ceiling. Six sets were re-seated and five were not recoverable in a condition permitting re-seating.
- Panel reconvened
- Never. The Division declines.
Medical footnote. Three members of the tasting panel continue to present at the gate house each spring for review. Medical’s position is that there is no clinical finding to review and that the men are therefore not patients of this company. The dental plan described in Form ASI-502 was extended to the Upper Peninsula in 1956 and the Personnel Department wishes it recorded that the two facts are unrelated.
The three of them still come every March. They stand at the gate for an hour and then they get the bus back. Medical will not open a file because Medical says there is nothing in the file. I have been paying their fares out of petty cash for four years and I am going to go on paying them. — C.
Interoffice Memorandum
Stop trying to make it a pudding. Eleven months, seventeen men, and not one bowl of it stayed where a bowl of it is supposed to stay. Do not bring me a flavour. Do not bring me a thickener. Do not bring me the beef one again.
Bring me a drum of it, a brush, and the worst floor in this building, and paint the floor, and then get out of the room and let something heavy fall on it. Then telephone me at home, whatever the hour, and tell me how far up it went.
You have not failed. You have succeeded at something else and you are the last men in Michigan to notice.
Cave JohnsonPresident & Founder
Sample Tin — Repulsion Gel No. 203 — Four Ounces — Post Free
Cut here and post to the Materials Division, The Enrichment Center, Test Shaft 09, Upper Peninsula, Michigan, or telephone ENrichment 9-0943. One tin per plant. Tins are shipped upright and are to be opened upright.
Form ASI-203. No. 203 is warranted against failure of adhesion and against nothing else whatever. Aperture Science Innovators accepts no liability for injury sustained above the level of the treated surface, which is to say for any injury sustained in a room in which the product has been correctly applied. Ingestion is not a use of this product. Persons who have ingested it should remain seated, remain calm, and remain indoors. See Form ASI-900, clauses IV and IX, and the further material at Form ASI-402, which the Materials Division prepared under protest.