The Salt Mine At Upper Michigan
A worked-out salt mine, bought in January 1944 for the hole rather than the salt, and presently containing nine test shafts, a reactor, an incinerator, a commissary, six bowling lanes, 1,247 people and one question the Facilities Department has stopped putting in writing.
Everybody who writes about this company writes about the curtain, and then the hole, and they get the order right and the emphasis wrong. The hole is not where the science happens. The hole is the science. There is no laboratory in the Republic that can hold a column of air four thousand feet tall at a steady sixty-eight degrees, and I did not build one either. I bought one, in January 1944, off a salt concern that could not have been happier to see the back of it.
They apologised for the salt. They apologised the whole afternoon. There is no salt left in it, they said, as though a man in my position walks into a room looking for salt. I told them what I have told everybody since: I am not in the salt business. I am in the hole business, and this is the finest hole in North America, and I would like to pay you for it now, before you notice.
Sixteen years later there are 1,247 people working in that hole, and a rail spur, and a commissary that does a pie, and six bowling lanes on the surface with a league in them, and a gate house with the same man in it since 1951. There is also, on the fourth survey, four thousand feet of tunnel that was here before we were and does not appear on any drawing the sellers gave us. Facilities calls this the inherited plant. I call it a bargain.
On The Salt, Since Somebody Always Asks
The mine came with the salt still in it. Not all of it — they took what was worth taking and then some — but there is salt down there, in quantity, in the west drifts, and it has been sitting in the dark since before this company had a name. Accounting has never entered it as an asset. Accounting cannot enter it as an asset without a tonnage, and a tonnage requires a man with a lamp and a tape measure walking west for a day and a half, and the last time Facilities proposed that survey the estimate came back at eleven hundred dollars and the President wrote one word on it and the word was “no.”
So the salt is not on the books. It is the only thing this company owns that has never been costed, and I am told the sum involved is somewhere between forty thousand dollars and nothing at all, and I sleep exceptionally well.
Site, In Brief
- Acquired
- January 1944
- Former use
- Salt. Worked out. Allegedly.
- Surface acreage
- 1,410 acres, fenced
- Grade to deepest level
- 4,000 ft. (Engineering: 4 km.)
- Test shafts sunk
- 9
- Test shafts in service
- 7
- Gate house
- One. Manned since 1951.
- Rail
- Private spur, 2.6 miles
- Below the water table
- Twelve levels. Two are ours.
“Run the spur to my gate and I will fill your cars for twenty years. Run it to the county road and I will dig my own railway, and I will enjoy it.”
The Nine Shafts
Shafts 01 through 04 were sunk in 1951 by men who had spent eighteen months hanging curtains and were ready for a change. Shafts 05 and 06 followed in 1953, 08 in 1957, and Test Shaft 09 opened on 11 March of this year, four months early, by the straightforward method of not asking the engineers how long it would take. Shaft 07 is dealt with in the table and will not be dealt with twice.
Test shafts, depth, opening date and present status. Fourth survey, Facilities Department.
| Shaft | Depth | Opened | Present Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 640 ft. | 1951 | In service. Instruction and demonstration. |
| 02 | 900 ft. | 1951 | In service. Materials, gel decanting. |
| 03 | 1,150 ft. | 1951 | In service. Chambers 1 through 6. |
| 04 | 1,400 ft. | 1951 | In service. Emancipation grill trials. |
| 05 | 1,860 ft. | 1953 | In service. Faith plate range. |
| 06 | 2,100 ft. | 1953 | In service. Corridor 6 remains closed at the far end. |
| 07 | 2,400 ft. | 1954 | Closed below the fourth level, 1955. Above the fourth level: lit, heated, swept weekly, entered by nobody. The signage below the fourth level reads right to left. It was not painted that way. |
| 08 | 3,100 ft. | 1957 | In service. Computation, Sub-Level 4 plant. |
| 09 | 4,000 ft. | 1959 | In service. Enrichment spheres, foyer painted 1952 against a shaft opened this March, a discrepancy Records has been asked about and has answered. See ASI-301. |
Facilities gives depths in feet and arrives at four thousand. Engineering gives them in metres and arrives at four kilometres. Both figures are in daily use, both appear in this publication, and neither department will move. The President has ruled that the hole is whatever depth the man standing in it says it is.
The Surface
- Gate house
- One man, one stove, one ledger. Mr. E. Pike, since 1951. He has not been late.
- Head frame
- Steel, 94 ft., repainted every second spring in Institutional Grey
- Curtain works
- Two shops, 61 sewing stations, still the largest single building on the site
- Commissary
- Ninety covers. Pie daily. The pie is the reason the bus runs early.
- Company store
- Credit against the pay envelope. Terms on Form ASI-502.
- Housing
- Aperture Row: 88 units, 44 duplexes, one water tower, no through road
- Bowling
- Six lanes, league play Wednesdays. Marine Division fields a team of one.
- Rail spur
- 2.6 miles to the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic. Ours. Bought outright, 1948.
- Fence
- 9,700 yards. Two gates. One is welded and has been since 1955.
Below Grade
Seven sub-levels are surveyed, drawn, lit and on the fire plan. They are listed here in full, because the Facilities Department has been asked for such a list eleven times in four years and proposes to be asked a twelfth time by somebody who has not read this sheet.
Sub-levels, principal plant, and the temperature at which each is held.
| Level | Principal Plant | Held At |
|---|---|---|
| Sub-Level 1 | Cage landing, muster hall, lamp room, first aid | 68° |
| Sub-Level 2 | Machine shop, curtain overflow store, the good lathe | 64° |
| Sub-Level 3 | Materials. Gel decanting, resin ovens, and the fires that Records has for five years insisted on filing under “third floor.” | 71° |
| Sub-Level 4 | Computation. Eleven tons of relays and one punch-card reader | 58° |
| Sub-Level 5 | Incinerator, rated 1,100°. It is not for documents. | — |
| Sub-Level 6 | Reactor and reactor room. Cleaned nightly by Greg. | Warm |
| Sub-Level 7 | Records, deep storage. Forty feet below the water table and dry by machinery alone. The stair continues past the Records door for a further nine flights. Facilities has measured it twice and got two answers. | 51° |
The incinerator placard reading NOT FOR DOCUMENTS was added in enamel by a hand unknown to this department. Facilities did not order it, has not removed it, and concurs with it.
The reactor is a matter of some pride and very little conversation. It was installed in 1954, it runs the pumps, the lights, the ventilation plant, the elevators and the whole of the Computation load, and in five years it has been shut down exactly once, for eleven minutes, on a Tuesday, for reasons entered in the log as “Greg.”
The pumps are the true wonder of this facility and nobody comes to see them. Four of them, on Sub-Level 7, moving eight hundred gallons a minute out of a level that has no business being dry. Stop them and the level is a lake in forty hours. They have not stopped. They will not stop. The company has a second reactor budgeted for no other purpose than to make certain of it.
A Memorandum From The Office Of The President
Interoffice Memorandum
Facilities has submitted a proposal recommending that excavation below Sub-Level 7 be discontinued on the grounds of water, cost and what the proposal calls, in paragraph four, “the character of the ground.” I have read paragraph four eleven times. Paragraph four does not say what the character of the ground is. Paragraph four says that the men would rather not.
I did not buy a hole to stop at the bottom of it. Nobody in this company has ever been paid to find out how deep a thing is not. Buy another pump. Buy four. If the water wins, we will establish what the water wants and we will sell it something.
Excavation continues. Mr. Pike is instructed to log every man down and every man up, by name, nightly, and to bring me the ledger himself on any evening the two columns fail to agree.
Cave JohnsonPresident & Founder
The columns failed to agree on the 14th, the 19th and the 27th of last month. Mr. Pike brought me the ledger on all three evenings because the President was in Washington, and I have kept all three, and I have not yet decided what a person does with them. — C.
That is the facility. Fourteen hundred acres of the Upper Peninsula, most of it trees, and underneath it the largest privately held hole in North America with the finest testing programme in the Republic running at the bottom of it. Men come up here from Chicago expecting a mine and they find a town, a railway, a pie, a bowling league and a column of air four thousand feet deep with science falling down it, and to a man they say the same thing, which is that they had no idea. Nobody has any idea. That is the pleasure of the thing.
Come and see it. Write ahead — the correspondence sheet explains why that is a longer sentence than it looks — and Mr. Pike will have your name in the ledger and a hard hat in your size. Then go and read how the whole thing started, which was with a curtain, and which nobody believes until they have seen the works.
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderForm ASI-105. Fourth survey, Facilities Department, approved for printing without amendment.