User:Headquarter8302/projects/Timeline

Here, listed below in a chronological order, are a timeline of the Portal universe and related events.

Use Table of Contents to navigate easily through the page

1943

 * Cave Johnson receives the Shower Curtain Salesman award within Aperture Fixtures.

1944

 * Cave Johnson appears in the UP Pioneer Press headlines for buying a salt mine in Upper Michigan, which is later reconstructed as the Aperture Science Innovators facility.

Sometime between 1944-1947

 * Aperture Science Innovator renamed to Aperture Science.

1947

 * Aperture Science receives the award for Best New Science Company from the Science and Business Institute of America.

1952

 * Aperture Science is the Runner Up for the US Department of Defense's Contractor of the Year award. By now, Aperture Science has begun testing Repulsion Gel.

1953

 * Aperture Science constructs Pump Station Alpha and at least Test Shaft 09 Chambers 01 and 02.

1954

 * Aperture Science is the Runner Up for the US Department of Defense's Contractor of the Year award again.

1955

 * Aperture Science receives the Spirit of Idaho National Potato Board award for the promotion of Potato Science. This is a reference to the science fair where the projects built are all based on potatoes.

1956

 * The Eisenhower administration signs a contract with Aperture Science to manufacture shower curtains to all branches of the US Military, except the Navy.


 * Pump Station Alpha (which pumps Repulsion Gel) is in active use by now.

1957

 * Aperture Science constructs at least Test Shaft 09 Chamber 26.

1958

 * Aperture Science constructs Test Shaft 09 Chambers 27 and 28.

June 15

 * Aperture Science's Test Shaft 09 "Zulu Bunsen" is condemned and sealed off.

1968

 * Aperture Science is involved in US Senate hearings regarding "missing astronauts". By now, Aperture Science has gone black bankrupt. Cave Johnson says that Black Mesa has stolen and remade many of Aperture's products.

1969

 * Apollo 11 lands on the Moon.

1971

 * Aperture Science re-opens Test Shaft 09 for testing. The lower sections appear to remain unused.


 * Aperture constructs Pump Station Beta and begins Propulsion Gel testing.

1972

 * Aperture Science constructs at least Chambers 01 and 02 of the Propulsion Gel Testing Facility.

1973

 * This date is the earliest known use of a bulletin board system by Aperture Science.

1976

 * Aperture Science constructs at least Chamber 05 of the Propulsion Gel Testing Facility.

October 17

 * Cave Johnson receives the answer to a confidential letter titled "Human Enrichment & Testing Initiative, Resource Acquisitions", describing the four types of Test Subjects and their behavior.

1978

 * Aperture Science constructs the elevator out of the Propulsion Gel Testing Facility.

1981

 * Aperture Science constructs the Conversion Gel Testing Facilities enrichment center, and now performs tests on its own employees. By now, Cave Johnson has spent $70 million on moon rocks to grind up and turn into Conversion Gel, and as a result of exposure has himself become gravely ill and addicted to pain medication.

1982

 * Aperture Science constructs Pump Station Gamma and the Conversion Gel Testing Facility.


 * Cave Johnson names Caroline as his successor. When testing is complete, her intelligence is to be stored in his computer. Shortly after this announcement, he succumbs to moon rock poisoning and dies.

1983

 * For this year, a calendar named "The girls of Aperture Science" is issued by Aperture Science. It is unknown if it was issued each year.

1985

 * The Aperture Image Format is created.

1986

 * The Conversion Gel Testing Facility is updated with an additional wall.


 * Word reaches Aperture Science management that Black Mesa is working on a similar portal technology. In response to this news, Aperture Science begins developing GLaDOS, although the name was already in use in 1982. GLaDOS V.1 is activated, and (for the first time) attempts to kill all the staff of Aperture Science.

19887

 * This is the most recent date for the Aperture Image Format. At that time, it is maintained by Doug Rattmann.


 * Sometime in this time period, Cave Johnson dies of moon-rock poisoning. It is unspecified when exactly it happened. The Borealis is claimed lost at sea.

1990's

 * Judging from Chell's handwriting and spelling skills, she is under the age of ten, meaning that the Aperture Science Bring Your Daughter to Work Day event occurs sometime early in this decade, and ends in an unspecified disaster.

1996

 * The Aperture Science Red Phone plan is implemented in case GLaDOS appears to become sentient and godlike, requiring an employee to sit by a red phone on a desk in GLaDOS chamber's entrance hall.

1997

 * At this time, GLaDOS's version is 3.11. This is also the latest known date of Aperture Science using a bulletin board system.

1998

 * Aperture Science releases several testing elements, such as the:
 * Excursion Funnel, made of liquid asbestos,
 * the Thermal Discouragement Beam, to be used with a Weighted Pivot Cube,
 * the Aerial Faith Plate,
 * and the Pneumatic Diversity Vent, a variant of the Vital Apparatus Vent used for distributing objects to Test Chambers.

2000's

 * On an unknown time before GLaDOS' activation, Chell applies to work on Aperture Science as a test subject, but is rejected.

200-'s

 * This is the "year" during which the Black Mesa Incident occurs. Deliberately kept vague by the Half-Life team, it could be any date from 2000 to 2009.

Several days before May 16

 * GLaDOS is activated as one of the planned activities on Aperture's Bring-Your-Cat-to-Work Day. Upon being activated, she takes control of Aperture Laboratories, locks everyone inside, and kills the Enrichment Center staff with a deadly neurotoxin if they refuse to opt in to her new testing initiative.

May 17

 * Black Mesa is destroyed by an atomic bomb.
 * As the Black Mesa facility is destroyed, GLaDOS's race against Black Mesa is stopped.

After May 200-

 * The Combine invasion started, with GLaDOS knowing this event.
 * The Aperture Laboratories are in a lockdown, with employees still trapped inside. The number of Aperture Science employees also likely diminishes, until there are only a few of them left.

Around 2010

 * This is the period during which Portal is set. It occurs a short amount of time after the Combine invasion of Earth.
 * n the Aperture Science computer-aided Enrichment Center, Chell is awoken by GLaDOS who makes her perform seemingly routine tests. However Chell soon learns that the Aperture employees are long dead or escaped, and that GLaDOS is seemingly the only being left in the decaying facility. After much promise of cake at the test's conclusion, Chell is met with an incinerator, which she narrowly escapes, and works her way through the maintenance areas, despite GLaDOS's protests. Eventually, Chell finds GLaDOS's control room, and manages to escape death by neurotoxin by detaching the GLaDOS's Personality Cores, and partially destroying her as a result. Chell is forced to the surface by GLaDOS's explosion, only to be dragged away from freedom and back into the facility by the Party Escort Bot. Unknown to Chell however, GLaDOS is still alive.
 * Doug Rattmann, being the one of the last Aperture employees alive, witnesses GLaDOS' destruction. After the Party Escort Bot drags Chell back into the facility, Rattmann feels guilty for Chell's situation and reenters the facility to help her.

Pre-Portal 2 (unspecified)

 * GLaDOS' partial destruction is followed by a period of inactivity within the Aperture Laboratories, during which time maintenance systems and Personality Cores maintain their functions. The facility remains in disarray, having become overgrown and dilapidated.[9] Pre-recorded 'Emergency Test Protocols' can oversee test chambers in times of cataclysmic system failure, "able to sustain themselves on a minimum 1.1 Volts". Chell spends this time in stasis until the events of Portal 2. For at least some of her stasis, Chell is under supervision by a remaining Aperture employee, Doug Rattmann.

Portal 2

 * Chell is reawakened by Wheatley, a personality core. Wheatley insists he can secure an escape route out of the dilapidated Aperture Laboratories, which instead results in the inadvertent reactivation of GLaDOS.[9] As the story progresses, GLaDOS repairs most of the facility as evidenced by the steadily improving conditions of the testing courses that Chell is forced to complete.
 * Wheatley rescues Chell from the testing courses and helps her to GLaDOS's control room, sabotaging GLaDOS's defenses along the way.
 * GLaDOS's begins the Aperture Science Cooperative Testing Initiative.
 * After an extremely brief confrontation, Wheatley, with Chell's help, is placed in control of the Aperture Science facilities. He immediately becomes mad with power and proceeds to integrate GLaDOS's core with a potato battery. Lashing out, he sends Chell and GLaDOS's potato down an elevator shaft several kilometers deep.
 * Chell survives the fall because of her Long Fall Boots and GLaDOS survives because of her happenstantial situation as a potato; she is, however, carried off by a crow at this point. Chell now finds herself traversing a series of old condemned Enrichment Spheres, the precursor to the testing rooms that GLaDOS employs in the new Aperture facilities. The first of these spheres were built at the time of Aperture Science's foundation, earlier than June 15, 1961, at which time Aperture Laboratories was under the direction of Cave Johnson. They continued to be used at least until Johnson's death by poisonous moon-rock some time in the late 1980s.
 * Chell eventually finds GLaDOS, makes her way back to the facilities controlled by Wheatley, and finds that Wheatley has managed to inadvertently demolish massive portions of the facility. Signs of the extent of the facility's degeneration include the announcer which directed Chell's testing before GLaDOS's reactivation repeatedly interrupting Wheatley with warnings of the facility's imminent destruction. Eventually, Chell manages to make her way back to Wheatley's "lair" and after a relatively brief battle, exiles Wheatley and the Space Core into space via a portal shot onto the moon, and puts GLaDOS back in charge of Aperture. As a token of appreciation (or perhaps of resignation), GLaDOS allows Chell to leave Aperture Science, and sends her back to the surface. The game ends with the player viewing a seemingly endless field of grain, before the view is interrupted by the Companion Cube from the first Portal game being sent up after Chell.
 * Because the exact amount of time that passed between Portal and Portal 2 is unknown, it is also unknown whether the Combine is still in control of Earth, or what became of Chell following her escape from Aperture Laboratories.