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According to the Aperture Science website, the company was founded in 1953 by Cave Johnson for the sole purpose of making shower curtains for the U.S. military. However, after becoming mentally unstable from mercury poisoning in 1978, Johnson created a "three tier" research and development plan to make his organization successful. The first two tiers, the "Heimlich Counter-Maneuver" (a maneuver designed to ensure choking) and the "Take-A-Wish Foundation" (a program to give the wishes of dying children to unrelated, entirely healthy adults), were commercial failures and led to an investigation of the company by the U.S. Senate. However, when the investigative committee heard of the success of the third tier, a "man-sized ad-hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain", they recessed permanently and gave Aperture Science an open-ended contract to continue their research. The development of GLaDOS, an "artificially intelligent research assistant and disk operating system", began in 1986 in response to Black Mesa's work on similar portal technology.[17] A presentation seen during gameplay reveals that GLaDOS was also included in a proposed bid for de-icing fuel lines, incorporated as a "fully functional disk-operation system" which is "arguably alive", unlike Black Mesa's proposal which "inhibits ice, nothing more."[18] Roughly thirteen years later, work on GLaDOS was completed and the untested AI was activated during the company's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day in 1993. The record ends at that point on a positive note.