Our Story So Far

Every company likes to tell you it started small. Most of them are lying, because most of them started with a bank, a brother-in-law and a going concern. This one started with four hundred dollars, a rented garage with a dirt floor, a bolt of vinyl forty yards long, and a thirty-four-year-old man who had correctly worked out that the United States of America was about to build a great many bathrooms and had not yet decided who was going to hang anything in them.

That was 1943. The company was called Aperture Fixtures and it sold one product, and it sold it hard enough that by December of that same year the trade named its founder Shower Curtain Salesman of the Year, which is an honour a certain sort of man would be embarrassed by. The President is not that sort of man. The trophy is on the third floor. Nobody is to move the trophy.

The word “aperture” was chosen because it made the curtain sound more hygienic. That is the whole of the reasoning and it worked, and there is a lesson in it that the entire research programme of this company has been built on since: the name of a thing changes what people will do with it.

January 1944 — He Bought The Hole

A worked-out salt mine came up for sale in the Upper Peninsula. The salt was gone. The sellers were embarrassed about the salt. They kept apologising for the salt. What they had left, and what they could not seem to give away, was a shaft complex whose tunnels run four kilometres straight down into the oldest rock on the continent, dry, cold, structurally sound, and absolutely private.

He bought the hole. He has never once pretended otherwise. Everything this company has built since — nine test shafts, the Enrichment Center, the spheres, the whole of the volunteer programme — is built inside a hole that a salt concern could not unload, purchased in the same winter that the United States Army took delivery of two hundred thousand Aperture curtains and reported that every single one of them held water.

1947 — The Name

By 1947 the company had a machine shop, a chemist, and a president who had begun asking the chemist questions that were not about vinyl. Sales wanted the name left alone. Sales lost. The reasoning offered at the time is reproduced further down this sheet and it has never been improved upon: a shower curtain is a portal. A low-technology portal, admittedly, between the inside of a shower and the outside of a shower, but a portal, and a firm that has spent four years perfecting the low-technology version should not be shy about the other kind.

1951 to 1953 — Down, And Then Sideways

The first four test shafts were sunk in 1951 by men who had been hanging curtains eighteen months earlier. Test Shaft 09 came later and carries its construction date painted on the foyer wall in eleven-inch letters — 1952 — which Records considers more authoritative than anything in its own cabinets, on the grounds that nobody has ever successfully argued with a wall.

Then, on a Thursday afternoon in April 1953, the lab boys put a hole in one wall of the materials laboratory and the hole came out of a different wall. There is no photograph. There was no committee. There was a curtain, a good deal of shouting, and a memorandum four hours later authorising every dollar in the building. Everything on the rest of this site follows from that Thursday.

1954 — The Programme

A hole is a curiosity until a man walks through it. In 1954 this company began paying members of the public sixty dollars, cash, same day, to do exactly that, against a contract the size of a phone book that nobody has ever finished reading and that Legal maintains is binding on the second page regardless. Since that year 4,118 volunteers have presented themselves at the gate and 1,306 have completed their testing.

Records is obliged to state that the difference between those two figures is not a measure of anything, and that a great many men simply decline the second afternoon, and that the Enrichment Center pays them anyway.

1956 — The Contract

In 1956 the Eisenhower administration awarded Aperture Science Innovators the supply of shower curtains to every branch of the United States military. Every branch. The Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard when it is being counted, and the two or three organisations that do not print their names on things.

Except the Navy. The Navy went elsewhere, and the Navy’s reasons were put in writing, and the writing is in the safe on the third floor, and the President has read it aloud at two Christmas parties. This company maintains a Marine Division to this day for reasons that are entirely to do with 1956 and not at all to do with any commercial opportunity anybody has been able to identify.

This Spring

Sixteen years on: 1,247 people on the payroll, nine shafts sunk, four kilometres of tunnel, and Test Shaft 09 running its deepest enrichment spheres in full daily operation. The curtain is still in the catalogue. The curtain still outsells the science. Nobody here finds that humiliating and neither should you.