On The Competition
A frank and entirely fair assessment of a certain research facility in New Mexico, prepared by the President personally, set in full, and passed for the press by a Legal Department which wishes the record to show that it was passed over their objection.
Every publication of this kind carries a page on which the head of the firm explains that he does not think about his competitors. This is not that page. I think about them constantly. I think about them at four in the morning on the third floor with the light on, and I have asked Records to give the thinking a form number so that at least it is filed.
I have said elsewhere in this publication that they run on federal money, a federal timetable and federal haircuts. I have had a month to reconsider that sentence and my only correction is that I should like it set larger. Everything a man does out there he does with somebody else’s money and somebody else’s permission, and by the time the permission arrives the man who wanted the thing has been promoted away from wanting it.
I will not print their name. Legal has taken the position that setting the name of a going concern in the same column as the remarks I intend to make about it invites a proceeding with a Latin term attached. So the name is struck. Records, which files what it likes and answers to nobody except me and not always me, has filed it here anyway: the Black Mesa Research Facility. The rest of this sheet is not struck.
“They publish. We finish.”
They Publish. We Finish.
Here is the whole difference and you may stop reading after it. A man out there has an idea on Monday. By Friday it is a proposal. By the spring it is a grant. By the following spring it is a paper with forty names on it, and every one of those forty men is a serious man with a serious education, and not one of the forty has been through the hole personally. Not one. They have written about the hole. They have modelled the hole. Two of them have very likely lectured on the hole at an institution with ivy on it.
I have been through the hole eleven times. I did not model it first. Somebody in Materials asked me whether I wanted to see it and I said yes, and that is the entirety of the procedure, and it has cost this company sixty dollars a man and produced nine test shafts, four thousand feet of them, in a hole I bought in January 1944 from people who thought they were selling salt.
A grant makes a careful man. I have nothing against careful men; I employ 1,247 people and a fair number of them are careful, and the ones who are careful are in Accounting where careful belongs. But careful is a way of arriving second with a footnote. When a scientist out there wants to try a thing, he asks whether he may. When a scientist here wants to try a thing, he asks whether the truck is loaded, and the answer is that the truck is always loaded, because I own the truck.
They will tell you their safety record is better than ours. It is. It is better than ours because nobody out there has been anywhere. You cannot be injured by a corridor you have not walked down. Set our figures beside theirs and ours look worse, and I want ours printed anyway, in the same type, on the same page: 4,118 volunteers since 1954, of whom 1,306 completed, every man of them paid in cash the same afternoon out of a tin on the second floor. Ask them for their tin. They will send you a form.
A Comparison, Prepared By Accounting And Not By Me
Aperture Science Innovators of Upper Michigan, compared with a certain facility in New Mexico. Their column compiled from open publication, the acknowledgements pages thereof, and two afternoons of the President reading with a pencil.
| Particular | This Company | A Certain Facility |
|---|---|---|
| Trading name | Aperture Science Innovators | Black Mesa Research Facility |
| Founded on | Four hundred dollars and a bolt of vinyl, 1943 | An appropriation |
| Time to first result, quantum tunnelling | A weekend, 1953 | Three years and continuing |
| Committees consulted before a test is authorised | None. There is a desk and there is me behind it. | Thirty-one, counted from their own acknowledgements |
| Men sent through personally by the head of the firm | Eleven | None recorded |
| Papers published, 1953 to date | Two. Both withdrawn by us. | Sixty-one. All finished. None of them a hole. |
| Depth of principal facility | 4,000 feet, nine shafts | Above the water table |
| Shower curtains manufactured to date | One million four hundred thousand, every one held water | None. The reader is invited to sit with that. |
| Branches of the United States military supplied | Every one except the Navy (1956) | Unable to determine; they were not asked |
| Naval contracts held | None | Also none, though for a different reason |
| Holes presently open in the fabric of space | Not fewer than nine at the time of setting | None that we have been shown |
Accounting notes that it was instructed to prepare a fair comparison and believes it has done so. Accounting further notes that the final three rows were supplied by the President and inserted after the table was closed.
The Three Sentences
The Legal Department read this sheet in draft. The Legal Department is three people in the basement, rear, and I pay them to be frightened so that I do not have to be. Herewith their memorandum, reproduced entire, because a company that prints the comparison ought to print the objection.
Interoffice Memorandum
The Department has reviewed the draft as dictated. The Department raises no objection to the table, the comparison, the tone, or the paragraph concerning haircuts, all of which are matters of opinion and are defensible as such.
The Department objects to three sentences, numbered in the transcript as nine, thirty-one and forty-four. Sentence nine asserts as fact a matter concerning a third party’s competence which the Department cannot substantiate and does not wish to attempt to substantiate in a courtroom. Sentence thirty-one concerns a living man. Sentence forty-four is not defamatory. Sentence forty-four is, in the professional judgement of this Department, a threat.
The Department respectfully requests deletion of all three and will accept deletion of forty-four alone. The Department asks that the President initial this memorandum to indicate which course he has chosen.
The Three Sentences, As Set
- Nine
- In sixteen years they have not built one single thing that a man could stand inside.
- Thirty-one
- Their director has never been below ground in his life and you can see it in his ceilings.
- Forty-four
- If they ever do open a hole out there, I will be the first man through it, and I will not be knocking.
Correspondence With New Mexico, 1953 To Date
- Letters received
- Fourteen
- Letters answered
- Fourteen
- Answered by the President personally
- Fourteen
- Answered on the same day received
- Thirteen
- Answered by cable, at length, at company expense
- Four
- Their men who have written asking after a position here
- Nine
- Engaged
- Two. Both in Materials. Both still with us.
- Our men who have gone to them
- One. He was not in Materials.
- Requests received for reprints of our 1953 findings
- Thirty-one
- Reprints supplied
- None. There is nothing to reprint.
Records & Filing — Card 106/c
Letter, undated, postmark New Mexico, received 19 January 1959. One page. Enquires whether this company would consider a joint programme, terms to be discussed, and asks in the final paragraph what our men are using as a conductor. Answered same day by the President, by cable, in nine words. Cable retained. Nine words not retained.
The 1953 paper he tells everybody we never needed to publish is in my second drawer, sealed, addressed and stamped. He told me to hold it until the device worked. The device worked in November. He has never once asked me for it back. — C.
On Being Second
I want to close on something that will not read like a boast, which is unusual for me, so pay attention. There is exactly one thing those men have that I want, and it is not their money and it is not their building and it is certainly not their forty-name papers. It is that when one of them dies of old age, somebody at a university will know his name.
Nobody is going to know the names of my people. Not the machinists, not the men in the shafts, not the fellow who paints the chamber numbers, not the girl who runs this entire company from a desk outside my door. Our papers are withdrawn, our patents are filed under curtains, and the finest work done in North America in the last six years was done four thousand feet under the Upper Peninsula by men whose names are on a payroll and nowhere else.
That is the price of finishing instead of publishing, and I have paid it cheerfully every year since 1943 and I will pay it again. But I have thought about it at four in the morning, on the third floor, with the light on. Now go and read the catalogue, and then go and read theirs, and then tell me which of the two you could stand inside.
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderDictated 4 March 1959. Passed for the press over the objection of counsel, which objection is printed above at the President’s insistence.