The Aperture Fixtures Shower Curtain
Calendered vinyl. A hem weighted with eleven ounces of lead shot. Twelve rolled brass grommets. It hangs true, it sheds water, and every other sheet in this publication is downstream of it.
This is the product. Not the first product — the product. Men come up here from the magazines wanting to be shown the hole, and I take them out to the surface plant first and stand them in front of a curtain line running at four hundred units the hour, because if you do not understand the curtain you will not understand one word of the rest of it.
I started in a rented garage in 1943 with four hundred dollars and a bolt of vinyl and cut the first hundred on a kitchen table. By December of that year the trade had a plaque with my name on it. A man does not get a plaque for enthusiasm. He gets it for shipping.
The United States Army signed in the autumn of 1943 and took delivery of two hundred thousand curtains by the January in which I bought the mine. The Army does not take a manufacturer’s word for anything. They pulled eleven hundred at random, hung them, filled them and left them filled for eight hours, and not one of them leaked. Not one. If you have never had to make two hundred thousand of a thing and have every single one come out right, then you have never had a standard imposed on you, and you are not qualified to have opinions about my volunteer programme either.
That contract paid for the hole. The hole paid for the shafts. In 1956 the Eisenhower administration put an Aperture curtain in every branch of the United States military with the single exception of the Navy. The Navy wrote us a letter about it. The letter is in the safe. The letter is not in this catalogue.
Sixteen years on, this curtain outsells every other line in this company by nine hundred to one, and I want that printed in the same type as the science, because it is the same company.
The Curtain, In Brief
- Catalogue No.
- AF-1
- In manufacture
- Continuously since 1943
- Material
- Calendered vinyl, .008 in.
- Hem
- Sewn channel, 11 oz. lead shot
- Grommets
- Twelve. Rolled brass.
- Seams
- Heat-sealed. No thread. Thread wicks.
- Price, household
- $3.95
- Price, case of twelve
- $41.40
- Price, military specification
- $4.20
- Recalls to date
- None
He raised it from ten to twelve on the ninth of April, 1948, and he will tell you he does not remember why. I typed the letter to Mrs. Kowalczyk in Marquette that March. I remember perfectly well. — C.
“Anybody can put a hole in a wall. It takes a manufacturer to keep the water on one side of it.”
How It Is Made
The vinyl is calendered on the surface plant to eight thousandths of an inch, which is thicker than the trade uses and thicker than it needs to be, because a curtain that a man can see his hand through is a curtain he will not buy twice. It is cut on a fixed table, not a roller table. The seams are heat-sealed. We do not sew a seam that will be under water, because thread wicks, and a firm that sells a wicking curtain deserves the correspondence it gets.
The hem carries eleven ounces of lead shot in a sewn channel, which is what makes the drop hang true and what makes the curtain sit against the tub instead of standing off it in the draught. Every man who has copied us has copied the vinyl and none of them has copied the hem, because the hem costs money and the customer cannot see it. The customer can feel it. I have built a company of four figures on things the customer cannot see and can feel.
The line is run by fifty-one women out of Marquette and Ishpeming, several of whom have been on it since 1944, and they are counted in the 1,247 people on this company’s payroll and are not counted last.
The Range
Colours presently offered. Yardage is the 1958 twelve-month figure, surface plant.
| Colour | Cat. No. | Yards, 1958 | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Institutional Grey | AF-1-G | 214,000 | The colour of the Republic. Ships from stock. |
| Institutional Grey (Warm) | AF-1-GW | 96,500 | Grey, but forgiving. Introduced 1949 at the request of hotels. |
| Green, Shaft Seven | AF-1-X | 0 | Special order. Not ordered since 1951. Eight bolts remain in the surface store and nobody has moved them. |
The green was matched in 1951 against a sample the President brought up himself. Materials has never reproduced the sample and has stopped being asked to. The eight bolts are carried on the books at cost.
The Acceptance Trials Of 1944
United States Army acceptance trials, Marquette, February 1944, and one trial conducted afterwards by ourselves.
| Trial | Method | Standard | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Filled and hung, eight hours | No seepage | Pass. 1,100 of 1,100. |
| 2 | Dead weight, single grommet | 25 lb. | Pass at 61 lb. |
| 3 | Humid chamber, thirty days | No growth | Pass. |
| 4 | Vertical flame, twelve seconds | Self-extinguishing | Pass. The curtain will not carry a flame. |
| 5 | Outdoors, Michigan, February | Flexible at −40°F | Pass. Two men were less flexible than the curtain. |
| 6 | Hung on Sub-Level 2, salt atmosphere | No degradation, one year | Pass. Recovered 1958. Still serviceable. |
| 9 | One curtain, one emulsion, two rooms | No standard exists | See Note 4. |
Trials 1 through 6 were conducted under Army supervision. Trials 7 and 8 were withdrawn by us before observation. Trial 9 was not conducted under anybody’s supervision and was written up eleven days afterwards from memory.
Note 4. Concerning One Curtain, March 1953
In the spring of 1953 a man in Materials put an early emulsion down the front of a curtain hung between the wet room and the corridor of the third-floor laboratory. For somewhere between four and nine seconds — the two witnesses disagree and both have signed — that curtain was in both rooms. Not half in each. Entirely in both. Twelve grommets on the rail in the wet room and twelve grommets on the rail in the corridor, counted twice, by two men, one of whom sat down on the floor afterwards.
Everything in this catalogue printed after this sheet exists because of those nine seconds. The tunnelling device, the gels, the chambers, the whole of the Applied Quantum Tunnelling division, the nine shafts and every volunteer who has ever taken sixty dollars off this company. All of it comes out of a shower curtain, and I will not have that treated as a charming detail. It is the finding.
The curtain was undamaged. It held water afterwards. We checked. Of course we checked.
A Memorandum Concerning Grommets
Interoffice Memorandum
Effective with the next roll, every curtain leaving this plant carries twelve grommets. Not ten. Twelve. The tooling is four hundred and six dollars and I have four hundred and six dollars.
I am told Manufacturing would like a reason. Manufacturing has had sixteen memoranda from this desk and has been given a reason in eleven of them, which is a better ratio than Manufacturing has any right to expect. This is not one of the eleven.
Sales asks whether the customer will notice. The customer will notice. That is not why either. Nobody in this building is to write the number ten on a curtain drawing again.
Cave JohnsonPresident & Founder
Order Form — Aperture Fixtures Model AF-1
Sizes stocked
- 54 × 72 in. — domestic, tub
- 72 × 72 in. — domestic, standard
- 72 × 84 in. — hotel and hospital
- 84 × 84 in. — barracks, military specification
- 72 in. × 4,000 ft. — special order. One made. Hung in Test Shaft 09 in 1957, top to bottom, and still hanging. Not repeatable at this price.