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50 Years of the Design Science Revolution and the World Game

R. Buckminster Fuller

World Resources Inventory | Philadelphia

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ENCODED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The theme of the “World Design Science Decade” program is “How to Make the World Work”—how to redesign the worlds prime tool networks and environment facilities so as to make the worlds total resources, now serving only 44 percent of humanity, serve 100 percent through competent scientific design and anticipatory planning-despite the decrease in available per capita resources. How may we use our resources more efficiently to serve all humanity?

50 YEARS OF THE
DESIGN SCIENCE REVOLUTION
AND THE WORLD GAME

WORLD RESOURCES INVENTORY

BUCKMINSTER FULLER
3500 MARKET STREET
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19104

©Copyright 1969 by R. Buckminster Fuller
Southern Illinois University

Foreword

“There is nothing new under the sun,” Ecclesiastes tells us. Truly, to some large extent most “innovations” are variations on a previous theme. Once in a lifetime, though, there is an Archimedes, an Aquinas, a Michelangelo, a Newton, a Darwin, an Einstein whose thought is so startlingly fresh that its insights become an enthusiastic start for an entire new age of endeavor. One such man is R. Buckminster Fuller.

This volume presents under one cover the fifty-year evolution of one man s thought. “Design science revolution” was a term early coined by Buckminster Fuller to express not only his dymaxion operating plan for a more efficient technology and universe, but also, and especially, an operating agenda for his own life. He saw, before others, the true implications of a micro-age of design—for example, an era where electronic servo-systems would free man for more important tasks—to comprehensively develop his intellect and thus allow him to more easily radiate design experience upon his environment. Change the environment, do not try to change man. Fuller says, for using aggression to bring about change only guarantees that someone must lose for someone to win. Why not show man the value and power of changing his environment by doing more with less and then turn him loose on his environment with plowshares of design experience rather than angry swords of strategists who feel that there is not enough oxygen to go around for all.

Fuller grew up in an age of analysis—systems analysis, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, logical positivism, operationalism, task analysis, phenomenology, creative analysis (brainstorming), linguistic analysis, etc. Yet, Aristotle had noted that “what is last in the order of analysis seems to be first in the order of becoming” (Ethics III, 3). If this is true, then all of our eras empirical problem-solving and analytic systems can only arrive at a beginning for discovery, not at a conclusion of the search. Fuller used this methodological ferment to achieve a divergent view of the structure of nature which not only allowed new directions due to its unique tetrahedronal conception of the molecular, infra-world of the universe, but because it forsook the crisis-solving of current science and technology for long-range design planning. The ancient Chinese may have discovered the advantages of subfloor heating of rooms by an experimental study of heat convection currents, but it is more than likely that they simply arrived at a crisis when they no longer cared to walk across cold floors in their bare feet. The illiterate Maine seaman who invented the doughnut did so not by analyzing the problems of thermodynamics, but in desperation when the inside of his fritters stayed doughy-so he cut out the center.

Fuller was the first American of his era to show that James mythologized "tough-minded” scientist need not operate by waves of crises nor that he be totally empiricist (going by the "facts”), sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic or skeptical. He brought fresh air into a suffocating atmosphere of empirical methodism—he was the first American philosopher of science to see that man need not take on the personality of his machines in order to successfully cohabitate with them. Rather could man control his evolutionary destiny if he put aside his pusillanimity, his fear of his design competence in meeting the grand strategies of survival, and chose scientific objectives less self-annihilatory than the robotizing crisis-solving of empirical technologizing.

If you have patience, dear reader, to study this volume carefully from beginning to end, you will participate in a remarkable experience. Starting before science conceived of conquering outer space, you will see Buckminster Fuller conquering inner space in a way astrospace engineers now envy and emulate. Before architectural functionalism embodied both utility and esthetics, you will see Fuller thinking of creature comforts and human integrity before setting out to “do more with less” with his designs—a lesson only recently forced upon engineers by human factors specialists. The machines inexorable march to replace man (as seen by most prophets of doom of this century) is early seen by Fuller as freeing man for more noble tasks, of letting him take in a larger view of reality than his previous over-specialized, task- oriented training and education permitted. Technology need not dehumanize man. Fuller says, if it springs from great hearts bent upon grand strategies of making the world work for 100% of humanity rather than the 40% it presently serves well.

Last in the evolution of R. Buckminster Fullers thought you will arrive at the “thousand-petaled lotus”—his ultimate faith in man s ability to discover and design objectives for realizing true concord among his fellows. The “World Game” is the capstone of a remarkable life—still in its youth, both in Fuller and in the spaceship earth he seeks to navigate to more self- fulfilling objectives. If you have diligently studied each step of the progression leading to this capstone, then you will be as enthusiastic and inspired as the thousands of students Bucky reaches to each year in his thousands of miles of travel around this celestial spaceship to which we all are so desperately clinging—creating in their lives a climate of hope in an adult world of pessimism, cynicism, pusillanimity, and worldly despair.

Thomas Broussard Turner

Southern Illinois University

HISTORY

This volume attempts to present the fifty year public discussion of Buckminster Fullers “design science revolution”. Buckminster Fuller thought long and hard about comprehensive design years before the first hints of them surfaced for public view, but this volume presents some of the distillations of his ideas in printed form (magazine, journal, etc., reprints) which gained both wide attention and public comment.

Having had special training at the U.S. Nava! Academy and practically experienced in the powerfully effective forecasting arts of celestial navigation, pilotage, ballistics, logistics and in the long range, anticipatory, design science governing yesterdays naval mastery of the world from which our present days general systems theory has been derived. Fuller recalls that in 1927 he set about deliberately exploring to see how far ahead we could make competent forecasts regarding the direction in which all humanity is trending and how effectively we could interpret the physical details of what comprehensive evolution might be portending as disclosed by the available data.

He came to the conclusion that it is possible to make a fairly reasonable forecast of about 25 years. He found this to be about one industrial “tooling” generation. On the average, the bulk of all inventions seems to get melted up every 25 years, after which the metals come back into recirculation in new and usually more effective uses. At any rate, in 1927 Fuller evolved a forecast. Some of his 1927 s prognosticating went only to 1952 - that is for a quarter of a century but comprehensively it went for a half of century - to 1977.

When people had the occasion to ask Fuller (in 1927) about his prognostications and he told them what he thought it would be appropriate to do about what he could see ahead for the 1950s, 60s, and 70 s people used to say to him - “Very amusing - you are a thousand years ahead of your time.”

Having himself studied the informed increments with which we can think forwardly, such as the overall history of gain of the tensile strength of various metallic alloys and other materials he was amazed at the ease with which the rest of society seems to be able to see a thousand years ahead while he could see only one-fortieth of that time distance.

As time went on people began to tell Fuller that he was a hundred years ahead and now they tell him that he is a little behind times. But he has learned about public reaction to the unfamiliar and also the ease and speed with which the transformed reality becomes so “natural” as mis-seemingly to have been always obvious. So he knew that their last observations were made only because the evolutionary events he had foreseen have occurred on schedule.

Fuller’s 1927 Dymaxion House was invented as part of the concept of an air-deliverable, mass-producible, world around, new human life protecting and nurturing, scientific dwelling-service industry as the preferred means of transferring high scientific capability from a weaponry to a livingry focus. He hoped that we might thereby render successful all worlds people instead of only a few, on the premise that a comprehensive anticipatory design science could through increased technical efficiency - and upping of overall performance per pounds of world resources - bring about physical and economic success for humanity to a degree unobtainable through political reform. He saw that this economic success could eliminate the fundamental causes of war, i.e., “you or me to the death - on behalf of yours or mine for.there is not enough to sustain both,” the seemingly scientific fact established by Malthus in 1805. AH else that Fuller has undertaken has related to these design science considerations. Thus, in 1927, he embarked on a life-long undertaking whose earliest possible realizations lay a quarter of a century ahead in 1952, and full-scale industrialized wodd-around realization of it no less than a half century ahead, i.e. in 1977.

In 1917 he began the collection of data which he named the Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs and in 1927 he made his first methodical updating of that inventory. In 1936-38, he was asked to make a comprehensive study of the worlds resources and industrial trending and to identify the role of copper in those world industrial trends. He did this on behalf of Phelps Dodge which was at that time the third largest copper company in the world. This brought about the second ten year updating of his original 1917inventory. Through Phelps Dodge Fuller had access to the most complete private as well as public economic records of the Earth.

During the years 1938-40, he served as science and technology editor of FORTUNE magazine. In February, 1940, the tenth anniversary issue of FORTUNE was editorially focused upon his suggested subject, “The Comprehensive Inventory and Comparative Data Study of World Resources vs. United States Resources.” This involved the third updating of his original 1917 world inventory resources, as augmented by his 1936-38 work with the world copper cartel.

Before the FORTUNE February issue was completed, there were a large number of the TIME, Inc., staff enlisted in his research and updating calculations. TIME, Inc./s powerful reach into the fundamental data of industry was brought into full play. This February 1940 issue of FORTUNE Magazine brought about a fundamental reorientation of basic economic evaluation methods regarding the relative vitality of the different countries and industries respective activities.

It was the first and only issue of FORTUNE to go into three editions. Henry Luce, then Chairman of the Board of TIME, Inc., in reviewing his annual report covering the year 1940, announced that this unique edition of FORTUNE, which had gone into three editions, brought FORTUNE into the black out of its historically consistent red-ink condition.

From early 1942 through 1944, Fuller served as chief mechanical engineer of the United States Board of Economic warfare in Washington, D.C. He also served on the U.S.A, and their Allies Inter-agency Alternate World Resources Substitutions Committee. At this time he was able to update further his fundamental resource data.

In 1945, TIME, Inc., was shifting buildings in New York and sought to reduce their vast archives. The Head of FORTUNES Research Department off erred to let Fuller have the prodigious resource files accumulated by TIME, Inc., during his preparation of FORTUNES Tenth Anniversary issue of 1940. Fuller gladly acquired those files and now has them in his office at Southern Illinois University.^[1] These economic trend studies cover the full gamut of World s industrialization. Southern Illinois University has joined Fuller in publishing this data and distributing it to wodd-around universities libraries. Dr. Delyte W. Morris, President of Southern Illinois University has been of tremendous help in these efforts through his long and continued support of Fuller s work.

KAY

ELEVATION AND PLAN, DYMAXION HOUSE BUCKMINSTER FULLER, DESIGNER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE 4D FULLER HOUSE AND THE WORLD TOWN PLAN

Conception of the Industrialized House 1

18 Dec. CHICAGO EVENING POST

“Tree-Like Style of Dwelling Is Planned” by R. Buckminster Fuller 2

June HARVARD SOCIETY OF CONTEMPORARY ART CATALOG

“4D” 5

22 May HARVARD CRIMSON EDITORIAL

“Dymaxion” 14

13 May CHICAGO EVENING POST ARTICLE

“Fullers Dymaxion House on Display” by Inez Cunningham 15

1932, July FORTUNE

“Five Questions and a Striking Answer” by Archibald McLeish 19

1932, Nov. SHELTER

“Conning Tower” 28

THE FULLER DYMAXION BATHROOM

The Industrialized Mechanical Package 31

1937, April THE DYMAXION WORLD OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER by

Robert Marks “The Ladle” New York State Association of Master Plumbers 32

AN INVENTORY OF THE WORLDS RESOURCES 43

1940, Feb. FORTUNE

“U.S. Industrialization” 45

1940 TIME

“The Press New Era” by Henry Luce 60

THE DYMAXION DWELLING MACHINE

Production of the Industrialized House 63

1946, April FORTUNE

“Fullers House” 65

THE GEODESIC DOME AND ITS ACCEPTANCE

A Controlled Environment 77

1954, 29 Jan. NEW YORK TIMES

“Marines Try Out Flyable Shelter” 78

23 April NEW YORK TIME MAGAZINE

“An Expo Named Buckminster Fuller” by David Jacobs 79

MECHANICAL PACKAGE FALLOUT FROM SPACE PROGRAM 89

2 Oct. WASHINGTON POST

“That Bucky Fuller Sure is a High Flier” by Wolf Von Eckhardt 90

Feb. ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

“The Year 2000” 92

Feb. PLAYBOY

“City of the Future” 97

Jan.-Feb. THINK

“Why Not Roofs Over Our Cities” 105

THE WORLD GAME 110

June JOINT NATIONAL MEETING: OPERATIONS RESEARCH

SOCIETY AND AMERICAN ASTRONAUTICAL SOCIETY

“World Game: How It Came About” 111

1964, Jan. TIME

“Modern Living” 119

Dymaxion House materials ready for assembly—1927.

THE 4D FULLER HOUSE AND THE WORLD TOWN PLAN

Conception of the Industrialized House

From 1917 to 1927 Fullers thoughts about housing and transportation were crystallizing. He envisaged the contemporary living pattern as local spherical control systems, everywhere surrounded by an air ocean.

In April, 1928, Fuller completed the essential designs of the 4D house. It was actually the worlds first tangible embodiment of what one French architect hopefully designated as a “Machine-for-Living.” Its purpose was avowedly not only to keep the occupants sheltered from the bite of the elements, but to reduce to a minimum the drudgery of physical existence. The central mast, in which basic utilities were factory- installed, came ready for instant use.

The dwelling was designed to provide what Fuller conceived as “high-standard functioning, unconsciously compatible with mans unconsciously coordinated internal mechanisms and chemistries.” The design, he held, must implement, but not impose. “There must be no Hons daw feet on the instruments, nor frozen rococo music to impede the regenerative evolutionary preoccupations of the ever-emergent new life.”

What was economically sensational about the planned 4D house was the cost to the consumer. Based on the price scale then current in the automobile industry. Fuller estimated that if such a house, completely equipped, could be mass- produced, it could be marketed at 25 cents per pound (in terms of the 1928 dollar). Fords and Chevrolets at that time were selling at 22 cents per pound. (Today Fords and Chevrolets, completely equipped, sell for $1.40 per pound). Fuller s 4D house dwelling machine of 1928, optimally equipped, weighed a total of 6000 pounds. At 25 cents per pound, this meant a 1928 retail price of $1,500. On a 1968 basis of $1.40 per pound for approximately the same brand of “Metallurgical pound cake,” the 4D house, mass-produced and distributed by the automotive industry, would sell for approximately $8,400—installed and ready for occupancy anywhere in the United States.

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Dymaxion House early stages of assembly with suspended floors in place—1927.

THE o HARVARD • SOCIETY • FOR • CONTEMPORARY • ART

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BUCKMINSTER • FULLER’S • DYMAXION • HOUSE

THE DYMAXION HOUSE

Fabricated industrially

Deliverable in 24 hours

Installed and serviced by men trained in their work

Creates own light, heat and power and functions entirely independent from outside utility sources

Is primarily a machine in which to live

Eliminates

Drudgery Exploitation

Selfishness Politics

Centralized Control

Safeguards against

Flood Electrical Storms

Fire Earthquakes

Tornado Hurricanes

Marauders

Saves time which may be devoted to

Education Amusement

Advancement

Is well within the reach of the average wage earner

TYPICAL MATERIALS EMPLOYED

For Walls, Windows, and Ceilings: Casein, a transparent, translucent opaque sheeting made from vegetable refuse. The bathrooms are cast in a single sculptural unit of casein, and inserted into the house.

For Doors: Silver balloon silk—inflatable and so dust proof.

For Shelter Covers: Duralumin—an alloy of aluminum used here in panels or rollers.

For Floors: Inflatable rubberoid units.

For Light: An oil engine both warms the house and illuminates it by a system of mirrors through the translucent walls.

Large residence, showing Flettner air-mill at top, for harnessing wind-power. Perma

nent crane for hoisting gear.

Three types of residences, with and without balconies.
9 deck residence, showing swimming-pool, enclosed by vacuum-plates, pierced by

elevator shaft.

Proposed World’s Fair Garage; Chicago, 1932, as incorporated in projected World’s

Fair drawings. 100 decks high.

Statistical diagram, showing lightness of 4D house.
World-diagram indicating distribution of world-family.
100 deck office building, combined with suspension-bridge, without loose ends.
Airplane view of 4D house.

9 and 10. 4D buildings composed with old-style houses in exposition.

Interior of 4D dwelling, emphasizing triangular vacuum window plates.
Office building, showing two tower arrangement, exterior surface joined.
Night view from airplane; entering a 4D colony.
4D transport unit.

MODELS

It is important to note that while Mr. Fuller claims no measure of refinement or perfection in these first models and sketched designs, they nevertheless represent the first complete attempt in architectural design on a "Best for All” basis, with no compromise to vanity. That vanity and tailoring practices in architecture are abandoned, in no way precludes harmonious disposition of a truthful composition. The attempt here is to raise architecture from the one tune music box of "frozen architecture,” to the infinity of harmony arrived at as in Music today, by conversion from the personal equation to the abstract eternity, via a truthful and standard machine. These 4D designs of Buckminster Fuller, (4D symbolic of a 4th dimension, as the designing method is literally "from the inside out,” on a radiotonic, time, space, quantum basis) take into consideration industrial fabrication, transportation and service, as being essentially an integral motif of the gross harmonious composition as the ultimate crystallization of the housing itself. This has hitherto been in no way a consideration of architecture; the standard architectural precept is that "the material at hand shall control the design”; pudding-stone houses for Massachusetts, and limestone for Illinois. The machine age says "we can think consciously only in the terms of experience, and every experience involves a material.” Therefore if we think in the best terms of experience, a material will always be found for each requirement of the new composition. This is true mind over matter-harnessed not worshipped materialism-on the long road from complete stony oppressive darkness of temporality to eternal abstract light establishes the hexagon as a simplest and strongest unit.

ON MIMEOGRAPHING

Synchronously with the development of his industrial machine-wrought architecture, Buckminster Fuller has developed a new method of mimeographed drawing. To be found in almost any American office of size is the Mimeograph Machine. Its work has, as a rule, been confined to turning out something “cheap,”—propaganda for the waste-basket. Mr. Fuller feels this is profoundly unjust to the machine. Instead of “going back” to woodcutting or etching to present an artistically reproducible composition, which is by nature limited in reproduction, he has developed a mim&ograph-cut, which is very reasonable of realization. The 14 compositions shown in this exposition are typical of the proper field for mimeographing. It is in reality the field of multiple sketching reproduction of useful sketches which one could ill afford to duplicate except on the mimeograph.

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

Entered at the Boston Post Office. Boston. Mass., as Second Class Mail Matter, December 1. 1887.

Bernard Barnes ’30, President

R. E. Barrett Jr. ’30, Business Manager
Charles M. Underhill , Managing Editor
Robert S. Morison ’30, Editorial Chairman
Edwin P. Gunn ’30. Photographic Chairman
E. T. Batchelder . Advertising Manager
R. H. Thompson , Circulation Manager

J. B. Ames , Secretary

Crimson Printing Company, Plyinpton Street, Cambridge 38, Mass.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 1929.

DYMAXION

Mr. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house is being shown this week at the rooms of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. When the first rumors of Its marvels began to circulate in Cambridge, there was more cynicism and discountenance than even at Brancusi’s Golden Bird, or at the Modern French pictures. Consider a house which is primarily a machine to live in, which can be manufactured in mass, assembled at service stations and delivered in 24 hours, costing as a minimum $500 a ton. Its translucent wa<ls of casein, Its inflatable doors and floors, its collapsible mast, its bathroom cast In a piece—all these were fantastic Items to catch the imagination. However as many architects trom the school and offices of the vicinity have honored the 4D plan with more than an Incredible smile.

Its basic principle of decentralization, Jts independence of power resources, electric light, its amazingly simplified practicality in the perfection of detail has convinced many of the most obdurate, and Ims frightened pinny of the most farseeing. For in its widest implication the Dymaxion house is fafchcfa frightening phenomenon. It threatens the architectural aesthetic found on an accumulative tradition, of Roman, Romanesque and Renaissance design. It dispenses with contracting engineers, with servants, with such domestic appendages as laundries, custom built furniture, electric light bulbs, carpets. It threatens the present economic system of centralized control of natural resources. It may mean the dissolution of the suburbs, the population of seemingly inaccessible parts of the earth. Personal independence of drudgery, allowance for a doubled leisure, a more civilized manner of existence) all depend on the Dymaxion House. Mr. Fuller has created the possibility of a new civilization, a new world of people, one only wonders with Shaw what man would do with his new found leisure.

Indeed Mr. Fuller has reinvented all the appurtenances of workaday life. The only thing left for him now, is : the discovery of that elixir, by which man can double his span—so that he may satisfactorily enjoy the inevitable Millenium.

Tbe Chicago Evening Post

J%agazine of the —

Art World

"Published every Tuesday

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1930.

Fuller’s Dy maxion

House on Display

By Inez Cunningham.

HERE is Buckminster Fuller, a young man with an idea so sane that it seems insane to most of us, so constructive that it seems de- structlve, so simple that it seems com. plex. May it not also be so practical that It seems impractical? Lindbergh did not cross the ocean in an Orville Wrights first plane.

Here is this young man with hia Dymaxion house. He comes ot generations ot New England Amerl- cans. The men ot his family were preachers and lawyers. He is the grand nephew of Margaret Fuller, and all these people, who attacked the moral and social problems ot a new, world, are alive in him. New England that burned witches, that prayed t® a Jehovan God, that hoped all the while for Christianity made of this son of theirs a young person capable of such intense suffering that he must in self-defense refer to the race oC men as the human family and attack its problems to forget his own.

The problem he elected to attack is not as I see it merely an architectural problem, not an economic problem, nor even an esthetic one. It become* all these things incldentaly, but first of all it is a feminist problem. It could only have been more so had ha attacked the neglected problem ot obstetrics. While women, are hardened by drudgery and children endangered by accident in the places we call homes, it is a man’s world still.

Mr. Fuller had a dream ot freeing women and children from the housing problems, but on account of his particular quality of intellect the dream had to filter thru the mind and so became a philosophy. There waa the heart and the mind—in other words, love and thought, but they had to be related to sense—to the outside world. Mr. Fuller instead ot looking to past experience felt that he had come to that state in our progress where mind must use matter, instead of matter controlling mind. This problem was not a problem for Boston, or Detroit. It was cosmic. It was not a problem for 1930. It was for humanity in time.

His mentality discarded all existing architectural forms as limiting and looked for a new one that would be as appropriate in Burma as in Boston, as effective at the equator as at the pole. I will not go into th® architecture or dynamics of the house, for even if I could space prevents. These few facts, however, are needed to awaken interest in it.

Architecturally it is constructed aa an engineering problem, in supension rather than by compression. It uses the triangle instead of the square as a unit. It works with the laws of nature rather than trying to overcome them. Its aim is lightness instead of heaviness; flexibility rather than hardness. It seeks materials for its design rather than design for its materials. It will be proof against earthquakes, winds, fires, floods and burglars.

It will have machinery to do all household tasks such as refrigeration, washing, ironing, dishwashing, cooking. It will be dustproof, rainproof, coldproof, heatproof, dangerprooC for children. It will have a place for everything and everything in its place. The major furniture will be built in. It will be self-contained, independent, making its own heat and light, pumping its own water, disposing of its own waste. It will be movable or stationary, ad lib. It will be, in short, a perfect machine to live In and it will be serviced just as your motor car is serviced.

How all these things will come t« pass you can see by going to look at the model Dymaxion house now at the Arts club. In 1933 there will be, we hope, a life-sized Dymaxion houso at -the Chicago world’s fair. The architectural committee has invited it, Mr. Fuller and the manufacturers have begun negotiations for the building of it. But what of the esthetics, you ask? Wont the standardization remove all individual possibilities?

No, it multiplies them. First be- [ cause such order is a kind ot beauty in itself. The living model ot the Dymaxion house Is a very beautiful thing, but aside from that the esthetic side of the problem has not even been touched. In such a house there is an infinitude ot possibilities for color harmonies in the lighting system alone.

The walls are not arbitrary parti- lions controlling the sizes and shapes of rooms as in the ordinary house. They can be adjusted to please the individual dweller. The sizes and shapes and arrangement ot Dymaxion houses would not necessarily have any more similarity to each other than do the oblong houses ot brick and stone to their kind.

As Mr. Fuller might himself explain it. ‘ ‘You dont have to play the same music because you all have pianos, do you?’’

The infinitude ot beautiful color In modern materials that come to hand for the fabrication ot Dymaxion houses would individualize them to some extent, even it the same general model were used in many thousands of cases. The model at the Arts club is only a Dymaxion house. It Is not all Dymaxion houses.

I could tell you a lot ot things that would amuse you about it too. Perhaps I’d better tell you some. It little Willie falls out ot bed, for instance, he won’t hurt himself, because the floor will be pneumatic and hell bounce. There is to be a charming play deck on the top ot your Dymaxion house. You can sit up there with the children and pay no heed to them, for it they fall over they will not be hurt. There will be a net to catch them.

Go see the Dymaxion house, it only to laugh, for I am sure you will remain to pray that r.tter the worlds fair, when they get Into production, you can have one set up in your favorite spot on the earth. Everyone has a favorite spot, ot course. I’ll take mine in the hills back ot Florence. Mr. Fuller, please, and you can set the chavacolor In the library, which will look down on Dantes city at the della Robbia blue.

Dymaxion House with all walls and partitioning completed-1927.

In keeping with his total-dedication-to-comprehensive-design principles. Fuller, in May, 1928, offered to assign full proprietary rights in the 4D house patents to the American Institute of Architects, whose vice-president, at that time, was Fullers father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett. The offer was not accepted; but at the annual meeting, in which it was taken under consideration, the Institute passed a resolution: “Be it resolved that the American Institute of Architects establish itself on record as inherently opposed to any peas- in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.”

Four years later, Archibald MacLeish took up the cudgel for Fuller in a FORTUNE article called “The Industry Industry Missed.” He pointed out that the human problem today is not more house for the money, but more housing for the money. It is not enough to have old houses, at old prices, in new envelopes. The problem is at bottom a problem of fundamental design—and this Fuller alone had faced.

Dymaxion House fully assembled—1927.

One Dollar a Copy J ULY 1Q’^2 Ten Dollars a Year I

After Five Years Of

The Prime Raw Material

Land: its manufacture; how the rutabagas wither as the city grows; how acres ripen into building lots . . . and what it costs to ripen them. Speculators, profiteers, improvements. A comment upon an industry which buys its essential raw material at retail.

Housing: the Need

Cross section of a country in which half the homes fall below minimum standards of health and decency; in which city slums are the worst in the world.

The Wages of Labor

. . . are not always paid to the laborer—and are sometimes also death. Crafts, craftsmanship, and strikes.

How Much House for a Dollar

Being the history of a $20,000 house that costs $40,000, a $5,000 car that sells for $2,000, and an industry the Industrial Revolution has passed by.

Debt and Taxes

. . . together with certain more hopeful aspects of the sheriffs role in housing.

Five Questions . . .

… as asked by FORTUNE in the first five of its articles on housing.

FOR five months Fortune has been asking questions about housing in America. In February it asked whether the shameful inadequacy of American low-cost housing was to be admitted. In March it asked how far the high cost of land and the wasteful and speculative technique of its development were responsible for bad housing and how far these conditions were subject to control. In April it asked what the builders responsibility was and the banker’s. In May it asked where labor stood. In June it made the same inquiry as to the municipal governments and the tax assessors.

In the article which begins on the page opposite it offers an answer to these questions as presented not by theorists and not by journalists but by industry itself.

It is of course true that industry alone cannot solve the political problems involved. Until the sources of political power and the sources of actual power in the U. S. are made to coincide, the tax problem and the city-planning problem and even the building-code problem will lie beyond industrial control. Lobbying is a clumsy and wasteful and corrupting means of making political mechanisms, based upon geographic representation, respond to economic actualities.

But the present time, evil as it is in many regards, is nevertheless propitious to the building revolution. The land problem, which was insoluble so long as the suggestion of condemnation and the like raised socialistic bugaboos, is now, under the pressure of necessity, and with the aid of deflated values, obviously soluble. The same thing is true of the financial problem. The labor problem, which presented every difficulty while the unions were in a mood to oppose technological advance, now presents less difficulty than at any time within the history of organized labor. And the engineering problem, as the article opposite indicates, has already been reduced.

What is required now is organization of the industry. And the manufacturing group which Fortune here for the first time describes accomplishes that end. If it is true, as certain industrialists believe, that the age of heavy industry is over and that a Second Industrial Revolution is now taking place under our eyes with the emergence of light industry as its goal, then the formation of this group is an event of great significance. For the manufacture of shelter would offer itself as the key industry of the new age.

Dymaxion History

. . . And a Striking Answer

As dictated by:

the plans and program of General Houses, Inc. and its cooperating manufacturers:

Pullman Car & Manufacturing Corp. General Electric

American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Pittsburgh Plate Glass

Container Corp, of America Curtis Companies, Inc.

Concrete Engineering Co. Thomas A. Edison, Inc., etc.

the experiments and reconsiderations of A. O. Smith Corp, American Rolling Mill Co., and other industrialists.
the designs and conceptions of the architects of the new day.

The aim of all: the industrialization of the manufacture of shelter, perhaps the greatest single commercial opportunity of the age.

IT IS a curious and a significant fact that the prophetic imagination of Mr. H. G. Wells has never been able to encompass the future house. Transportation, diet, and the rearing of illegitimate children in the year 2000—or even the year 802701—were easy enough. But when it came to shelter the Wellsian vision foundered. People in the eight thousand and twenty-eighth century after Christ would Hutter in and out of gigantic ruined palaces (obviously imitated from the Romanesque), but of dwellings there would be none. And England in the year 2000 would still produce the painted boathouses of the late lamented Queen and an occasional stone gable among roses. It is not that Mr. Wells was unaware in his own experience of the obsolescence of the contemporary house. He had recently (in 1900) built a villa of his own. But when it came to the explicit picture of the future dwelling, Mr. Wells was able to contribute nothing more revolutionary than central heating, dustable baseboards, a device for washing windows without the aid of chamois skins, and the completely blameless hope (in a footnote) that it might some day be possible to build "sound, portable and habitable houses of felted wire-netting and weather-proofed paper upon a light framework.”

However, Mr. Wells was not alone in his failure of imagination. The architects of the world were with him. And for the most part they still are. Their attention, for all their proclamation of a new functional architecture, is still taken up with styles. The so-called International Style house as developed in America is merely the old house at the old price in a new envelope. And it is not too much to say that nothing as yet exhibited at any architectural show in this country or abroad, if we except the Dymaxion House of Mr. Buckminster Fuller, who is not an architect but an engineer, offers anything approaching a free and untraditional attack.

AND yet the problem of design lies .across the threshold of the whole question of low-cost housing. The construction problem is not a problem of more house for the money but of more housing for the money. It therefore rests upon the fundamental consideration of what housing is. And that question is a question of definition. Which is to say, of design. The automobile industry was compelled to answer it in terms of transportation at the end of the gasoline-buggy era, and the building industry, now that the era of the medieval- manor-with-modern-improvements is also past, will be obliged to answer it in terms of shelter.

The problem of design, in the modem low-cost house, is not an esthetic problem but an industrial problem. It is now past argument that the low-cost house of the future will be manufactured in whole, or in its parts, in central factories, and assembled at the site. In other words, it will be produced in something the same way as the automobile. And design will occupy the same relative position it occupies in the automobile industry. Design will dictate the form of thousands of units instead of the form of one. And the designer will neces sarily consider not only the appearance and convenience and efficiency of the completed product but the feasibility of its production in mechanized plants and its distribution by modern transportation.

Which does not mean that the level of American domestic architecture will fall. On the contrary, it should mean that the level of American domestic architecture will very appreciably rise. Numerous factory-made products, of which the automobile is the most notable, are well proportioned and esthetically sound. And standardization by factory production with expert engineering and complete functional efficiency is certainly preferable to the standardization by sheer imitation and inertia which is as visible today in the mock-F.uropean houses of the fashionable suburbs as in the mock-suburban villas of the sub-division lots.

Neither does industrial design necessarily mean that sales will be more difficult. It is true that the semi-sophisticates will continue to jeer in the future as they have in the past. “Get a real house” will take rank with the get-a-horse joke of igto. But once the modern house is actually built and in use the prejudice will vanish. It will have no choice but to vanish. If Mrs. Guic- cioli next door pays definitely less money to live in a really more efficient, brighter, cleaner, more livable house heated for half the cost, her neighbors are not going to be put off by the fact that her roof is flat while their roofs are shoddy imitations of the Chapel Royal.

A new way of thinking

To date the one completely untraditional attempt to think of house in terms of housing and thus to achieve a new architectural definition is that of Mr. Buckminster Fuller. Mr. Fullers diagnosis of modern shelter led him to a fundamental distinction. He observed that modern housing combines two elements—the housing of utilities such as plumbing, heating,
lighting, etc., and the housing of people. The first must be strong, well-protected, and delicately adjusted. The second may be light, free, and more or less temporary. Consequently the two may be—indeed should be—differently constructed.

From this conclusion there followed another: viz., that if the housing of the utilities ■was to be strong and rigid, and if the housing of people was to be light, then the first might be used for the support of the second. The development of this idea produced the Dymaxion House—a house of light floors and walls suspended by steel guys from the top of a rigid central tower of inflated duralumin tubes containing all equipment for the generation of heat and light and the conditioning of air, as well as mechanisms for distributing heat and light, and pipes for water. Since the house is conceived at the outset in terms of mass production and mass distribution, weight becomes the determining factor of cost and hence of price. The Dymaxion House, manufactured in large numbers, would sell —or so its inventor believes—at twenty-five cents the pound with the small, five-room type, complete with furnishings and accessories, weighing 6,000 pounds (a sales price of $1,500). The Dymaxion House lias never been fabricated, but its importance from the point of view of design is such that its details, printed in the caption on pages 64 and 65, will repay study.

In a certain sense Mr. Fuller’s project is utopian, as anything is utopian which requires a modification of accepted ideas and images. But Mr. Fuller’s structural principle and Mr. Fuller’s analysis of shelter are so far from utopian that they have already been adopted in design by several architects.

The Bowman Brothers of Chicago replace the Dymaxion central mast with a circular steel tower containing stairs, stacks, pipes, and basic utilities from which, by steel members, the floors and walls are hung, the result being a rectangular instead of a hexagonal house. (Structural details

and technical descriptions of the Bowman house will be found in the July number of the Architectural Forum.)

Fairchild Aerial SurrejJ, Inc.

SHROUDED IN SECRECY

. . . have been the plans of A. O. Smith Corp., world’s largest manufacturers of automobile frames, to apply to the manufacture of housing their famous mass-production technique.

Mr. S. C. Horsley of New York uses for his central supporting unit an oblong construction of load-bearing walls enclosing stairs, pipes, and utilities from which light floors and walls are hung, as in the Dymaxion design, by cables.

And Mr. Henry Wright, attacking the same problem from another angle, has come to a similar conclusion. Mr. Wright noticed that the cost of one of his Sunnyside flats, which he estimated at thirtyeight and three-fourth cents per cubic foot of occupied floor space, could be divided into two elements—the cost of building the corner of the building containing the utilities, and the cost of building the remainder. The first was ninety cents per cubic foot, the second twenty-five cents. In other words, a narrow vertical column containing the bathrooms and kitchens and heating equipment cost from three to four times as much, per cubic foot, as the mere living space. That being so, it seemed to follow that the two parts of the house might be separately constructed as the engine and body of a car are now separately constructed. And Mr. Wright foresees a time when a half-block housing project will be serviced by some sixteen mechanical towers of permanent construction around which the actual living quarters will be built in the lightest and least expensive manner. The lightest and least expensive manner would seem to be Mr. Fuller’s.

Mr. Fuller’s design has, therefore, an importance altogether apart from the probability or improbability of its general acceptance. It may well be the prototype of a new domestic architecture. And at the very least it will destroy the great architectural dogma that a house is what our greatgrandfathers called a house, and that the architects’ sole opportunity is to modify what already exists.

None of these experiments in suspension,

WILL THE PLANTS OF A. O. SMITH AND AMERICAN ROLLING MILL TURN TO THE PRODUCTION OF SUCH STEEL

Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc.

ALREADY AN EXPERIMENTAL HOUSE

… . has come from the Middletown, Ohio, plant of the American Rolling Mill Co., leading manufacturer of sheet steel and one of a score of industrial concerns plotting invasion of the building markets.

however, has as yet proceeded beyond the ink and paper stage. And the immediate hope for a pre-fabricated house lies in the adaptation by such architects as Kocher, Clauss & Daub, the Bowman Brothers, Howe & Lescaze, and Howard T. Fisher of the more familiar principle of weightbearing members. Innovations along this line within the past two or three years have taken the form of the elimination of purely structural members (i.e., of the "frame” of the house) and the substitution of pre-fabricated panels, the height of a story and two to four feet in width, which would not only serve as walls but as bearing members as well. These panels have been designed in various materials with metal predominating. And their architectural effect has been to impose a cubical form (not unlike the simpler hand-built houses of the so-called International Style) which depends for its esthetic value upon mass and proportion rather than upon decoration or detail.

A house a minute

But design, though a fundamental and necessary act, begets no housing. Housing is the work of builders. And builders continue to construct the old, shoddy, expensive house by the old wasteful, handwork methods—each house involving a complete revolution in the building cycle. In spite of the fact that 60 per cent of urban families pay less than §35 per month in rent, the builders have gone right on constructing their §5,000 to §8,000 “low-cost” houses with carrying charges averaging §50 per month, and wondering why the urban populations move into cheap apartments. And in spite of the known facts that at least half of America s 30,000,000 families are not even decently housed, they have to date made no serious effort to reach that market. They have not even investigated its extent. No builders organization or magazine in America has accurate statistics as to dwellings already built to sell at less than §5,000.

The result is that those who look for a solution of the housing problem do not look for it within the building industry as now organized. For it is abundantly clear that the low-cost house depends upon the elimination of most of the industry s present characteristic features. The cost of financing must be drastically reduced from its present giddy level. Material prices must be cut. And expensive, lengthy, hand labor at the site of construction must be replaced by economical, rapid, machine labor in central factories. All these considerations establish one inevitable conclusion—the mass production and mass distribution and mass financing of houses. And the building industry is not now equipped to that end.

THERE are, then, two possibilities: (1) mass production and distribution by some one company already equipped with a modern plant capable of conversion to housing manufacture, and (2) mass assembly and distribution by some central organization drawing upon and coordinating the various existing manufacturers of housing materials. The two methods are roughly comparable to the two techniques at present known in the automobile industry. Certain automobiles are largely constructed by their makers. Others are largely assembled by the company under whose name they are sold.

American industry is aware of the dilemma and of its solutions. The United States Steel Corp, has studied the subject through a special committee for some years and has listed fifty-six distinct methods of steel construction for small houses. Other steel companies have done the same thing. And many engineering and materialmanufacturing companies have made serious studies of the possibilities.

A. O. Smith; American Rolling Mill

Only two companies, however, have definitely attacked the problem with a view to solving it by the first method—i.e., by con-

HOUSES AS THESE? LEFT TO RIGHT:

DESIGNS BY KOCHER & FREY, BOWMAN BROS., S. C. HORSLEY, CLAUSS & DAUB

Continued on page 26

On pages 24 and 25: the Dymaxion House

Dymaxion House Invented Anc

The Dymaxion House:

. . . is, in a certain sense, not a house at all but what the French have aptly and hopefully designated as a Machine-for-Living. That is to say, its designer proposes for solution a whole range of social, engineering, and human problems as well as the ancient “brick and mortar” problem with which the traditional architect is almost exclusively concerned. For the purpose of the house is not only to keep its occupants wann and dry but to reduce the drudgery of cleaning and cooking and washing and service to the minimum now permitted by the state of the mechanical arts. And not only to reduce the drudgery of living but to enlarge its possibilities.

The whole construction is hung from the duralumin mast. Based upon the principles of tension and triangulation, it is satisfac-

THE HOUSE ASSEMBLED

The Dymaxion House is best understood by following the stages of construction. The upper illustration to the left shows the duralumin mastcontaining all heating, lighting, plumbing, air- conditioning, and other machinery—anchored to the ground. The lower illustration to the left shows the floor beams of the upper deck and three of the floor beams of the lower deck in suspension from the ton of the mast. On the right are shown the triangular floor plates of the upper deck in position and the lower deck complete with the pneumatic floor laid over die plates.
torily taut and as strong within its limits as a suspension bridge. The windowless walls are of opaque or translucent or transparent double-pane vacuum plates which permit of heating the house with the heat generated in its illumination and power supply. Air is drawn in through vents at the top of the mast, conditioned, and circulated. Artificial light at night is provided in the central mast and diffused by prisms, lenses, and mirrors. Cooking, by an arrangement of vacuum mazda units, is enormously expedited and the drudgery of dishwashing is canceled by a device which washes, rinses,

In 1927 Development Began

… a Creative Essay in Shelter by Buckminster Fuller

and dries dishes as they arc inserted. Laundry is handled in the same way—articles being returned washed, dried, and ready- to-wear in three minutes. Dish closets, clothes closets, food closets (refrigerated and otherwise) are rigged so as to revolve at the instance of a photo-electric cell. Water is supplied either by artesian well or by truck transport—the quantity needed being exceedingly small. (A ten-minute atomized bath, for example, requires a quart of water or less, and the toilets, constructed upon the present airplane system, require none.) Cleaning, when necessary, is by compressed air units. Partitions are

soundproof. Furniture is built-in. Beds are pneumatic. Garbage is disposed of in an incinerator pocket.

The whole house, in other words, is as nearly self-sufficient and as nearly free from the political nuisances of city water and city sewage and city electricity and city light as may be. And its adoption might well expedite the urban decentralization which many critics of the modern city now anticipate. What Mr. Fuller foresees is a scattered population living in cheap, speedily-assembled single or multiple-family houses which may be taken down, transported, and reassembled almost at will. And which will be replaced at five-year intervals or at ten-year intervals as automobiles are now replaced.

THE HOUSE COMPLETED

Pre-fabricated service units such as bathrooms, closets of revolving shelves, eta, serve as structural elements. To the left these appear with the soundproof partitions which complete them. The upper deck is as yet unfinished. The upper illustration to the right shows the roof flooring and pa ■-a pc I installed and the transparent vacuum plates of the walls in place. The bed is pneumatic for considerations of comfort. The lady is nude for the same reasons—the temperature of the house being absolutely controlled and drafts impossible. The last illustration on the right shows the completed house with the protective hood in place and the central lighting apparatus in the mast in operation.

verting their plants and their facilities to the complete manufacture of a pre-fabricated house. And neither is as yet ready to undertake production.

American Rolling Mill through its subsidiary, the Insulated Steel Floor & Wall Co., is now engaged in building in Cleveland an experimental house of welded sheet steel units in corrugated forms, the walls of each room being delivered to the job in a single piece. The company, however, has no present program for production but, like the Ferro Enamel Corp, and the Aluminum Co. of America, is merely interested at present in establishing the practicability of its product as a material for the new industry, and in aiding the development of the new industry by actual experimental construction.

A. O. Smith Corp., the world’s greatest manufacturer of automobile frames, is, however, definitely interested in developing a construction and distribution program. Plans of the company have been carefully guarded, due to patent difficulties and the burning curiosity of competitors. But the understanding in the industry is that the corporation started its investigation with a consideration of income groups and particularly of the amount of money a man in the middle group ($2,000 a year maximum) might be expected to spend for the purchase of a house. Upon the basis of data available, the corporation’s engineers would certainly have reached the conclusion that a house with its land must not cost over $3,600 if the mass market is to be opened. If the corporation should allocate the usual 30 per cent of this sum to profit and selling costs, the balance available for the manufacture of the house would depend on the cost of the lot, which might run from $400 on up, leaving a construction cost from $2, iooodd on down. But no authentic figures are available. It is understood that the house A. O. Smith has under consideration has a modern bathroom and kitchen, a dining alcove, a living room, two bedrooms, and a partial basement. The company’s famous engineering department has conducted exhaustive tests of materials and construction methods, priced raw materials in enormous quantities (thereby causing a considerable stir in world markets), and is known to believe that the project is entirely feasible. And the company’s economic research department has meanwhile collected heretofore unavailable statistics on the small-house market. But beyond that point the corporation has not yet progressed. A house type and material have not been definitively chosen.

Builders All

The new age of shelter, which will manufacture its houses in central factories, will change the Whos Who of the building industry. Great industrialists will replace contractors. Manufacturers will stand with architects and architects will become engineers. Producers of building supplies and accessories will be drawn into an integral relation with the constructors in the field. And the technician will find his place. The gentlemen pictured below are typical of the interest and the professions which the new industry is already attracting.

Actne-P & A

CLARENCE M. WOOLLEY

Chairman, American Radiator

Creative Sttdioi, Inc.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Architect of the Dymaxion House

Moffett-Rauell

HOWARD T. FISHER

Architect, General Houses, Inc.

Rillaie

LLOYD R. SMITH
President, A. O. Smith Corp.

Kejttvne

HARRY S. WHERRETT President, Pittsburgh Plate Glass

Acmt-P & A

CHARLES A. LIDDLE President, Pullman Car Corp.

WMt Vcrtd

OWEN D. YOUNG Chairman, General Electric

ROBERT L. DAVISON
John B. Pierce Foundation

As early as 1932 Fuller illustrates the value of comprehensive information storage and retrieval for problem solving. SHELTER magazine, November, 1932, published his “Conning Tower” concept: instant call-up of data for high power decision making at the industrial executive conference level.
A mechanical layout for the new “industrial conning towers”, showing how, with currently available mechanics, information routing and correlating activity in general may be expedited with a hitherto incredible acceleration, accuracy, and lack of human effort. Foi instance, it is suggested that all industrial headquarters be equipped with a conference room, to be designed as the 4D “Hoop Skirt” for broadcasting stations as compounded with the latest mechanics of movie headquarters, that all conferences may be recorded by film, visually and orally. The duplication to be eliminated by such mechanics is extraordinary. Conferees who tend to recite acknowledged history, convergent in the specific conference involved, may rapidly be enlightened by a talkie, quite interestingly runnable in a few moments, as the net result of hours of conferences in which there is multitudinous lag for cigarette lighting, banalities, etc. There could be mechanical hook-ups of industrial unit production headquarters by teletype, telephoto and television with central publishing headquarters of industrial units, who in turn would be tactically hooked up in like manner with information sources such as Bureaus of Standards, Navigation, Department of Commerce, etcetera or corporations such as Standard Statistics, Consumers’ Research, Science News Service, etcetera, as well as university hook-ups.

The conning tower is free of private records, superfluous accounting, checkup methods, etcetera, as the "bridge” of a giant liner or dreadnought, with simple "log” or "continuity notes” of O. D. Economic and elemental mechanical indicating and reporting systems of universal interest are incorporated, such as intramurally integrated ticker services, weather forecasting instruments, economic traffic indicators, elemental availability indicators, storage indicators, storage pile-up indicators, dominant news indicators, harmonic trend indicators.

CONDITIONED AIR ENTRY THROUGH FABRIC ENVELOPE NO COMEBACK RADIANT SOUND

LIGHT DIFFUSION FROM CENTRAL FIXTURE VIA CONVEX SILVER FABRIC TENT

TENT

CONNING TOWER — "HOOP-SKIRT” ROOM — ISOMETRIC

CONFERENCE ROOM

Section and Plan of Conning Tower showing two deck relationship of tented conference room above and mechanical control room below. "Conference’^- divided into 3 team-sectors on principle “3s a crowd”, and that “correlation of 3 forces essential to stabilization.”—4D.

Hoop Skirt" designed to compensate cubical structure "interference "factors of sound and light control. Light diffusion enables operation of 3-way movie mechanism concealed in triangular shield of central recording device containing also microphone. In same device are housed speaker for “incoming” sounds and 3-way screens for trans-lux visible displays as required by conning group. Air intake through top envelope exhaust through step risers.

Circular stair leading from mechanical control room to tent exterior enabling operators to circulate around conference without disturbance to conferees. Two-deck segregation ovbiates visiting conferees conduct alteration as result exhibition-consciousness if aware of recording devices. Mechanical operating room allows of television “in” or "out” operation and provides for storage pertinent film—for immediate conferee reference.

1 . Conning Tower designed to preserve the integrity of intellectual progress by freeing the enthusiasm momentum of hitherto stultifying effects of constantly repeated disclosures of “purposes” and "results” which through medium of "conning tower” require but one disclosure for their potential social diffusion.

To obviate possibilities of misunderstanding not possible in conference records by written word only—sight, sound, continuity, and delicate gesticulation punctuation made available for reference.
To allow of new perspective “to see ourselves as others see us”. Not only would this be potential to extraordinary individual development, but also to whole human welfare as conferees would incline to elimination of esoteric idiosyncrasies, and obvious selfishness.

VISUAL AND ORAL RECORDING DEVISES

“IN” AND " O U T ”

MECHANISM CONTROL SEGREGATED FROM

CONNING TOWER — "HOOP - SKIRT” ROOM — PLAN AND SECTION

The Fuller Dymaxion Bathroom—1937.

THE FULLER DYMAXION BATHROOM

The Industrialized Mechanical Package

Research undertaken for the Pierce Foundation of the American Radiator Company, in 1931, enabled Fuller to develop the first fully equipped bathroom and toilet unit as an integral mass-production item, as well as detailed schemes for a mass produceable utilities-core linking kitchen, heating, and lighting, and heating elements as well as complete plumbing. It was formed of four die-pressed sections which were bolted together for assembly and then required only connection. Though not strictly autonomous, it allowed easy conversion to an autonomous system. The combined unit, including all necessary bathroom facilities, was successfully developed to the prototype stage, and twelve models were eventually installed in various test places. It was not mass produced because the manufacturers felt that it might meet with resistance from plumbing interests, due to the fact that it could be taken out, like a refrigerator, when people moved, and just plugged into the next house.

“The reaction was unfortunate,” Fuller said, “because the Plumbers Union, in 1936, stated officially in the unions journal, THE LADLE, that the plumbers of the country were in enthusiastic support of the bathroom because it could be purchased on the same basis as a refrigerator to be moved with the household furniture, whereas the public which rents its living quarters never owns its bathroom fixtures.”

DYMAXION

BATHROOM

D2- D9

DI Unitary bathroom shown as it would be hoisted aloft in 1927 multi-deck building. {This picture is also shown as B2.)

D2-D9 Patent drawings showing details of the Dymaxion bathroom. {1937)

DIO The first Phelps-Dodge Dymaxion bathroom. Fuller improved on this model by making the front and back "rooms” of the bathroom in identical oval pattern, thus enormously reducing tooling costs. {1937)

D11-D14 Assembling the four main components of the Dymaxion bathroom. Each part was light enough and small enough to be carried through small doorways and up old-fashioned back stairways.

D15 Two completed Dymaxion bathrooms, showing electrical harnesses, and final control switchplate, together with air conditioning components. Each bathroom covered a floor area of 5 feet by 5 feet. In several instances two bathrooms were installed side by side as "husband and wife” units in guest and master bedrooms. {1938)

D16 View inside bathroom, showing cupboard opened in such a manner that mirror is in use even when door is open. A light was installed along base of mirror. The cabinet provided space for items as large as 5 gallon buckets. Round water control handles were of red and blue plastic. Hot and cold color-coded water handles are now in use on bathroom fixtures in many parts of the world. Note the circular air exhaust grill on lower face of the wall, below the washstand through which steam and stale air were evacuated. The washbasin was without knobs or spigots. The waste handle for the washbasin was a black knob at knee height on the outside of the basin. The drain was actuated by a knob pushed to the right with knee.

D16 DI7

DIS D19

D20

D21

D17 Looking into the bathroom from the front door. Note the step for entering the bathtub and shower at the same level as the bathtub bottom. Handles on either side of door, at entrance to tub and shower area, prevented the possibility of occupants falling while entering or leaving tub.

D18 View of interior of the knobless basin, showing the orifice, at lower right center, through which hot and cold, control-mixed water, spurted into the washbasin from the front toward the back of the basin. This direction of the water jet prevented water from going up the cuffs, and back-splashing. Note the overflow exhaust slots to prevent back-syphoning.

D19 View looking down into tub section. The tub was 27 inches wide, 3 inches wider than standard tubs, and permitted the occupant’s body to float freely. By placing the drain at center of the tub, Fuller was able to make the pitch of the tub floor so slight as to offset the user’s tendency to slip. In addition, the tub surface was hammered to prevent slipping. Note the alcoves for sponge, soap, and arm rest at the corners of the tub; the plastic tub and shower handle on interior, at the right of the doorway; and the seat saddle at the foot of the doorway.

D20 Trailer delivering two bathrooms to Christopher Morley’s home, "Knothole,” in Roslyn, Long Island. (1937)

D21 Two bathrooms on trailer being delivered to Fisher’s Island, Rhode Island, residence of John Nicholas Brown, one-time Secretary of U. S. Navy, for a house designed by Neutra in 1936. Fuller is shown at right. (1938)

DZZ

D24

D22-D23 Outside and inside of Fuller’s cylindrical bathroom designed for Butler Manufacturing Company in 1940. The exterior view shows the bathroom attached to Fuller’s 1940 Deployment Unit. The septic tanks were contained in the cylinder base below ground level. The ground-level area, as shown in the interior view, contained the shower bath, basin, and toilet seat. The water tank was above the ceiling, in the cylinder’s head. The cylinder was 4 feet in diameter.

D24 Another version of Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit manufactured by the Butler Manufacturing Company, in Kansas City. The seat, basin, and shower, with their flooring and walls, were mounted on a box chassis along with the kitchen plumbing equipment. The latter was placed on the other face of the central wall within which plumbing manifolds, electrical harnesses were installed behind readily demountable panels. (1941)

D27

D25-D27 Fuller considered the Dymaxion bathroom as an interim, mass-producible, sanitary facility; his fog gun, pictured here, afforded a new method of bathing. It combined compressed air and atomized water with triggered-in solvents. The kinetic force of the high-pressure air stream was utilized without the skin-damaging effect unavoidable in high-pressure needle-pointing of water streams. Generalizing from his Navy experience, in which engine room greases on the skin were almost unnoticeably removed by wind and fog on deck, Fuller reasoned—and later demonstrated—that the feeding of atomized water and air at high pressure on to the skin surface would accelerate the surface oxidation, and release the surface cells themselves, along with the attached dirt. The round pictures show magnifications of the skin surface. Two of the pictures show the dirt interspersing the "coral reeflike” structure of the pores. {1927-1948)

D28

D28 Research students at the Institute of Design, Chicago, in 1948 testing the Fog Gun. (Subsequent experiments were conducted at Yale and other universities.} A one-hour massaging pressure bath used only a pint of water. If fog gun bathing were done in front of a heat lamp, all the sanitary and muscle-relaxing effects of other types of bathing could be effected without the use of any bathroom. Since there were no run-off waters, tons of plumbing and enclosing walls could be eliminated, and bathing would become as much an " in-the-bedroom” process as dressing. Fuller holds that the other functions of the bathroom may be effected by odorless, drypackaging machinery, employing modern plastics, electronic sealing, dryconveying systems.

D29 Reproduction of a page from The Ladle, April, 1937, official publication of the New York State Association of Master Plumbers. The article documents the master plumbers enthusiasm for Fuller’s 1936 Phelps-Dodge version of his mass-reproducible unitary bathroom as a chattel mortgage appliance. Despite the plumbers’ enthusiasm and large public demand, industry failed to venture in the bathroom’s production and distribution.

THE NEWEST
prefabricated bathroom
IS ALSO NEAREST

the 29th floor of 40 Wall St. there sits the finished model of a new plumbfixture that might well bug the eyes of any bystanding master plumber, a fixture that to all intents and purposes constitutes a one-piece bathroom. Designed by Architect Buckmister fuller (Dymaxion House. Dymaxion Car) it accomplishes. by the simple connection of four basic parts, a complete bathroom weighing 404 pounds, with integral lavatory, toilet and bath. First known as the Five Five" (because thats the space it takes up), the official designation is now “The tegrated Bath”.

for

PRESTO!

by In-

In the research department of the Phelps Dodge Corporation it sits, ready moderate production (100 units) in 1937. Architect Fuller has assigned his patents to the PD organization, and rumor discerns a new manufacturing and marketing sub sidiary in the immediate offing. The range of uses for the. unit is broad: pullmans, planes, trailers, trains, but mainly small homes. In fact. Mr. Fuller hopes this light, compact, complete bathroom will even inspire renters to install conies in their apartments. and remove them when they move. All of which lies in the realm of speculation. . For the immediate future the device will

SNAP

probably induce fewer orders than conversations. None the less the fact remains that this prefabricated bathroom comes closer to commercial reality than any of its predecessors.

The Integrated Bathroom consists roughly of two oblong sections that form a partition .where they join, which .conceals the piping and other mechanical appurtenances. The sections (each

a monometal stamping) are each split in the middle, the top being aluminum and the bottom 272 pounds of sheet copper unmelallized and tinted by a coating of silver, tin and antimony alloy. The bottom of one section is the lavatory and toilet, of the other a flat- bottomed tub.

The toilet, though reminiscent of the old backyard one-holer, is fully sanitary. The seat lifts and remains upright by compression against the walls. Underneath is a standard form of bowl (though chrome nickel bowls are also available).

Two men can handle an installation in three hours, for all piping except a minimum amount of connection material is integral with the unit. So are electric connections, ventilation oquipment, etc. Fresh air is drawn by a motor under the lavatory from the nearest room, and exhausted—wherever circumstances permit.

Miscellaneous features: A composition Venetian blind gives privacy to the bather, and. while permitting the escape of steam, prevents the escape of water. The door-frame between the two sections is six inches thick, permitting use as seat. Complete cleansing of tub is easily attained. The plumbing layout was devised in collaboration with a local master plumber, copper tubing being used for water lines. Particular care was used to avoid back-siphonage possibilities. Sliding doors conserve space. The metallic finish has a “hammered” appearance while at the same time being thoroughly sanitary, the inventor claims. Under surfaces of the base metal are covered with Dum-dum. a sound deadening material. An electric heating system between -the two units warms the metal itself, radiating heat to occupant of bathroom. Removable panels permit access to plumbing traps and connections under toilet and lavatory.

The Dymaxion bathroom was designed by Fuller for ultimate production in plastics. He saw a future for plastics which only recently has been achieved—as the following article excerpt demonstrate.

Werkstoffblatt ■■I 5003.2.01

August 1967

Kunststoffe in der Anwendung

Sanitarzelle aus glasfaser- verstarktem ®Palatal

Der Einbau von sanitaren Einrichtungen erfordert eine gute Koordination der verschiedenen handwerklichen Arbeiten; trotzdem behindern sie sich oft gegenseitig. Die Vorfertigung ganzer Sanitarzellen gestattet, diesen EngpaB dadurch zu umgehen.daB die komplizierten Installationsarbeiten statt auf der Baustelle in der Fabrik ausgefuhrt werden. Die Verwendung von Kunst-

Blld 1 Slick In die Sanitarzelle

Die Im Kopf genannten Produktbezelchnungen slnd auBer Polystyrol reglstrlerte Warenzelchen der BASF

Bild 2 Der Zellenkbrper wird aus drei Elnzelteilen zusammengesetzt

stoffen auf diesem Gebiet gibt dem planenden Archi- tekten daruber hinaus noch neue gestalterische Mog- lichkeiten.

In konsequenter Weiterentwicklung der Fertigteilbau- weise wurde eine Sanitarzelle aus Palatal entwickelt, die als fertig installierte Raumzelle direkt in den Bau eingesetzt werden kann. Die Zelle enthalt alle Arma- turen und Einrichtungen eines normal ausgestatteten Badezimmers, wie WC mit Wasserkasten, Wasch- becken, Badewanne mit Duschmoglichkeit, Handtuch- stange.Toilettenschrank, Ablageflache, blendfreie Dek- kenbeleuchtung, Steckdose und Bodenentwasserung. Die Grundflache der Zelle ist 1,625 X 1,625 m bei einer Einbauhbhe von 2,395 m.

Die Zelle besteht einschlieBlich Boden Decke Wan- den und Tur aus glasfaserverstarktem Palatal und wurde nach dem Handauflegeverfahren gefertigt. Der Zellenkorper ist aus drei Elnzelteilen zusammengefugt

Bild 3 Zusammengesetzte Zelle vor Aufbringen des Hartschaum-AuBen- mantels

- Sockel und 2 symmetrischen Oberteilen -, die die Innenhaut bilden. Wie die Bilder 4 und 5 zeigen, er- ganzt Hartschaum unter Ausfullung der Hohlraume den Baukorper zum Kubus. AuBen kann wahlweise eine weitere Kunststoffschale oder eine Putzschicht auf- gebracht werden.

Die Zelle wird schliisselfertig am Bau angeliefert und wie ein Schrankelement auf den Boden der fertigen Wohnung gestellt. Lediglich Zu- und Abwasser, Luf- tung und Elektrozuleitung sind an die Stutzen anzu- schlieBen.

In einem ausgefuhrten Beispiel enthalt die Zelle sogar einen Teil der Elektro- und Heizinstallation fur die ubrige Wohnung sowie die Beliiftungs- und Beleuch- tungselemente fur den angrenzenden Flur.

Einsatzmoglichkeiten fur derartige Installationszellen bieten sich z. B.

im Bauwesen

in Appartements, Krankenhausern, Hotels und Motels, Ferienhausern,

in Verkehrsmitteln

- gegebenenfalls ohne Badeeinrichtung - in Bahn, Bus, Flugzeug, Boot, Campingwagen,

auf Baustellen,

z. B. in Wohnbaracken und Unterkunftswagen.

Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik AG

6700 Ludwigshafen am Rhein

Bild 4 Langsschnltt dutch die Zelle

Bild 5 GrundriB der Sanltarzelle

Die hier abgebildete Zelle wurde vom Planungsburo Weber und Brand, Aachen, Kurbrunnenstr. 14-20, ent- wickelt.

Den Prototyp fertigte die Firma Kunststoff-Formteil- und Behalterbau E. Berberich, Stolberg, Rbmerweg 13.

AN INVENTORY OF THE WORLDS RESOURCES

Industry, as Fuller had anticipated in his “trial balance” inventory, had shown no special enthusiasm for the Dymax- ion bathroom. The Dymaxion house was hibernating in his mind, awaiting the technological breakthrough which, according to Fuller s original reckoning, was due sometime in the 1950s, assuming an approximate 25-year lag between the inception of the basic idea and the conditions for its acceptance. Meanwhile, he occupied himself with other activities and projects. From 1938 to 1940 he was a technical consultant on the staff of FORTUNE. This gave Fuller the opportunity to put to work and publish the data compiled in his Inventory of Worlds Resources.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

1900 100%

1960

2000 A. D.

1920

1940

1910

1930

1950

1970

1980

1990

90%+

80%–

70%–

60%–

50%–

40%–

30%–

NOW

20%–

10% -

WORLD WAR II

WORLD WAR I

CRITICAL POINT 50% IN 1972

1952 Energy Slave Quotas Each North American Averages 400 " North European “ 40

" South American " 30

" Mediterranean " 15

" Asiatic " 3

“SLAVES" NOW USED IN NO. AMERICA AT 4% EFFICIENCY

FUNCTION OF NO. AMERICA: TO UP EFFICIENCY AND EXPORT SWELLING SURPLUS

WORLD INDUSTRIALIZATION: ITS RATE OF ATTAINMENT AS AN INDUSTRIALLY OBJECTIVE ADVANTAGE TO INDIVIDUALS, i.e. WHEN 100 INANIMATE ENERGY SLAVES* ARE IN CONTINUAL ACTIVE SERVICE PER EACH AND EVERY FAMILY EXISTING IN GOVERNING ECONOMY AND THOSE ENERGY SLAVES ARE PRIMARILY FOCUSED UPON REGENERATIVELY ADVANCING STANDARDS OF LIVING AND IN ARTICULATING AMPLIFYING DEGREES OF INTELLECTUAL AND PHYSICAL FREEDOMS

*One energy slave equals each unit of “one trillion foot pound equivalents per annum” consumed annually by respective economies from both import and domestic sources, computed at 100% of potential content

UNTIL CRITICAL POINT IS REACHED MAJORITY OF WORLD MEN ARE "HAVE NOTS” AND ARE INCITABLE TO SOCIALISM BY REVOLUTION AGAINST THE SEEMINGLY EVER MORE UNDULY PRIVILEGED MINORITY AFTER 1972 MAJORITY ARE "HAVES’

EST. AT 2,300,000,000 IN 1940 AND INCREASING AT RATES OF 1% PER YEAR THUS APPROACHING 3,000,000,000 BY 2000 A. D.

COPYRIGHTED 1952 BY BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Fullers critical-point trend chart of World Industrialization.

Volume XXI

Fortune

Number 2

The United States of America

IN SEARCHING for a suitable way for Fortune to commemorate its tenth anniversary many ideas were examined. In the end it was felt that nothing could be more suitable than the setting forth of our own experience of the economy that we have been reporting for the past ten years. This issue, therefore, differs from every other issue of Fortune in that it is a peculiarly intimate and personal expression. It is, however, an expression of a large and objective reality, which must be documented and understood for what it has become: the most important nation, in the world. Fortune was founded at the peak of the 1929 boom, in the conviction that American industrial life represented an achievement worth recording. But during most of its existence Fortune has found itself reporting on an economy whose dominant psychology was not one of achievement, but of failure. Now at last, at the end of a decade, the idea in which Fortune was conceived is ripe, we believe, for reassertion. The reassertion must not be, and is not here, merely emotional. It recognizes and meets the inherent and critical problems. But it recognizes also that the problems of the U.S. are mostly the result of the achievements; and that they can be solved only in that light.

Contents for February 1940

The U.S.A 39

The contours of the nation arc defined. It is great not by reason of its area, its population, the diversity of its regions, its agriculture, or its industry. It is great through their integration.

Industrialization 50

A measurement of the industrial system by industrial yardsticks reveals a profound change. It reveals the last ten years as an era of progress. And it suggests that a new era is at hand.

The 30,000 Managers … 58

They work the control levers of the U.S. industrial machine. They find two groups impeding enterprise: Washington and the capitalists.

The Workers 64

They are 31,000,000 strong, and are weak only in their indecision. Their prime problem is unionization, whose collective methods collide with their inborn individualism. But unioniza* tion is also their solution.

The 32,000,000 Farmers . . . 68

They have uniquely accepted industrialism as part of their lives, and are the biggest single slice of the American market. Today they want more than tractors; they want capital.

The Great American Salesman 72

He has saddled an enormous expense account on the American consumer. But he is the catalyst for billions. From Brady through Patterson to Holler is an evolution.

U.S. Culture 76

There can be few phenomena more characteristic of U.S. culture than that a magazine devoted to business should attempt to measure it.

The U.S. $ 88

An elementary account of the U.S. money system rises from a country bank to the U.S. Treasury.

It emerges on one more problem of abundance— 517,800,000,000 of gold.

Politics 90

The U.S. is governed by 175,000 local governments. They are sterner guardians of liberty than the checks and balances of the founding fathers.

The Dispossessed 94

All the problems of the U.S. can be reduced to the tragic and un-American fact that nearly one- fourth of the people live outside of the system of free enterprise.

The U.S. Frontier 97

A realistic appraisal of what lies on the frontier today, using the automobile industry as yardstick; and a glimpse into the exciting future.

The Fortune Survey … 14

A self-portrait by the people of the U.S. revealing that the American generally regards himself as “middle class”; would like to work for himself; thinks he has a better chance than his father; believes in the future; thinks he should pass something on to the next generation; and never expects to hire a servant.

Cover by A. Petruccelli

Board of Editors: Raymond L. Buell, John Chamberlain, Russell W. Davenport (Managing), Albert L. Furth, John K. Jessup, Henry R. Luce, Charles J. V. Murphy, Richardson Wood. Associate Editors: F. Lawrence Babcock, Francis E. Brennan (Art), Gilbert Burck, Robert Coughlan, John Davenport, Patricia Divver, William B. Harris, Richard H. Hippelheuscr, Lawrence P. Lessing, Francis Sill Wickware. Publisher: Eric Hodgins.

Copyright under International Copyright Convention. All rights reserved under Pan American Copyright Convention. Copyright, 1940, ny Time Inc.

Reg. U.S. Patent Oft.

U. S. Industrialization

Definition of industrial man . . . Estimate of his achievement in the U. S… Analysis of his present predicament . . . Announcement of a new era.

THE word industrialization has meant many things to many people. It has meant squalor and soot, poverty and dispossession, the need for sanitation, a revolution in culture. It has meant the exploitation of labor, the prediction that capitalism would collapse; but it has also meant the full dinner pail, emancipation, the spread downward and upward of the middle classes, the enlightenment of capital far beyond the predictions of its critics. On the economic front industrialization has meant a series of problems, each more difficult than the last: problems in supply, marketing, and demand; problems in prices and financial control; problems in investment and savings, in producers’ versus consumers’ goods. Concerning few words has there been more confusion or less enlightenment.

But the historical fact here referred to under the word industrialization is a great change—a revolution—in the life of the individual. The basis of this revolution is the tool, the extension, by which man is enabled to accomplish more than with his bare hands. The most elementary tools are levers and wheels; but industrial man has evolved infinite series of tools, infinite extensions to his hands, his legs, and his five senses. From simple levers to production lines, from simple chemical reactions to new substances under the sun, from simple electric current to electronic tubes, these extensions have increased immeasurably his power over space and time. The process has not been merely mechanical but organic and evolutionary. It has transformed the species into a new kind of species, whose extensions raise each of its members far above the levels of the past. It has created a new kind of life, augmented and hitherto unimagined.

Industrialized man is augmented over mere man in many ways. He is augmented as a worker because the tools of modern industry enormously increase his power to accomplish work. He is augmented as a capitalist or owner because of the endless opportunities offered for the development of tools in the competition of tools. And he is augmented as a consumer by the great variety of products, tools, and extensions available to him for his personal satisfaction and the development of his faculties. The problems of our time, which appear so insuperable, are problems arising out of industrial achievement and are mainly problems of adjustment to the achievement: the worker does not get paid enough for his vast work power; the capitalist cannot seem to take advantage of his almost infinite opportunities; the consumer has to pay too much for the products and extensions he requires. One result of these maladjustments is the unemployment described on page 94. And another has been a sense of defeat.

The unemployment is a critical problem which will take a long time and many sacrifices to solve. But the sense of defeat that has given rise to an "emergency psychology” has so little substantiation in the industrial facts that it is difficult to understand how intelligent men, and even some leaders, have succumbed to it. It arises from a failure to define the purpose of industrialization. A definition is important because, in framing one, it becomes perfectly clear that the tools and extensions of industrialization do not exist for their own sake. They exist for the individual, known in this connection as the consumer. The entire producers-goods industry, for instance, whose purpose is the making of tools, is quite secondary to the real purpose of industrialization. That real purpose may be defined as an increase in the power to consume: to consume not only as a simple animal but as a member of a new species whose potentialities of enjoyment, use, and knowledge are infinitely extensible. Industrialization, to be sure, enables man to consume more of the purely animal necessities such as food and clothing. But also, and more characteristically, through the use of what are called consumers’ durable goods (automobiles, airplanes, refrigerators, radios, typewriters, etc.) it enables him to convert raw materials like oil, coal, gas, electricity, cement, plastics, wood pulp, chemicals, and dyes to the expanding purposes of life. The index of civilization is the individual’s power to consume—to make use of—the resources of nature.

Now the fact is that all during the so- called “depression” this power to consume,

The charts and interpretations in this portfolio of U.S. Industrialization were prepared in collaboration with R. Buckminster Fuller, consultant on Fortune’s editorial staff. this augmentation of the individual, has proceeded faster than ever before in history. It has proceeded faster than in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the railroads and the steel mills were being built. It has proceeded faster than in the gay nineties, or the expanding tens and teens of the twentieth century. It has proceeded faster, even, than in the booming twenties, hallowed in the charts of economists. Yet this accelerating progress has received relatively little attention. It has not been observed. And the reason why it has not been observed is that, in computing progress, we follow the economist in reducing everything to the dollar. Clearly, in order to achieve an increase in his power of consumption, man needs a complex economic system; and, clearly, the dollar is vital to the healthy functioning of that system. But it is not necessarily the measure of the system.

This fact becomes clear if w^re stop to make a fundamental distinction. There are two ways of measuring the individuals power to consume, one of which may be called potential, the other actual. The potential power to consume may be defined as the power of the best-equipped, most augmented individual. The rich man in 1850 could not have bought the extensions available to even modest incomes in 1940. His power to consume was of necessity far less than the power of the rich man today. And this potential power—potential in the sense that it may not yet be distributed to all—may be taken as the basic yardstick of civilization. The actual power to consume, on the other hand, may be defined as the per capita power to consume—the average of all individuals in a given economic system. The actual power to consume measures the extent of industrialization. Since industrialization is based upon mass production, the potential and the actual are always linked together in some degree. And of course the degree varies. In this sense the private airplane (one for every 9,692 persons in the U.S.) is much more potential in character than the radio (nearly one for every three persons). While the effort of every industrial system must be to increase the actual power to consume to the greatest possible extent, the potential, in a growing system, must always remain ahead of the actual.

This distinction bears strongly upon the question of why dollar measurement leads the investigator astray. A classical economic

Continued on page 50

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^{1850 1890}

■

THE EVOLUTION OF AN

The above charts provide a capsule description of the U.S. economy. Chart 4 (top) shows income produced per family, 1850-1939. Chart 5 shows the relative gain of "all other” (chiefly industrial) exports over agricultural exports. Chart 6 provides the key to the present article. Abandoning dollar figures, it shows the net addition of new iron to the economic system (black area), in

INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY

hundreds of pounds per capita; versus the effective consumption of energy (white line) from mineral fuels and waterpower in B.T.U.’s per capita. The decline of the iron curve, coupled w ith the rise of the energy curve, is symptomatic of the basic change from a tonnage, or producers’, economy, to an energy economy dependent for its growth upon the consumer.

solution for the present “stagnation” would be an increase in capital investment. There is no question that this would help the economy; money would be spent, and this would increase the actual power to consume. But an increase in the rate of investment, or any other such measure, would not necessarily increase the potential power to consume. It would not necessarily advance the progress of industrialization in this most basic sense. The progress of industrialization will depend rather upon what kind of investment is made. The potential is not at all increased when a railroad buys new cars that are obsolete in design; it is very little increased when the federal government builds a new post office
where the old one had served: but it is very much increased when the chemical industry puts a fraction of the above investment into the development of a new solvent; it is very much increased (or was, during the growth of the automobile) when the government builds concrete highways. Some capital investments increase both the potential and the actual power to consume. Others increase only the actual. And projects can be imagined that might have relatively little effect upon either.

Thus, in measuring our industrial system and in proposing solutions to its problems, it is necessary to use industrial measurements as well as dollar measurements; it is necessary to measure with such ele
ments of progress as units per capita, tons, thermal units, kilowatt-hours, watts, and engineering indexes of viscosity, flux, torque, and efficiency. To talk about income and expenditure, price, capital promotion, or investment, without taking the engineering factors into account, is both futile and confusing. For while the power to consume—in both senses—is certainly affected by the economic factors, it does not spring from them.

The measurement of industrial progress is the purpose of the accompanying portfolio of charts. Beginning with the simplest static charts on page 51, and ending with the extraordinary illustration of U.S. industrial power on page 57, the portfolio

11850

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1920

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UNITS PER 1,000 POP.

GROUP II

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AUTOMOBILES

PEP 1,000 POP.

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TELEPHONES

1920

1890

I9MO

shows some of the hidden and irresistible forces that, before our eyes yet beyond them, are making a new world. These charts are not economists charts; only six out of the fifty are concerned with the dollar, and none of these pretends to make basic measurements. They are industrial charts whose purpose is to illustrate the dynamics of progress in the U.S. In some cases this has necessitated original computation; in others it has called for a liberal use of estimates designed to show not absolute quantities but trends.*

Group I: the U.S. vs. the world. Like almost all the charts in the portfolio, these three are per capita charts. And they do not show quantities, they show ratios. Thus, to take cattle (in Chart i, showing per capita resources), there are fewer cattle in the world (about 700,000,000) than there are people (about 2,125,000,000), and there are more cattle in the rest of the world (about 633,000,000) than there are in the U.S. (about 67,000,000). But in the U.S. more cattle are divided among fewer people than in the rest of the world. Thus, if all the cattle inside the U.S. were to be distributed to the people in the U.S., and those outside were to be distributed to the people outside, each citizen in the U.S. would find himself in possession of half of one, whereas each citizen in the rest of the ■world would get less than a third of one. The ratio between these shares is about one and two-thirds to one—which is the point illustrated by the chart. Similarly, if the world’s known reserves of coal were distributed, each U.S. citizen would own 24,450 tons, whereas each citizen in the rest of tne world would own only 2,465 tons; and this ratio of ten to one is what the chart shows. The ratios are shown in terms of the divisions in each horizontal bar of the charts, the blue divisions with white stars standing for the U.S., the red divisions for the rest of the world.

Chart 1 shows the ratio in per capita ownership of some of the most important resources. Chart 2 shows the per capita ratio in the production of certain representative resources and manufactured goods, both agricultural and industrial. No effort has been made to compile a complete list, but for those shown it will be seen that the world approaches most closely to the U.S. in its per capita gold production, where the ratio favoring the U.S. is only about seven to three. The ratio for the per capita production of automobiles is about thirty-seven to one.

Chart 3 is the most striking of this group, showing the ratio of products in use. In this, the real measure of the standard of living, U.S. leadership falls scarcely short of the fantastic. In the least dominant categories (cotton spindles and merchant marine) it leads by more than three to one.

•The derivations of some of these charts are exceedingly complex. Fortunl *will be glad to send a mimeographed memorandum concerning them to anyone interested.
*In radios in use the ratio is about eighteen to one; in automobiles, about thirty-three to one; in nonmilitary airplanes, about forty-three to one; and in bathtubs an almost incredible hundred and forty to one. Such has been the progress of the individual under the libertarian system.

Group II: history. This group divides itself into two parts. The three charts (4 to 6) on page 52 snow the over-all characteristics of the economy, and the five on page 53 (7 to 11) show a few examples of the means by which these characteristics have been developed.

Chart 4 is a record, furnished by the National Industrial Conference Board, of national income produced from 1850 to 1939, translated to a per family basis. Prior to 1900 these figures are little better than informed guesses, and the 1939 figure is a rough estimate. Nevertheless, the trends are certain. The purpose of the chart (which is one of the few employing dollars) lies with the lowest three lines. These show the sources of income—that is, the proportions coming from government (13.6 per cent estimated in 1939), industry (41.9 per cent in 1939), and all other, such as agriculture, service, trade, and finance (44.5 per cent in 1939). The dominant feature here is the gradual rise in the proportion of income derived from industry. This rise is accompanied by a decline in all other (chiefly agriculture) and a rise in government. It is probably safe to predict that in the near future industry will cross all other—that is, will contribute more than half of the nongovernmental income. In reality it already does; some large but indeterminate portions of service and trade are generated directly by industry.

The persistent rise of industry is even more clearly shown in Chart 5, which divides U.S. exports into agricultural and all other. Nonagricultural exports began to rise sharply in the middle nineties, crossed the agricultural exports about 1912, proceeded upward slowly, spurted in the late twenties, and spurted again in the late thirties. The result is that the relative dollar value of the two is almost the reverse of what it was in 1850.

Chart 6, which follows, is the most important of all, providing the key to the entire portfolio. Industrialization is achieved by harnessing matter and energy, and its basic yardsticks are therefore tons and kilowatt-hours. If these are used to measure industrialization a startling and altogether critical trend emerges, namely, an increase in the consumption of energy and a decline in the amount of matter, or tonnage, annually added to the system. This fundamental trend can be measured in a number of ways, of which the one chosen in Chart 6 is the simplest. Here iron is taken to represent matter, for the purpose of comparison with energy, not only because it is the basic raw material of industry but also because it actually enters into the mechanics of practically every form of industrial en
ergy production. The net annual addition of iron to the system (shown by the black area) is computed by adding the tonnage of all imported iron and steel to the tonnage of pig production in this country, and by deducting from this total all exports of ore, of iron and steel scrap, and of finished goods made of iron and steel (in tons). Thus what is really being measured is the addition of atoms of Fe (in tons) to the economic system.

The importance of these figures does not lie with their absolute accuracy (which would be virtually impossible to obtain) but with the trend that they show. And the trend is unmistakable. The absorption of iron by the economy increased at an accelerating rate through the nineties and the early twentieth century. It continued to rise slightly until 1923 (with a violent break in 1921), when it reached its all-time peak with a total of nearly 780 pounds per capita. During the rest of the twenties it diminished slightly, and in 1930 it broke violently. In 1932 it reached a low of 150 pounds per capita. It returned briefly to the level of the early twentieth century, and then, in 1938, dropped again—to a level not much higher than that of the nineties. For 1939 it will have recovered somewhat: but it shows no sign of real recovery.

The consumption of kilowatt-hours, meanwhile, has steadily risen. Since matter and energy are measured in different units, there is no telling where the curves should cross. The points shown (in 1921 and then again in 1930) are extremely suggestive, though quite arbitrary. In any case it is clear that the energy curve has had a persistent rise, with a slight acceleration during the twenties just as the tonnage curve was leveling off. The depression did not set energy back so much as it did tonnage; and—most significantly—energy recovered at the steepest rate in its history, has since made a brand-new high, and is definitely pointed upward.

The meaning of this twofold trend will become more apparent as we proceed. It is profoundly descriptive of the economy. Meanwhile, however, a glance at the other charts of Group II (on page 53) will help to visualize the dynamic processes at work. These charts divide themselves into two groups. Charts 7, 8, and 9 show per capita consumption trends; Charts 10 and 11 show per capita trends of products in use: but the common characteristic of both groups is a progression from old forms to new and violently expanding ones. Such fundamentals as wheat, coal, cotton, railroad trackage, and telegraph-wire mileage all show a per capita leveling off and decline. But against these declines new products, better adapted to high industrialization, produce steeply rising curves: oranges (an industrialized commodity), oil, rayon, automobiles, airplanes (measured in passenger seats), telephones, and radios. The rise of these new products vastly increases the consumption of energy. The process is most clearly illustrated in Chart 10 on

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transportation. Clearly, the expansion of railroad-track mileage, bringing with it a huge expansion in rolling stock, was a big factor in the consumption of tonnage during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The addition of the automobile increased this tonnage absorption. But automobiles also became a big factor in supplying iron scrap (a curve shown in Group III, page 55); hence, while causing a rise in the consumption of energy, they have not caused an equivalent rise in new iron requirements. But no sooner had the automobile curve begun to flatten out than that of the airplane began to rise. Here, of course, tonnage was reduced to a minimum, energy pushed to a maximum—an example that is rather more symbolic than actual since the airplane’s total consumption of energy is still relatively infinitesimal.

This group of charts is designed to show trends in U.S. foreign trade. The above (47) is a breakdown of total U.S. direct investments in other lands. During depression direct investments have held up well; portfolio investments (foreign equities) have suffered. Biggest net profits (1938): Transpacific and Africa, 10 per cent on capital invested.

INDEX
_EXPO R.TS
52 NXTIO* AL INCOME

10 * — r——

             **9 1**      **0 \*3**   **1**   **1 ’3**   **1 \*J**                        **’3**   **19**   id

If the charts of Group II are considered as a whole they suggest that the period from 1850 to 1939 can be divided into three. During the first subperiod, from about 1850 to about 1890, the nation was busy laying railroad track and communication lines. It absorbed large quantities of iron and other tonnage materials and it drew its energy almost entirely from coal. During this period the people did not think of the railroad, or the telegraph, or even the older cotton mills and foundries, as representatives of a new order of existence. The economy was still primarily agricultural and the wonders of industry were considered to be no more than adjuncts to the old order.

This chart (48) provides an index of foreign trade, using as a base (equals 100) 5 per cent of national income each year. In the late twenties this index shows exports above 100. They helped to sustain the boom. The export line did not again exceed 100 until 1937-38, and then wavered. Note violent decline of imports.

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In the gay nineties, however, there appeared a series of technological advances and of almost unbelievable inventions, which rapidly changed the character of the system. Thereafter vast tonnages of heavy materials were absorbed in the rush to build a national plant capable of capitalizing on those inventions; tonnage rose faster than energy. This is the period of shrewd opinion and wild guessing—attributes that led to success because the possibilities of good fortune in almost any industrial attempt were exceedingly high. It was also the period in which the principles of mass production were born: Frederick (Speedy) Taylor showed the steel industry how to cut the labor cost in every ton of steel; and a decade later Henry Ford practically revolutionized the world with his moving production line. These latter developments were not to bear their full fruit until the next era, but meanwhile the character of life was definitely changed; people became conscious of industrialization though still ignorant of its full import. In 1912 nonagricultural exports crossed and exceeded agricultural exports; oil began its long climb toward coal as a major energy source. To all this the World War added the final impetus. And in 1920, at the end of that second era, the U.S. emerged as the greatest industrial nation on earth.

The exports shown in Chart 48 are here analyzed (Chart 49) by countries. All countries whose proportion of the total has declined since 1928 are grouped together (blue line); and similarly, those whose proportions have risen are grouped together (red line). Exports have declined to old industrial areas, increased to neophyte industrial areas.

It is perhaps too early to make a clear analysis of the modem period, which would seem, according to these charts, to extend from about 1920 to the present day. One guess, however, can be hazarded. In terms of national income this period has been characterized by a violent expansion during the twenties and a violent contraction during the thirties. These vast swings have led some students of the economy to assume that two periods are involved: one an extension of the nineties, the other a new, contracting era signalizing a decline in the standard of living.

It does indeed seem to be true that the nature of the economy was radically and abruptly changed about 1930, where we [Continued on page rj#]

50 TREND OF U.S. EXPORTS-BY PRODUCTS % OF TOTAL $ VALUE

2.6 2.0 1.9

1.8

1.3 1.0

	PERCENT




4695								40*
								3O3X


		ITEMS	HOT l*CU Cll —	JMDNID *( —	TREND BIT* —	UN 1925-J	) TO 1937 —

1’719

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7.3

Cotton (unmanufactured)

Automobiles (chassis and passenger cars) Copper (including orc and manufactured) Gasoline and motor fuel

Coal and coke

Wheat (including flour)

Cotton (manufactured)

Lumber

Packing house Rubber (manufactured)

3.4

3.0

2.9

2.7

2.6

2.4

2.3

1.5

1.2

Iron and steel mill products Industrial machinery Tobacco (unmfd.)-down 201- in quantity Electrical machinery and apparatus Automobile parts and accessories Motor trucks-up 40’- in quantity Crude pctrolcum-up 234- in quantity Chemicals (coal tar, industrial, medicinal) Lubricating oil

Iron and steel scrop-up 1,025‘- in quantity Books and paper

Office equipment, printing machinery, etc. Aircraft

Cbbru by eimtr Snub

Here (Chart 50) exports are analyzed by types or categories. All categories whose proportion of the total has decreased since the 1926-30 average have been grouped together (blue line); and all svhose proportion has increased have been grouped together (red line). Those that have decreased are listed (with percentages) in the small box on the left, and those that have increased, on the right. It will be seen that most decreases have occurred in agricultural and consumers goods. Only exceptions, tobacco, which has increased in dollar volume, declined in quantity; books and paper, and auto- mobile parts. And most increases have occurred in producers goods.

WORLD ENERGY

A Map by R. Buckminster Fuller

Executed by Philip Ragan

O =21,250,000 human beings

• =368,500,000 inanimate energy slaves

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Mechanization, the harnessing of energy, is man’s answer to slavery. Man, whose population totals about 2,125,000,000, now possesses the equivalent of some 36,850,000,000 inanimate energy slaves. Their number is estimated by dividing total energy consumed by industrial man from mineral sources and waterpower, by the energy output of one human per year. Each white dot on the map represents 1 per cent of the human population; and the dots are located at centers of population. Each black dot represents 1 per cent of the inanimate slaves, located at focal centers of consumption. Each black dot represents about seventeen times the effective power developed mus- cularly by a white dot. The U.S. has 54 per cent of the energy slaves, an army of 20,000,000,000.

The broken line north of the equator is an isothermic line representing the zone of 32° Fahrenheit mean low. While all of industrial Europe lies to the south of this thermal zone, the heart of U.S. industrialism lies just to the north of it. History has made a clockwise spiral of civilization from East to West and northward.

have arbitrarily crossed the tonnage and energy lines in Chart 6.* But it is probably sounder to think of the period 1920- 39 as one transition period than as two periods. This assumption is well substantiated in the charts of Croup III (page 55), where many of the factors that have caused the vast increase in energy consumption of the thirties are shown to have been already on the rise during the twenties. The economy has changed from a tonnage economy to an energy economy. But this change began before 1930 and does not coincide with the depression.

Group JU- die elements of progress. In order to simplify the astounding record of the past eighteen or twenty years the charts of this group have been smoothed to show trends rather than annual variations. Readings are given at key points on every trend line, and in most cases only three or four points are necessary. Every curve on the page is up. And the burden of the exhibit is that certain forces that began to make themselves felt in the twenties have all but revolutionized the economy during the thirties; that these forces are still pointed upward; and that they signalize not the end of an old era but the beginning of a new and more spectacular one.

Materials. The group begins with two charts (12 and 13) showing one of the major reasons why tonnage has fallen off. The supply of iron scrap has reached 245 pounds per capita per annum, and while this is not enough to provide for all of industry, it is enough to furnish about 40 per cent of the net domestic iron requirements. The situation in copper is even more marked. With regard to this metal it would seem that a kind of "scrap point” is being reached at which the annual supply of scrap (about 13.6 pounds per capita) could almost take care of the entire domestic demand for copper. Chart 14 shows the growth of aluminum, contrasted with the now familiar curve for iron.f The curve for plastics is violently upward. These two curves, aluminum and plastics, are reminiscent of the railroad-automobile-airplanc progression and the other progressions shown in Croup II. Industrial progress is effected by constant replacement of old materials and inventions with new materials and inventions, the constant aim being the production of more with less. Usually the new materials and inventions are not strictly comparable to the old. Thus, aluminum and plastics Gin be more realistically measured by volume than by weight. Hence, the poundage has in each case been multiplied by a volumetric factor for the purpose of comparison with iron.

Efficiency. The net new tonnage requirements of the economy are reduced by the piling up of scrap. At the same time,

•It will be noted that, while this crossing is admittedly arbitrary, one would have to introduce con- siderable distortion in the chart to avoid crossing these lines in the early thirties.

f Aluminum scrap cannot be readily measured because this rnetal is so universally alloyed. A great deal of aluminum scrap is sold in its alloyed form.

Industrialization

the efficiency of the industrial plant has been increased to the vast benefit of industry, and ultimately of the consumer. Thus there has been a rise in the number of kilowatt-hours that can be derived from a pound of coal, from .33 to .71, or 115 per cent (Chart 16). There has been a rise of 34 per cent in the conversion of B.T.U.’s of industrial coal into horsepower, or kinetic energy (Chart 17); and a rise of 200 per cent in the conversion of automobile gasoline B.T.U.’s to tractive effort (Chart 18). These factors are important in figuring the energy output of the economy because they mean that more energy is obtained from each ton of coal that is mined or each barrel of oil that is recovered; and they have been figured into the energy curve in Chart 6. Together with other factors, not the least of which is the introduction of new metals, they have been responsible for a vast increase in the horsepower output of engines per pound of weight. This is shown most markedly in aircraft engines (Chart 19), where horsepower per pound has been one of the limiting factors in the development of the art. Without the spectacular rise in this ratio modern airplanes would not exist.

At the same time, advances in metallurgy have produced steels more perfectly adapted to the demands of the engineers—hence more efficient. One example is the automobile fender (Chart 20), for which specially formable steel has been developed, leading to great economies in manufacture. Another is steel cable for bridges (Chart 21), which has increased in tensile strength from 160.000 pounds per square inch in 1870, when the Brooklyn Bridge was undertaken, to 225,000 in 1927, when the George Washington Bridge was undertaken—a development that has brought about longer spans and heavier loads. More familiar to the average citizen is the spectacular increase in average miles per automobile tire, from 11,000 to 26,500 (Chart 22). One development has been the increase in the efficiency of lubricating oil as measured by the lubrication (or so-called viscosity) index (Chart 23). For half a century, until 1929, pure Pennsylvania oil was the most efficient and was given an index number of 100. Then the chemists began to produce synthetic oils, which, by 1938, had reached an index value of 185 in laboratory tests, nearly double that of 1929. This means not only that the oil lasts longer but that the moving parts that it lubricates also last longer—another tonnage saving.

Almost equally spectacular has been the increase in the amount of light, as measured in lumens, that can be derived from a watt of electrical energy (Chart 24). In another (ield there was a vast and sudden increase in the speed of newspaper presses—from 30,000 to 50,000 papers per hour (Chart 25). In still another, the sensitivity index for photographic film has leaped upward (Chart
26), practically revolutionizing this extension of the human eye. And finally, a virtual revolution has been effected in the transmission of messages over telephone cable. With the equipment of 1920, only three messages could be carried over two pairs of cables at one time; whereas today about 480 messages can be carried. For each telephone message sacrificed twelve teletype messages can be substituted.

Expanding energy consumption. The most significant effect of these increases in efficiency has been a direct expansion in the consumption of energy. No better example of this could be had than that of the automobile (Chart 28). Whereas Europeans have sought economy, the U. S. has sought power in its passenger vehicles, with the result that the average maximum horsepower per car rose from 28 in 1920 to 85 in 1936. This has meant increased energy consumption, partly because of the increase in power, partly because of the increase in distances traveled owing to higher speeds. Another indicator has been the increase in passenger-mi les traveled per capita per annum (all forms of transportation) from 1,486 in 1920 to about 4.200 in 1938 (Chart 29), a rise of 180 per cent. But besides traveling. Americans have- been busy talking: telephone messages per capita (Chart 30) have increased 39 per cent, from 161 to 223. Finally, in its search for energy the U.S has harnessed its rivers to such good effect that the per capita kilowatt-hours from this source have increased from 143 in 1920 to 339 in 1939, or 140 per cent (Chart 31).

Expanding productivity per worker. Industrialization, as already pointed out, increases the power of everyone, not least of the worker; one of the most impressive measures of the expansion during the thirties is the rise in worker productivity. This has come about in many ways, but chiefly by putting more horsepower at the worker’s disposal. Thus in the Detroit area (Chart 32) the industrial energy consumed per worker has risen from 4.400 kilowatt- hours to 11,200 kilowatt-hours during the last eighteen years. On the farm the same trend is evident. In the wheat bell a man worked .14 acres per hour in 1920; now he works .24. The textile industry extended its work power from the processing of three pounds of raw cotton per man-hour in 1920 to 4.8 pounds in 1938, an increase of 60 per cent (Chart 34). The oil-refining industry (Chart 35) showed a similar increase; and by the improvement of machinery and other measures the bituminous-coal industry raised its output from .499 to .658 tons per man-hour, an increase of 32 per cent (Chart 36).

Expanding power Io consume. The vital objective of the industrial system is the consumer, as already set forth, and the increases already shown in efficiency, in energy production and consumption, and in worker productivity, have inevitably benefited him. If dollar measurements tire used these benefits arc often obscured. It is only in units consumed per capita that they am be truly summarized. During the “depression"
many consumers’ articles showed a vigorous expansion in these terms. No attempt is made here to cover the list, but a few representative samples (besides those already pictured in Group II) are shown in women’s silk stockings (Chart 37), sales of pairs of shoes (Chart 38), vacuum cleaners in use (Chart 39), bathtubs in use (Chart 40), and sales of electric bulbs (Chart 41).

Expanding knowledge. During the so- called depression, then, there has been a violent expansion in the use of certain new materials, in efficiency, in the consumption of energy, in the productivity per worker, and in the consumption of many products. Nor has the violent push of a new era stopped there; great advances have been made in the means of obtaining knowledge, which will in turn create new future demand. Thus the resolving power of microscopes (Chart 43) has increased from 3,600 diameters to 40,000, an increase of 1,011 per cent in man’s power to explore the invisible and to carry industrialization further. The same trend is shown in the violent rise in the employment by industry of research technicians (Chart 45). This rise of 433 P^er cent, from 1920 to 1938, was touched on in Fortune’s "U.S. Frontier” editorial for October, 1939; and it too guarantees more progress in the future. Equally indicative are the rise in college enrollment (Chart 42) and the rise in highschool attendance (Chart 44). Even the movies, with their vast power to create awareness and new desire, have pushed upward. Discounting the "depression rise” in 1930 as an abnormality, movie attendance has risen from nineteen admissions per capita per year in 1922, to thirty-four in 1938—a net gain of 80 per cent.

The “depression”

IT IS now possible to analyze the modern period, from 1920-39, with a clearer understanding of the forces at work. Turning back to our key, Chart 6, page 52, it is necessary to note, first, that the basic trend shown therein is not causal but symptomatic. Thus, to take iron, the decline in the absorption of this material did not result in a change in the economy; on the contrary, a change in the economy caused the decline in absorption. The nature of that change can be summarized in two points.

First, when iron is put into producers’ goods, such as steel rails, bridges, buildings, factories, and even heavy machinery, it stays there for a long time; it is lost, so to speak, from the circulatory system. Thus, when an economy is building its producers’ plant, vast annual tonnages of iron will be added to the system, the net absorption will be high. These machines, however, are used to make machines for the consumer (consumers’ durable goods) such as automobiles, refrigerators, typewriters, bicycles, etc.; and the consumers’ machines rapidly wear out. When they wear out they are junked and returned into the circulatory system in the form of old scrap, to be remanufactured into more consumers’ goods. As an economy

Industrialization

reaches a high consumer stage, therefore, its net iron requirement will decline; or, vice versa, a decline in the net iron requirement is the first sign that an economy is entering the consumer stage. All this is irrespective of exports, which are eliminated from the net figure. It would of course be possible to have an actual rise in iron mining and pig production, though a decline in the net domestic absorption, provided exports were increased.

Second, increases in efficiency of the kind shown in Group III enable an economy to produce more energy for each ton of iron absorbed. Thus, an old-style turbogenerator weighed twenty-diree and a half pounds per horsepower; a comparable modern one weighs only about seven pounds. The latter will consume more energy per ton of material than the former. A virtual revolution takes place in the energy tonnage relationship in the transportation industry when we introduce the airplane engine, which weighs slightly more than one pound per horsepower, instead of the automobile engine, which weighs nine or ten, or the locomotive, which, deliberately made heavy for tractive purposes, weighs seventy-five. This point is crucial. Manifestly, if the progress of industrialization (i.e., of increasing the potver to consume) were to stop, a decline in the tonnage curve would sooner or later result in a leveling off, or even a decline in the energy Curve. If automobiles, for example, were no more powerful today than they were in 1920 the recirculation of automobile scrap would not necessarily result in an increase in the energy consumption per capita. If, however, industrialization is advancing, the same amount of scrap will result in the consumption of more energy. Thus it is possible to conclude that if the absorption of matter and the consumption of energy both decline, then indeed an economy may be finished. But if a decline in the net absorption of matter is accompanied by a rise in the consumption of energy, industrialization is proceeding in a healdiy and vigorous manner—that is to say, the system is expanding. Moreover, diis latter trend over any considerable period of time would mark a clear transition from a crude producers’ economy to an advanced or highly evolved consumers’ economy.

Now this is exactly what has happened during the modern period, 1920-39. The first shift came in the period 1923-29, when new plant was still being built but not fast enough to maintain die rate of tonnage absorption. If the effect of this change had been noticed at all, it would have been noticed first in the mining industries and in the production of pig iron. But it was not noticed even there because all industry, including mining and other producers’ industries. was sustained by enormous exports financed by Wall Street. These exports were
chiefly consumers’ goods, but diey absorbed big tonnages of ore and pig. and also supported other producers’-goods industries. It was not until exports collapsed (from a value of $5,157.000.000 in 1929 to $1,576,- 000,000 in 1932) that the change that had already begun was felt.

The effect of the decline in exports would have knocked the props out from under the producers’-goods industry in any aise. But the effect was intensified by the fact that the nation had an even bigger and better plant in 1932 than it had had in 1923. New plant, of course, would still have to be built; replacements and improvements would still have to be made; hence some of the producers’-goods industries (notably the machine-tool industry) would prosper—and have prospered. But the wild prosperity that comes from finding newtons of valuable industrial materials under the earth, mining them and smelting them, was not to be expected. Moreover, owing to technological advances, the productivity of the plant already in existence was greatly increased. This meant that a large increase in consumption could be registered without creating any corresponding need for an expansion of the plant. Accordingly, the capital market collapsed, idle funds accumulated, and fear spread. The situation was characterized as an “emergency” by the political leaders. Business was blamed. And many persons, some in high office, opined that the country was in for an era of contraction and a declining standard of living.

It is manifestly impossible to review here the various stimulants and antidotes that have been administered to revive the supposedly sick industrial system. They have not revived the system chiefly because they have failed to put the emphasis where the emphasis belongs. The important fact is not diat an old era has passed, but that a new era has been born. And in the last analysis the central economic problem of diis new era is a simple one. The central economic problem is not a revival in the producers’ industry, although that would help. Nor can it be a revival in “investment” in the old sense of the word. The central economic problem is simply the conversion of a high potential power to consume into an actual power to consume: a wider distribution of progress.

The great differential that links potential and actual consuming power is price; and what the new era cries for is a drastic decline in many lines of industrial prices. The most cogent example of the effect of price is to be found in Chart 22 (Group III), which shows the enormous rise in miles per automobile tire. Much of this rise ’ has been achieved simply by putting more rubber on the tires; yet costs have been saved, both in the price of crude rubber and by an increased productivity of labor in the tire factories: and these savings have been handed on to the consumer, with the result that the cost per mile of every tire has radically declined, and sales have increased. This is the-method by which potential is translated into actual consuming power.

Continued on page 58

This is quite in accordance with classical capitalist theory, which holds that while technological advance creates unemployment, it will also create new sources of employment, providing the cost saving is passed on to the consumer. A lower price in one article saves the consumer money that he can then use to buy another article, thus increasing the volume of the latter and creating a new demand for labor. Industrial price cutting, in other words, actually increases the purchasing power; and a high purchasing power must result in a high rate of consumption and an improved labor demand. Whether this principle is capable of sustaining an indefinite advance without any assistance from an expansion in the producers’ industry is a matter for debate. But it would patently be capable of starting an advance; and if an advance were started the next steps would become far more obvious than they are today.

But a decline in prices can be brought about only in the presence of an intangible factor that has hitherto baffled everyone. This is the factor of confidence. Concerning this word there has been a lot of confusion. Emphasis has been put on the need for confidence in making new investment; but in view of the shift in the nature of the economy, this emphasis is both unrealistic and academic. The realistic requirement is, rather, that the businessman should have confidence in the consumer: he must have confidence that if he decreases his prices and his profit margins he will get a corresponding rise in volume. He has not been confident of this and he has consequently held his prices high enough to be sure to cover his overhead and fixed charges at the present volume.

This failure of business confidence in the consumer has been due partly to a lack of business imagination. But it has also been partly justifiable because consumers themselves, lacking confidence in the future, tend to save too much against the rainy day that everyone has been taught to expect. They do not spend so much as they might if they had confidence in the future. It cannot be argued, of course, that the situation can be solved by a cut in the rate of savings of the average consumer. The bulk of the savings comes from the upper brackets; and the upper upper brackets, at any rate, have presumably almost reached the limit of their power to consume. Nevertheless—again—a start could be made. The release of one or two or maybe even three billions a year from the unfruitful purchase of insurance policies, “safe” bonds, or just plain cash accumulation may be that very pump primer that we have been needing all along.

The chief hope, therefore, of starting to convert our great potential into actual con- sumirtg power, is to lay the facts of industrialization before the people. The new era, the new requirements, the new duties, the new hopes should be announced. But this has not been done; and the result has been theorizing in vacuo. To this general observation should be added the caveat that participation in a war would apparently

Industrialization

change the entire situation. Vast tonnages of metal would then be absorbed, not only in building a big national munitions plant but also by shooting iron at the enemy. If this happened the "solution” would be provided via producers’ goods, just as in the past. But since the object of industrialization is to increase consuming power, and not to destroy, nothing would really be solved. The true solution would merely once again be deferred for another generation.

Group IV

The U.S. abroad. There is one other factor in the present situation that bears heavily upon the future prosperity of the U.S. In Group I the U.S. standard of living was shown versus that of the rest of the world. In Group IV the relationship of the U.S. to the rest of the world is shown in the more tangible terms of foreign trade.

Explanations of these charts will be found under the charts themselves on page 56. They are presented by way of a reminder that, although (barring war) the U.S. has built its primary industrial plant for some time to come, the rest of the world has not. Reliable figures are not available, but those that Fortune has obtained indicate that whereas the tonnage curve for the U.S. is falling, that for the rest of the world is now rising. The rest of the world, considered as a whole, is building its plant, and one way to revive the U.S. producers industry would be to participate in this building.

DISTRIBUTION OF WORLD POPULATION AND INDUSTRIAL ENERGY

The left column below gives comparative figures for effective world-energy consumption (average 1937-39), computed at 4 per cent efficiency. The column titled inanimateslave population is arrived at by dividing the figures of column one by 37,500,000. This figure represents the foot-pounds of physical work that it is estimated a man may maintain over a year, less the energy required for self-locomotion. Countries whose animate and inanimate populations are under 1 per cent of the world’s have been distributed proportionately to countries above 1 per cent (exception, Canada).

                       Effective consumption all energy in quadrillions of foot-pounds   Inanimateslave population   Per cent of total world inanimate slaves   Human population   Per capita energy slaves

United States ,899,000,000 ,000,000 >53
Canada ,842,500,000 ,000,000
All other America. . ,474,000,000 ,000,000
Total Americas… . . ,500,000 ,000,000
Germany (greater). . . Ill ,948,000,000 ,000,000
Great Britain ⁶9 ,842,500,000 ,000,000
France ,474,000,000 ,000,000
Italy ,105,500,000 ,000,000
U.S.S.R ,842,500,000 ,000,000
All other Europe… . . ,474,000,000 ,000,000
Total Europe ,686,500,000 ,000,000
Japan and China. . . ,211,000,000 ,000,000 4
All other Asia O ,000,000
,211,000,000 ,124,000,000
Total Africa ,000,000 ,000
All other O ,500,000
Total World 1,382 ,850,000,000 ,125,000,000

Ejfimal/J by R. Buckmimltr Fuller

This possibility raises a number of problems that cannot be entered here, but it is worth noting that considerable participation already exists. First, as Chart 47 shows, direct investments of private capital outside the U.S. totaled 7.7 billion in 1933 and some 7 billion in 1938. The “depression,” in short, did not by any means wipe out these investments. They are now near the level of the late twenties—whereas, as shown in Chart 6, the U.S. domestic absorption of tonnage is back at the level of the nineties. On the other hand, portfolio investments (i.e., U.S. ownership of foreign equities) have dropped much more severely.

As for exports, Chart 49 shows a steady rise in shipments to industrial neophytes such as Central America, the West Indies, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa; and a decline in exports to industrial Europe (including the Soviet Union) and to Canada (including Newfoundland and Labrador). Tracing this trend further [Continued on page 164] (Chart 50), we find a very marked rise in the exportation of industrial capital goods, a trend consistent with the thesis that the rest of the world is now building its industrial plant.

It is clear that the exportation of private capital in direct investments, together with the exportation of capital goods, whether producers’ or consumers’, can provide partial solutions to the domestic savings problem, on the one hand, and the stalling of the domestic tonnage economy on the other. In so far as outlets can be found in this direction, some of the pressure for converting the domestic economy almost overnight into a consumer economy will be taken off. Hitherto the barrier to this line of development has been our own unwillingness to participate in world trade by admitting imports. Our tariffs have brought forth tariffs and quotas against us. International trade has thus been blocked, and at present the situation is further complicated by war. But the need is now so great that something must be done. As pointed out in the last article of this issue, the U.S. frontier is becoming international. It is necessary for the U.S., while reforming its economy, to work for a new world order in which it may confidently share.

A foreign policy, formulated with some of the determination that characterized the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine, but adapted to the needs of the modern situation, will be essential to the re-establishment of that confidence which, as we have seen, American business and the American consumer must have. Such a policy might well be based upon the declared intention of the U.S. to help raise

Industrialization

the standard of living of the rest of the world, and particularly of its neighbors. The vast discrepancy in the standard of living inside the U.S. and outside of it—as shown in the charts of Group I—is, assuredly, neither just nor democratic. It is not even wise: for it creates a fundamental imbalance in the world from which the U.S. itself is now suffering.

THE U.S. citizen is not accustomed to thinking of himself as an internationalist, and it may be a generation or so before the idea sits easily in his head. But whether he thinks of himself as such or not, he is. His internationalism is the result of his great power, a power such as no mere citizen has ever had, nor for that matter, many kings. The dimensions of this power are illustrated on the map on page 57, which shows the power of the American in terms of manpower slaves. It is estimated that one man, besides carrying his own weight, can do 150,000 foot-pounds of work in an eight-hour day, a total of 37.5 million footpounds per year. On the other hand, the energy consumed by the U.S., 1937-39, from mineral fuels (coal, oil, gas) and waterpower was sufficient (after allowing for the inefficiency of conversion) to produce 746 quadrillion foot-pounds of work. That is the equivalent of the work of 20 billion human slaves, or 153 per capita. In addition, of course, the inanimate slaves are more serviceable than humans. No number of human slaves could enable the citizen to fly or to drive a car at eighty miles an hour. But for purposes of comparison the figure will serve.

And the comparison with the rest of the world is almost incredible. While topped by Canada on a per capita basis, the U.S. actually has 54 per cent of all the world’s 36,850,000,000 inanimate slaves. On the map the comparison is simplified by the use of white dots (for actual population) and red dots (for the inanimate-slave population), but in the table on page 163 it is broken down by countries and continents. Whereas the U.S. has 153 slaves per capita. Great Britain has only 41, Germany only 27, France only 35. Africa has only 5. And Asia, without Japan and China, has virtually none at all. The average for the entire world, including the U.S., is only 17. The relative supremacy of the U.S. in these primary terms is something that no empire in the world, probably not even Rome in the days of human slavery, has ever equaled.

This supremacy carries with it a responsibility. It is easy for us to turn back to the history books, to trace the errors that the Roman people made and the errors that the emperors made; to watch the crumbling and decay of that great civilization. It is not so easy to measure or to analyze our own civilization—or even to realize that it is ours. But this we must now do. By industrialization we built a new civilization. And during tire last fifteen or twenty years, by further industrialization, we have created the possibility of an entirely new era for mankind. It is time now to get to work to make that era a reality.

Fifteen Cents

(REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.)

VOLUME XXXV

NUMBER 6

FEBRUARY.5, 194

THE PRESS

New Era

Last week subscribers to Fortune could study that magazine’s bold free-hand portrait of the U. S. Ten years ago the first issue of the magazine went to a handful of charter subscribers; through the following 120 months Fortune editors investigated and wrote about businesses flourishing or under the weather, U. S. citizens sanguine or depressed. To celebrate its first ten years, Fortune took on its biggest job— to size up the U. S., to sum up its decade’s experience.

Result is a big, handsome issue of twelve articles (100,000 words), 135 Fuller, creator of the Dymaxion House and Dymaxion car, establish that, in relation to each citizen in the rest of the world, the U. S. citizen is rich in the forces that developing technology has potentially made available, so rich that “the important fact is not that an old era has passed but that a new era has been bom. . . .”

Framing Fortune’s account of the dispossessed are pictures of a Tennessee family in a poverty-stricken mountain cabin; framing the story on U. S. culture are quotations from Walt Whitman and an album of U. S. folkways, covering U. S. unions, U. S. salesmen, the 30,000 U. S. industrial managers and the 32,000,000 U. S. farm- U. S. greatness lay in its past rather than its future, nor could it find one belief, one condition, one policy, the key to U. S. strength. “In spite of all lacks and unfavorable comparisons, the U. S. is the greatest nation on earth. . . . But its actual greatness rests not on these single a*- sets but on their combination. The greatness of the U. S. is the sum of a vast land area; a great, resourceful population of diverse origins and talents; … a universal industry of cosmic dimensions; an enormous treasury of resources; a form of government that has stimulated the optimum development of all the components of the economy. It is the compounding of all these sources of greatness that makes the U. S. great.”

Blackstone

Richard Buckminster Fuller “A new era has been bom.”

Elmo Roper For the middle class, 79%.

photographs, one map, nine reproductions in color of U. S. paintings and prints, an abundance of charts in color, and a declaration that a new era in U. S. history has begun.

Physically, the U. S. that emerges from Fortune’s pages is no land to be depressed about. To generally known superlatives about U. S. resources, the leading article, The U. S. A., contributes new ones: the amount of sunlight that falls on the different regions of the country; the potential mineral energy stored in the mountains of Wyoming and North Dakota; the potential water power that thunders down the rivers of the Northwest. Winding up ten years of fact-finding, Fortune’s editors came out with: “Almost all the serious problems that now confront the U. S. have their origin . . . in the achievements of the U. S. They are not problems of poverty, but problems of abundance.”

Most startling achievement that Fortune records: that throughout ten years of depression the U. S. citizen’s power to consume has increased more rapidly than ever before in history. Charts prepared by rotund little Richard Buckminster ers. In other articles, Fortune covers U. S. opinion in a survey, conducted by Poll Taker Elmo Roper, that measures U. S. opinion about itself.

Over 79% of the people believe they belong to the middle class.
65% would prefer to work for themselves.
61% would rather gamble on a job with a high wage and an even chance of getting fired or promoted; 56.2% believe that interests of employers and employes are the same. The average American never expects to have a domestic servant, believes his children will have a better chance than he had, believes in the Bill of Rights, but is wary (40.2%) about the preaching of doctrines that might in the long run endanger those rights.

Without blinking at the immensity of U. S. wealth, the extent of U. S. poverty, Fortune makes as strong an affirmative statement with the photographs that illuminate U. S. life as with the statistics that dramatize U. S. industrial growth, gives figures for future growth to justify the basic optimism that poll takers found when they asked their questions. In no field scrutinized could Fortune find that

Dymaxion Dwelling Machine air-flow diagram—1944.

THE DYMAXION DWELLING MACHINE

Production of the Industrialized House

In 1944, a serious labor shortage developed in the aircraft field, the war efforts top priority industry.

Somebody in Washington remembered that Fuller had been talking about the possibility of a post-war conversion of the aircraft industry to housing. When queried about it, Fuller answered, “It might provide two things, an immediate solution to the looming postwar housing shortage. And it might provide permanent employment in the aircraft field because there is no basic difference between the fabricating of aluminum parts for the Dymaxion house and for the fuselages of B29s.”

“If and when adequate time, money, resources, and knowhow have been invested in the Dymaxion houses,” Fuller continued, “They will be installable anywhere around the world at the same speed in which telephones can be installed. And with such economy of use of resources as to open up their universal availability to worlds peoples.”

APRIL

194*

FULLER’S HOUSE

Why Buckminster Fuller’s designs for low-cost, truly modern, mass-produced homes may well upset a notoriously tradition - bound building industry.

FORTUNE Magazine: Editorial Offices, 350 Fifth Avenue, New York I, N. Y.

corramt i«««, TIME Imc.

BOARD CHAIRMAN FULLER WITH VENTILATOR

FULLER’S HOUSE

IT HAS A BETTER THAN EVEN CHANCE

OF UPSETTING THE BUILDING INDUSTRY

Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. is a chunky, powerful little man with a build like a milk bottle, a mind that functions likri a cross between a roll-top desk and a jet-propulsion motor, and one simple aim in life: to remake the world. Into a mere fifty years he has crammed enough technical careers to staff the faculty of a sizable engineering school, and by way of extracurricular activity has managed to write several books, publish a magazine, and create a system of mathematics. As a cartographer he is unique: he is the first man to be granted a U.S. patent for a basically new method of map projection. These achievements, however, may all fade into relative obscurity if his current venture—a house—succeeds, for this “dwelling machine” is likely to produce greater social consequences than the introduction of the automobile.

These are strong words, but Bucky Fuller goes in for strong ideas. A Washington official, who got so sick of hearing from his subordinates about Fuller’s extraordinary house that he finally took a plane to Wichita to see the one Beech Aircraft had built, was taken into the carefully locked building where the prototype was hidden, and gasped, “My God! This is the house of the future!” Later, when he had regained his composure, he announced that the house was going to precipitate an industrial revolution or the most monumental flop in history, and that he was betting on the former. He then jammed on his hat, got back on the plane, and fled to the secure familiarity of his pre-Fuller office building and his solid walnut desk. Bucky Fuller’s ideas often have this effect on people.

Fuller’s house, which has been developing for nearly twenty years, shows devastatingly rigorous logic and astonishing technical ability. It probably never would have come into existence save for the fortuitous interaction of a Puritan conscience with the atomic age. When Bucky was a little boy, he gradually became aware of an environment not unlike that of The Late George Apley (J. P. Marquand is his cousin). And, since ancestors are taken seriously around Boston, he quickly learned that his forebears were solid, God-fearing, and occasionally distinguished people. They were, like so many of their New England contemporaries, a rather stem lot, rigidly repressed in their emotions but violent crusaders for their own concepts of justice and morality. Also, the Fullers had been Harvard men for four generations, and it was taken for granted by his father, a prosperous tea and leather merchant, that Bucky and his brother Wolcott should represent the fifth. The year 1913 saw Bucky in Harvard, where he anticipated the war one year by going off in a series of personal explosions that produced two expulsions and a number of other events. While his activities did not differ radically from the usual student shenanigans, their scale indicated that he already had a penchant for doing things in a big way. The first collision with authority occurred when he skipped examinations to escape to New York, where he took out the entire chorus of a musical comedy on a champagne party. The arm of the law caught up with him three days later at the old Waldorf, where he was confronted with a mountain of unpaid bills, and his mother’s deputy arrived on the heels of the sheriff. As a disciplinary measure Mrs. Fuller exiled him to Quebec, where he was apprenticed to a machine installer in a cotton mill. The punishment seems hardly to have fitted the crime, for Bucky was crazy about the job and wanted to stay, but his mother again intervened. Bucky obediently trotted back, but there was presently a second expulsion—again for dipping too deeply into the fleshpots—and he was turned over to Armour & Co., where he was given the privilege of working on the 3:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. shift.

Considering the background, there is nothing particularly surprising in any of this, and Fuller’s later career often repeats the alternating pattern of conformity and rebellion. His own explanation is that playing around made more sense than the Harvard curriculum. He had demonstrated earlier at Milton Academy that he could be a brilliant student, but on account of the interruptions he missed out on his Harvard diploma. Immediately after college he joined the Navy, and in the same year married Anne Hewlett, daughter of a prominent New York "architect.

The Navy, for Fuller, was all that college might have been. In his job with Armour he had been struck by the rapid mobility of the meat-packing process, and in the Atlantic transport operation he saw “big tons moving over large geographical patterns.” Both experiences convinced him that increasing fluidity was a basic characteristic of industry, and the idea became central in his first concept of the Dymaxion house. By chance he got in on the first successful radio conversation between a plane and a ship, which again reinforced the idea of mobility, for here was trackless and weightless movement at the speed of light.

MODEL OF HOUSE WITH VENTILATOR

DEPLOYMENT UNIT

These shelters, built by Butler Mfg. Co. of Kansas City, were inspired by corrugated-iron grain bins. The Signal Corps used them for radar shacks.

He learned other things: his work required a knowledge of map projection, chart making, and statistical methods, and for a time he was editor of the magazine Convoy. The Navy, for Fuller, was a powerfully concentrated introduction to the modem world. Also he mixed with people like Vincent Astor, who were prominent socially and financially. A member of an old New England family himself, Bucky Fuller has never quite got over the innocuous pleasure of being on first-name terms with the upper crust.

Two things that happened in the twenties sealed irrevocably the pattern of Fuller’s career. One was the death of his daughter Alexandra at the age of four; the other was the failure of a building business on which he had spent five grueling years. The child had had infantile paralysis and spinal meningitis in infancy, but after a desperate struggle it began to look as if she would recover from the effects of both. She had been taken to Bermuda for the winter of 1921, and shortly after her return to Long Island she contracted pneumonia and died in a matter of hours. Fuller had been away, and returned to find her unconscious. Although there wasn’t a thing he could have done about it, he never succeeded in throwing off a great feeling of guilt, and for years afterward used his work the way other men use liquor. He also felt (whether correctly or not doesn’t matter) that in a properly designed house she would not have become ill, and in his Dymaxion-house project one later finds a passionate insistence on the house as scientifically designed protective environment, and an equally violent hatred for the obsolete housing he saw around him.

FULLER WITH MODEL OF FIRST HOUSE

The 1927 Dymaxion had a hexagonal plan and exposed cable supports. Raised one story, it provided parking below, an elevator in the mast.

FULLER’S DYMAXION CAR

The first car was built in 1933 and was followed by two others; all had rear engines and three wheels. The one illustrated, after having been driven 300,000 miles, was repurchased by Fuller and is now in Wichita. Photograph below shows the unusually generous space inside.

Fuller’s business was the Stockade Building System, a combination of fibrous insulating blocks and reinforced concrete. In>the five years he had it, he put up several small plants and learned at first hand about the innumerable difficulties facing anyone who was trying to introduce even minor improvements in building. On every job he ran into code troubles, financial opposition, the ignorance of contractors, jurisdictional disputes, and high costs. What impressed him more than anything else was his observation that there was no way to provide a good house for the low-income purchaser. “I became convinced,” Fuller says, “that no company could bring an improvement into the structural phases of the building world and make money out of it, and because of that people were not able to buy houses as they did cars. Technology was not able to make its imprint on housing.” After the failure of his company, Fuller moved his family to a Chicago slum and resolved to forget about earning a living until he had put his ideas in order. The result, in 1927, was the design for the Dymaxion house, a hexagonal affair that hung on a metal mast like a speared apple. Not only was the house revolutionary in structure, but Fuller predicted that it would be air-conditioned, have built-in furniture, a packaged kitchen, and automatic laundry equipment. Needless to say, this led a lot of people to call him a visionary crackpot. But not everybody: a number of universities invited him to lecture, some favorable articles about the house were published, and a number of architects encouraged the project.

After several years of campaigning for his ideas, Fuller concluded that the house would have to wait: he needed alumi-

PARTS PRODUCTION

The prototype of Fuller’s newest house was not built by hand, it was made on production machinery at the Beech Aircraft plant in Wichita. Perhaps the most startling single fact about the house is that all its parts are made with aircraft materials on aircraft tools. A visitor at Beech would be unable to distinguish house parts from those being produced for planes.

DOOR FRAME

Bucky Fuller (right) stands in the door frame of his house, a formed aluminum member strikingly similar to the opening that appears in the side of the Beechcraft in the background. The shape combines great rigidity with extreme lightness. The frame has no joints.
num, new plastics, and high-strength alloy steels for its production, none of which were available at reasonable costs, and he decided instead to look over the automotive industry. The result was the Dymaxion car, a three-wheeled streamliner with a rear engine. The car produced more excitement than ridicule, for people, even in 1933, had an intuitive appreciation of its logic. Automobile manufacturers, however, showed no interest, so again Fuller was checked off as a “failure.” The next thing was a bathroom, built while he was in the research department of the Phelps Dodge Corp. The bathroom was an extraordinarily refined design of monocoque construction that incorporated in its four pieces not only the three fixtures, but walls, floor, and ceiling as well. The reaction to published pictures was so enthusiastic that Fuller’s friends became hopeful. But the big plumbing manufacturers, with a virtual stranglehold on the market, had no intention of letting this kind of competition develop. Fuller, undaunted, turned up in 1940 with a design for temporary housing made of the same corrugated sheet steel used for cylindrical grain bins. A few were built and then the war cut off the supply of steel. Both the steel house and the 1927 Dymaxion seem decades behind the aluminum and plastic job Beech has produced in Wichita, but the underlying idea is the same as ever.

If all people are to get high-quality shelter, says Fuller, that, shelter must be industrially produced in enormous quantities. Mass production means mobility, for both the raw materials and the finished product. Mobility demands minimum weight: the pound is the yardstick by which success and failure are measured. And minimum weight, in a structure, means the use of metals chiefly in tension rather than compression—expressed, if you like, in the difference between a suspension bridge and the Pyramids. Accordingly, Fuller’s house is made of aluminum, stainless steel, and plastics instead of bricks and lumber. It weighs around three tons instead of the usual hundred. It hangs rather than sits. It is circular instead of square because the round form gives maximum strength for each pound of material used. All of this sounds passing strange, and it is. Yet when you go into the house it feels as if, for the first time in your life, you had walked into the twentieth century.

This is the industrially produced house. No other dwelling in existence is even remotely like it. It is the only house designed for full mass production. It was manufactured in an airplane factory alongside the planes themselves, using the same materials, the same tools, and the same workmen. The plants now standing in Wichita can produce 250,000 of these houses a year without interfering with the manufacture of planes now on order. Beech alone can make 60,000 houses. Between the industrially produced house and the prefabricated house there is an enormous and instantly apparent technological lag. The prefabricated house is a compromise—necessary, perhaps, but a compromise nonetheless. This house looks like what it is, the end result of our most highly developed manufacturing technique.

Paradoxically, it is because he didn’t fool around with compromises that Fuller’s house has such an impact on whoever sees it. Because it is so completely radical there is no basis for comparison with the traditional dwelling—one thinks instead of plane cabins, ocean liners, the interiors of streamlined trains, all of which have full public acceptance. In the living room one sees considerable exposed aluminum; the thin cables supporting the floor pass in front of Plexiglas windows, which are riveted together. In Fuller’s house this all seems so appropriate that it rarely causes comment. The circular form, which arouses such doubts at first, looks quite unremarkable from inside and rather pleasant. Most unexpected of all, perhaps, is the general impression of luxury—due partly to the beauty of the materials used but chiefly to the indirectly lighted domed ceiling, which rises to a height of sixteen feet at the center.

Since the prototype was erected last October, people from all parts of the country have been through it. Reactions generally were so enthusiastic that Fuller executives became alarmed. Something must be wrong with the house. What mistakes had been overlooked? Bucky, as usual, was unperturbed, and serenely agreed to a test showing for the wives of twenty-eight Wichita workmen. The reactions were (1) “It’s beautiful!” (2) “I could clean it in half an hour.” (3) (For twenty-six out of twenty-eight) “I want to buy it.”

This does not prove that 93 per cent of U.S. women will want the Fuller house, but it is significant, for people are so involved emotionally with the traditional picture of home that

THE HOUSE IS A COMPLETE CIRCLE THIRTY-SIX FEET IN DIAMETER

LIVING ROOM

The living room is a broad wedge occupying about one-third the area. It is flanked by the hall closet (behind the sofa) and by the kitchen unite. The exterior wall is composed of an insulated Plexiglas window and sheet aluminum. The window goes around the entire house. From the inside sill are hung mats of pigskin-colored plastic. The floor is made of plywood boards set between converging aluminum ribs. The fireplace, included because it serves the reasonable function of letting people watch an open fire, is made of stainless steel. Slots in the outer baseboard take room air and return it through the floor ribs to the centrally located conditioning unit, thereby warming the floor in winter.

FLOOR PLAN

Looking at this bird’s-eye view of the small model as if it were a dock, one finds the hall closet at twelve o’clock, bedroom closets at one and four, laundry at seven, and kitchen unit at eight. Balcony shown has not yet been incorporated in the prototype, and will probably be offered as an extra to those who can use 200 square feet in addition to the first-floor area of 1,017. Doors to bedrooms are accordion type, and are located next to the outside wall, directly contrary to conventional placing. In the center are the supporting mast, two bathrooms, and the heating-air-conditioning unit. Two exterior doors open on the entrance hall and kitchen area. All storage elements (bookcases, bureaus, and closets) are built in.
they usually resent changes in it. Many people will disapprove violently when shown the house, but like it or not, they are bound to respect Fuller’s deep concern with the problem of high-quality shelter for low-income people, and the forthrightness and logic with which he met that problem.

The circular shape is an example of the logic. The first question people ask is, “Why is the house round?” Fuller retorts: “Why are houses rectangular?” Houses reflect the nature of their materials. An igloo is a dome because there is no other way to make a roof out of ice blocks; the tepee is necessarily a cone; houses in general are rectangular because lumber comes in straight pieces; Fuller’s house is circular because it permits him to use materials in tension and thereby reduce weight as much as 98 per cent.

Fuller’s house, like a wheel, is supported at only one central point. It uses the principle that metals are stronger in tension than in compression. The walls do not hold up anything; they are held up. From the central mast, which rests on a compact foundation, cables fan out, supporting the roof, the walls,

NO. 1 MAN AND NO. 2 MAN

With Fuller is Herman Wolf (right). President of Fuller Houses, Inc. Wolf is thirty-four, was with WPB as director of promotion for the War Production Drive. On page 174 are pictures of their chief colleagues.

and the floor, which is a foot or so off the ground. The cable ends are anchored in the ground so that the house will not tip over. A merry-go-round is a beautifully light structure because it is hung-, a suspension bridge is light for the same reason and so is the circular house. (It does not turn, by the way,) Once established, the circular form shows other advantages. It encloses more space with less wall than any other shape. Its streamlined contour reduces wind drag and, therefore, heat losses; and because of this saving, the heater will be reduced in weight to under a hundred pounds. The house may be able to use electricity as an economical fuel.

DYMAXION BATH

Developed in 1936, it was originally built of copper. Henceforth it will be produced from aluminum and plastic. The complete unit has an area of only twenty-five square feet. Each Fuller house will have two.

People have questioned the appearance of a group of such houses: wouldn’t the effect be unbearably standardized? What few realize is that it is not standardization that is unbearable, given a beautiful object to begin with, but meaningless efforts to suggest “individuality.” Nothing is more monotonous, anyway, than a typical U.S. residential development. And, conversely, much of the charm of old New England towns lies in the fact that the houses are pretty much alike; the same is true of Rockefeller Center. Years ago, all cars had special bodies; today the owner of one would feel like an eccentric because such a car would represent nothing more than standard performance at three times the cost. There is another point: Fuller’s standard model is only the standard model. A two-story house with a full roof deck is on the boards. Exterior colors will be varied. It will be possible to set the standard house a story off the ground to provide garage and play space underneath. These, however, are not styling variations, but differences as natural as those between a Piper Cub and a B-29.

The house has many features never before associated with inexpensive dwellings. Air conditioning is one. Indirect lighting of any color is another. There is a kind of mechanized bureau, the only real gadget in the house, consisting of a horizontal slot at shoulder height with nine trays behind it on a chain conveyer. Pushing a button moves the trays past the opening until the desired one appears. There are three such units, and

[Continued on page 174]

JOHN P. GATY

Operating head of Beech Aircraft, Gaty is tough, likable, and very fastmoving. He has no qualms whatever about producing Fuller’s house.

GREGORY BARDACKE

. . . is probably the only corporation executive in the U.S. arrested twentyeight times for picketing. Bardacke runs the eastern office.

CYNTHIA LACEY

. . . is one of Fullers original group, and is Vice President and Secretary of the company. Main job: liaison between management and production.

LABOR LEADERS BROWN AND DICKERSON

. . . represent International Association of Machinists and CJ.O. Steelworkers on Board of Directors, recognizing labor’s big stake in Fullers project by participating in the decisions made at top policy level.

their combined capacity is enough for linens and books as well as clothing. There are also two baths of the type Fuller developed for Phelps Dodge in 1936. Because of its shiny outer skin the house reflects almost all solar radiation, and it should be cool in summer; supplementing this reflective insulation there protrudes from the roof a large ventilator. As it swings with the lightest breeze, it can produce ten complete air changes an hour.

When one reviews all the known facts about the house—its spaciousness, amenities, and ease of maintenance; the logic of its manufacture and the superlative quality of its materials— it is difficult to escape the conclusion of the gentleman from Washington: “This is the house of the future!” It seems equally reasonable to predict that whatever happens to this particular house, to Fuller and the corporation he set up, sooner or later people are going to get around to the realization that the only way to make dwellings in an industrial society is to make them the way everything else is made—in factories. Houses designed for mass production will inevitably bear a strong resemblance to this house. But it is not likely that anything disastrous will happen to Fuller’s house or his company. For one thing, the need for homes is too great. For another, his company is run by a group of exceedingly bright young people.

Fuller Houses, Inc., began in Washington in the spring of 1944, when Fuller, then chief mechanical engineer of the Foreign Economic Administration, got in touch with two acquaintances, Herman Wolf and Gregory Bardacke, for an introduction to Walter Reuther of the U.A.W. Bardacke, who had been an organizer for the hatters’ union in Danbury, was with the Labor Office of the WPB. Wolf had worked ten years in public relations for trade unions. Fuller, with his assistant Cynthia Lacey, had revised the Dymaxion house to take advantage of aircraft technology, and he needed labor support to get it into production. Bardacke had never heard of the Dymaxion house, was fascinated by its social possibilities, and initiated a series of discussions with various unions. The International Association of Machinists was most interested because the majority of its new members in plane production were slated to lose their jobs when the war ended. The I.A.M. recommended Beech

[Continued on page 176]

B. FULLER, MATHEMATICIAN

Least known of Fuller’s works is his mathematics, which he calls “Energetic Geometry.” His approach is non*Euclidean, led to creation of the Dymaxion map. Nuclear physicists are interested in the “more than coincidental” similarities between his theories and their research.

Aircraft in Wichita as the company that had the best labor relations; Beech also had a first-rate production record. In the summer of 1944, Fuller and Bardacke went out to see Jack Gaty, Vice President and General Manager of Beech, who insisted that he was profoundly uninterested in the idea of using his plant to make prefabricated houses. Fuller, indignant at the accusation that he had designed a prefabricated house, wanned up and began to talk. He talked all morning and all through lunch. When they returned to the office, Gaty finally spoke. “Well,” he asked, “what are we waiting for? Let’s go!” That evening an agreement was drawn up.

In October the “company” resigned its jobs in Washington and moved to Wichita; at this stage it consisted mainly of Fuller, Cynthia Lacey, Bardacke, and Wolf. There was another hour’s conversation with Gaty, at the end of which a contract was typed and signed. By this contract Beech got a two-year option on 1,000 shares of stock and first refusal rights on manufacturing. Fuller’s company got Beech materials and labor at cost, and use of the needed plant machinery.

The company was capitalized with 15,500 shares of stock at $10 par value. Fuller held 5,500, Beech had its option on 1,000, and the remaining 9,000 were sold in what must have been a most unusual selling campaign, for each purchaser (there were around 140, most of them friends of the original group) was offered the stock on a “consider your money thrown away” basis. Since the venture was risky, to say the least, the selling argument was that purchase of stock was a contribution toward a solution of the housing problem and not a financial investment. In the light of what has since happened, the original stockholders may find that they made a very good investment.

By May of 1945 the company had its needed $90,000 but no priorities. A contract was made with the Army for an experimental model, designed for overseas use, but after V-J day the contract was canceled and the model became the first house prototype. Last February a second house was erected outdoors for testing purposes, and in the summer it is planned to erect ten more, in ten cities west of the Mississippi. By fall there will be a real check on public acceptance in terms of orders. Mass production is scheduled to begin in early 1947. To finance its expanded activities, Fuller Houses has recapitalized itself with 750,000 shares at $1 par. The original shares have been exchanged one for ten, leaving 595,000 new shares to be sold. The 28,000 shares set aside to raise immediate working capital have been sold at $10. No date has been set for a public issue. One of the most revealing facts in the picture is that Beech Aircraft exercised its option six months before it was due.

The group controlling Fuller Houses, Inc., is not exactly what one would expect to find in a corporation whose income, with only a fraction of the anticipated production, would be astronomical. Wolf, who is President, and Bardacke, Vice President and eastern representative, are both under thirty-five, both were members of the Socialist party, and their business training was acquired in the trade unions. Cynthia Lacey, also a Vice President, is twenty-four. On the Board of Directors are two representatives of labor: in this respect Fuller Houses is unique.

President Wolf insists that their amateur status has been an asset rather than a handicap. He says that the labor movement is an excellent place to learn how business is run and the best training in negotiation. He also claims that he and Bardacke would never have listened to Bucky if they had been conventional businessmen, which is probably true. What he does not say is that the group as a whole believes that it has a mission —to improve housing—and that everything else is secondary to this objective. Potential backers who saw in the company only a way to quick wealth were swiftly and ruthlessly weeded out.

According to the present setup, the Fuller company will hold all rights to the house, giving subcontracts to any aircraft company that qualifies (it must, for example, meet price and quality standards). Fuller will sell the houses. When they are produced in volume—say 500,000 a year—the price to the consumer may get as low as 50 cents a pound, or $3,700 at the present weight. Under the limited production schedule now contemplated, the cost will certainly be more, but even at $6,500 the standard model could meet any competition in sight. A dealer organization is now being set up by Vice President Donald Miller and Treasurer J. Arch Butts Jr. Dealers will erect the houses and service them. It is estimated that putting up one house and connecting it to the utilities will require sixteen man-days. Since the house is put together with bolts and special rivets, no bulky field machinery will be needed save the delivery truck itself, which will be equipped with a boom for erecting the mast. How sales will be financed is anyone’s guess at this point. But in view of the shortage and the government’s attempt to stimulate all types of home construction, it is safe to assume that “normal” financing obstacles will not hold up production.

Considering the nature of the housing business up to now, the mere idea of 500,000 houses a year produced by a handful of manufacturers is staggering. But Fuller executives calmly point out that by using existing plant potential in aircraft, they could make two million. This estimate has been emphatically confirmed by Jack Gaty of Beech, who impresses one as a man who knows what he is talking about. Gaty says production of the house, which has 200 types of parts as opposed to a plane’s 25,000, is “no problem at all.” The pieces will be stamped out,

Fuller’s House

says Gaty, assembled in a packing case on the conveyer, and at the end of the line a lid will be nailed on the crate. To ship a complete crated house (about 250 to 300 cubic feet) from Wichita to the farthest point in the U.S. would cost less than 8100. Because of the intimate relationship of the house to plane production, Fuller has found unexpectedly strong support in the Air Forces. Among the officers who have seen it, it is described as “a stationary airplane,” and they see in it the only way to keep the industry going full blast without cost to the taxpayers, ready for an overnight conversion to planes should the need arise. Further support may be forthcoming. The program of Housing Expeditor Wyatt puts considerable emphasis on “widespread use of . . . mass-production methods,” “absorption by government of undue risks in developmental work on new- type materials,” and possible assistance through government purchase contracts. Fuller’s house is eligible on all counts.

Through all this excitement, Bucky Fuller remains as cheerfully unmoved as before. In fact, he is probably happier than he has ever been in his life, but not because of the possibility of success, which has never interested him. Always fond of young people, he is now surrounded with a group in his corporation who act more like members of a family than fellow executives and employees. Bucky is regarded by his associates with a combination of-worshipful amazement and easy affection; knowing his fondhess for intellectual digression and his generous inclination to trust anyone and everyone, they have surrounded ~ hfm with an invisible protective barrier that on occasion can seem tougher than armor plate.

Biicky’s overwhelming desire to rehouse the world is no less ardent than it used to be, but he has become less violent about it. The stern, almost fanatically self-righteous countenance that appears on the top of page 168 has become warmer and more human, and the aggressive self-confidence has changed to a peaceful assurance. The only thing that hasn’t changed is Bucky’s boyish enthusiasm for people and ideas. Now that the house is launched, he is getting a little restless, and he will talk occasionally about being no longer needed, a remark that never gets him anything but indulgent smiles. He also talks about carrying on his mathematical research, for he is convinced that with truly modem mathematics children could solve problems that now baffle students of calculus. Recently asked what he intended to do next, Bucky said he really didn’t know, but added, with a very familiar glint in his eye, “I have an idea that all hell may break loose in the automobile industry within five years.” So it may be the Dymaxion car again after all.

This is a far cry from the early days. Through the years since 1927, he watched his ideas “fail” in the eyes of the news- paper-reading public because they weren’t instant commercial successes. He never expected that they would be, and his lack of interest in money is monumental. He passionately wants to be socially constructive (the old New England sense of duty comes in here), and believes, as he once wrote in capital letters, that “you can’t better the world by simply talking to IT. PHILOSOPHY TO BE EFFECTIVE MUST BE MECHANICALLY applied.” His Dymaxion models, his car, his bathroom, and, finally, the present house, are all “philosophy mechanically applied.” That today even bankers, manufacturers, and Air Forces generals no longer believe that he is a crackpot or a failure doesn’t surprise him very much. Nor does he care particularly one way or the other. He always figured that people would see what he was driving at, sooner or later.

Front page of Fullers basic Geodesic patent—1954.

THE GEODESIC DOME AND ITS ACCEPTANCE

A Controlled Environment

The war ended. The .labor shortage was no longer acute. The Beechcraft people, who had never volunteered to underwrite the production of the Dymaxion house, returned their attention to the private aircraft production which they pioneered. The conflicting plans of post-war factions among backers of the house led to a stalemate, and all development plans were dropped. Fuller was left with a determination never again to put his projects in the lap of a promotion whose life or death was determined by the speculative instincts of others.

After the Wichita House, Fuller concentrated on the problem of air delivery. He had never departed from his 1927 4D assumption that the air is our ultimate ocean, and that mans mobilizing, recirculating, design-regenerating technology" will eventually evolve into gossamer. But evolution toward gossamer depends on radical weight reduction; a spiders web can float in hurricanes only because of its high strength-to- weight ratio. For new design strategies aimed at radical weight reductions and strength intensifications, Fuller scanned the premises of his Energetic Geometry; he explored possibilities of intertwining the geometry with the inventory of war-developed technical advances.

Marines Try Oot Flyable Shelter

Associated Press Wirephoto

Helicopter hoists shelter in demonstration at Raleigh, N. C.

By The Associated Press.

RALEIGH, N. C., Jan. 28—A Marine Corps helicopter picked up a 1,000-pound portable hut today, flew it half a mile and gently set it down. The semicircular building, equal in area to a thirty-eight-man barracks, is framed with pine battens and covered by a plastic shell. "It means a new era in Marine shelter,” a Marine spokesman said aS he viewed the experiment in the corps’ search for durable, transportable structures. The helicopter lifted the. building, about thirty feet in diameter, 100 feet into the air before moving it horizontally.

Eljc jNelu llork Simes JHagadne

APRIL… 1967

In Competing With the Communist World. We Must Not Fight Fire With Fire

By J. W. Fulbright 27

Negroes Are Anti-Semitic

Because They Want a Scapegoat By Robert Gordis 28

Fred Friendly and Friendlyvision By Harvey Swados 30

An Expo Named Buckminster Fuller

By David Jacobs 32

Crisis in Catholic Education By Daniel Callahan 34

You. Too, Can Be Anti-American

By Russell Baker 36

Czar of the Movie Business

By Vincent Canby 38

o

Parent and Child: Grandma Is a Swinger By Eda J. LeShan 92

Food: Steak Rarity By Craig Claiborne 100

Fashions: Bloomer Girls

By Patricia Peterson 106

Home: New Design. U. S. A.

By Barbara Plumb 110

o

Picture Credits …134 Puzzles 142

FULLERS “SKYBUBBLE” — The U.S. exhibit at Montreal s Expo 67. Its ’ ’skin" interacts

Aii Expo Named Buckminster Fuller

By DAVID JACOBS

le weather and changes color. Right, Russias pavilion and a Canadian exhibit (peaked roofs).

The worlds chief dome-maker is now going on to his most colossal project—a mile-high pyramidal city (est. pop.: 1,000.000) designed to float at anchor in Tokyo Bay.

FORM AND SUBSTANCE— Fuller, right, in a photomontage; above right, explaining the crystallike form which is the basic building block of his structures. Top, a Marine plane carries a Fuller dome used as a mobile maintenance shop. The 1933 runabout, above, is from the days when Fuller was known as “a Rube Goldberg who took himself seriously."

his persistent crusade in 1927. This was a pivotal year in Fuller’s life: the year he decided to devote his time and mind to devising a strategic plan to reconcile the evolution of man and

THERE has been considerable talk lately about how the jet-age traveler is wrecking his metabolism. Whether Buckminster Fuller is the exception that will prove the rule or the contradiction that will disprove it, I couldn’t say; but he is 71 years old, his health is extraordinarily good, and he is probably the world’s champion marathon trip-taker. By comparison, John Foster Dulles was a homebody; the jet-setters, plodders.

A short time ago, Fuller dropped in on New York for 40 hours to do a week’s work. Four days before he had been in Japan on business; from there he had flown to Los Angeles for a meeting and a look-in on the West Coast branch of his family. After what could hardly have been more than a shower, shave, nap and glance at his secretary’s messages at his house at Carbondale, Hl., he flew to New York, and from New York to Raleigh, N. C., to address the students of a women’s college. Several other university appearances were on his agenda, plus keynote speeches before national conventions of geographers (of which he is one), cartographers (of which he is one), metallurgists (of which he is one), and the American Medical Association.

Between speeches he went to Cambridge, Mass., to see his architectural associate, Shoji Sadao, who operates the closest thing to a regular office that Fuller has, and to Minnesota, where he is a consultant on an urban- research project being conducted at the state university. It is likely that the project will culminate in the construction of a completely operative, Fuller-designed experimental city somewhere in the state. Then—he wasn’t sure when, but probably within the next three or four months—he would return to Japan.

J^URING his New York interlude, Fuller met with a number of reporters, business associates and friends, and placed and received an endless string of telephone calls. He was, as always, immaculately groomed and attired—in a dark suit with a vest, a starched white shirt, and a blue silk tie with dark maroon stripes. His exhausting-sounding schedule notwithstanding, he was. energetic, unhurried and perfectly relaxed, and his eyes, made outsized by the extremely thick lenses in his eyeglasses, were clear and curious. The hearing aid he wears seemed, as usual, superfluous, for Fuller the conversationalist

**DAVID JACOBS, of American Heritages editorial staff, is writing a book on urban architecture.
**gives himself little opportunity to do any listening.

The main purpose of his visit was to make an appearance at the Architectural League of New York, where a model of his United States pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67 was on display. In addition to being the building in which the American exhibition is housed, the enclosure is an exhibit in itself, demonstrating a completely controlled environment, perhaps a prototype for an enclosed community of the future. The steel and plastic structure, which Fuller calls a ’geodesic skybreak bubble,” Is 200 feet high, has a diameter of 250 feet and encloses a volume of 6.7 million cubic feet—about the same space contained in the Seagram Building in New York.

American visitors to Expo 67 will no doubt be proud of the United States pavilion, if for no other reason than that it is beautiful, colorful and the most imposing structure on the fairgrounds; but they will be doubly fascinated once they get inside. The steel skeleton looks and is incredibly lightweight, and the skin is real, breathing if not living skin, composed of nearly 2,060 vari-proportioned acrylic hexagons that throb and change color and keep the sun out or let it in. The interior temperature is regulated by a network of motors programed to react to outside weather conditions. Some of the hexagons have intake and exhaust vents which work according to need; and anodized plastic shades, affixed to the inside of the hexagons, open and close in response to certain natural light conditions. As a result of all this, the bubble changes all day long and looks different from one angle to another—here clear, there silvery, elsewhere like a rainbow. The sky and sun and clouds are visible from within, and the light of day shines in, but shaded.

striking as the big dome is, the most significant thing about it is not so noticeable, and that is that it does a great deal with very little. Compared with any other pavilion— for that matter, with almost any existing architecture of parallel volume—it is inexpensive, employs little material, is exceptionally lightweight and extraordinarily strong, and encloses much space with a minimum of surface area. It is by no means Fuller’s first geodesic dome, and it is not even his largest, but it is the most splendid one, and the best expression of the more-with-less concepts that he has been devoted to for 40 years.

The geodesic dome is the most utilitarian, economical and adaptable building form there is. Although
many variations of it are possible, the structure is basically a sphere composed of tetrahedrons (pyramid shapes with four sides—including the base). The design principle encompasses two mathematical truths: that the sphere, of all geometrical forms, encloses the most space with the least surface and is strongest against internal pressure; that the tetrahedron encloses the least space with the most surface and best withstands external pressure. Thus design, not weight, gives the dome its incredible strength.

The skeleton can be made of almost anything (even paper) to almost any size and may be used for almost any purpose. The Air Force flies the domes around (suspended from aircraft by piano wire); the Marine Corps replaced 47 kinds of shelter with a basic geodesic dome; there are geodesic factories, restaurants, homes, cotton mills, concert halls and roundhouses.

The geodesic dome Is only the expression of Fuller’s notions about building, one example of how more can be produced with less. The building industry, he maintains, has been too bogged down with archaic ideas, politics, obsolete economics and unsophisticated mathematics to transcend its extravagant wastefulness. It has not been able to make more with less because it has not kept up with advances in the aircraft and spacecraft industries and has learned nothing from industry’s mass-production techniques.

The result is the modem city and all its problems; Realization that the city is in trouble has finally come, along with realization that the solutions will be unimaginably complex and expensive if not altogether impossible. What makes all this such a shame is that Buckminster Fuller warned us long ago. Now he is welcomed all over the world, implored to help solve the problems that might not exist at all had he been listened to in the first place.

DULLER achieved his current eminence the hard way—by being right almost all of the time since starting the evolution of technology. He thus became an "evolutionary strategist” (one of the several names he gives his occupation). So often does he stress and restress 1927 in his biographical discourses that there is a tendency on the part of the listener to assume that the 32 years of his life that preceded it were insignificant. But in fact an understanding of
his earlier life is essential to an understanding of the man.

Born in Milton, Mass., in 1895, to an old, distinguished Yankee family, Richard Buckminster Fuller was raised around Boston Bay and, in the summertime, on a little island off the coast of Maine. He was in frequent contact throughout his youth with ships and sailors—from the merchant vessels and crews of the Boston port, to the gentlemen sailors of the yacht club, to the fishermen of Maine. Oriented to shipping and shipbuilding, his natural curiosity about anything historical, structural and mathematical evolved into a navigational view of science; he came to think like a sailor, to regard the world in terms of trade routes, winds and tides.

That same view permeates his discussions today: he describes the development of civilization as though it were cargo being transported and exchanged at a series of ports around the globe; his home, like the sailor’s, is a cocoon and exists wherever he happens to be. All evolution, he says, is aiming toward the production of a world man through man’s natural migrations. “The United States," for example, “is not a nation at all; it is a phase of this developing world man crossing between East and West”

And the best city in the world is the Queen Mary. “Shes an organic city,” he explains, "capable of accommodating a very large number of people at a very high standard of living. She’s comfortable and has facilities for entertainment and a beautiful bakery shop, and yet weighs less than an ordinary office building. She’s an organic whole, not a piece of real estate that anybody with money can add anything to. Shes so much with so little.’ ’

Fuller tried Harvard twice: once he was a dropout, the other time he was tossed out for “general irresponsibility.” As soon as World War I came along he enlisted in the Navy and reinforced his knowledge of ships and navigational principles. He married Ann Hewlett, whose father taught him a great deal about construction engineering. In 1922 Hewlett and Fuller founded the Stockade Building System to manufacture the father-in-law’s invention, a fibrous concrete building block. When Fuller’s daughter died of infantile paralysis that same year, Fuller sought relief from his grief in work; but his contacts with the “sub-industry” of building, “the most ignorant and most prodigious of men’s fumbling activities," only deepened his depression. In 1927 he lost financial control of the Stockade Company, and he contemplated suicide; another daugh-

ter had just been bom, and he saw nothing in front of him to make life better for her.

HANGING HOUSE—Fuller in 1930 with a model of his prefab circular house. Entry is by an elevator in the central mast on which the structure is suspended. Eady bias against prefabs quashed the project.

He elected instead to change the whole world. He decided to synthesize all the marvelous discoveries of technology in all fields and apply them to human needs. He was to become a "comprehensive designer” (really the most fitting of his professional titles), to employ every aspect of man’s knowledge to plot man’s environment. “I didn’t do it for money,” he says. “I saw that there were some tasks that needed to be done that nobody else was doing. If I tended to these things, and didn’t worry about making money, I knew that my credit would be all right—it would take care of itself. I used to say that I had a blind date with principle. Well, I took care of the principles, and the credit is there. I knew what I was talking about.”

XuLLER had two major setbacks within the first six years of his mission. His earliest structures were dynamic and maximum efficiency), and in 1929 he developed his fully workable dymaxion house. An auto* mated, inexpensive, circular structure, it was prefabricated and collapsible: it could be crated and shipped compactly and easily. But when he offered the patent—as a gift—to the American Institute of Architects, not only was the gift rejected, but the entire concept of prefabrication was condemned by that organization in a public position paper.

called “dymaxion” (a combination of

From that time on, Fuller had little trouble getting in the press, but he was always viewed as some sort of an eccentric, a Rube Goldberg who took himself seriously. Nothing but prejudice killed his dymaxion car of 1933, a three-wheeled vehicle with a 120-mile-an-hour top speed and the ability to turn full-circle within its own length. A number of automotive companies were interested, but cooled off when one dymaxion car was struck by a speeding four-wheeled car and overturned, and the driver killed. The three-wheeled design had nothing to do with the tragic but quite com-

PARTNER—Architect Shoji Sadao, who runs Fullers office in Cambridge, Mass.

monplace accident, yet the newspapers implied that the only reason for the accident was the design of the dymaxion car.

Fuller developed the geodesic dome in the nineteen-forties, and the Marines were the first to use it extensively. In 1953 Ford ordered one for its rotunda building- in Dearborn; the Government used one for the 1956 World Trades Fair in Afghanistan; and Kaiser built the grandest geodesic of them all in Honolulu in 1957. (Henry J. Kaiser, who commissioned the dome for use as a concert auditorium, was said to be anxious to watch it go up; he was delayed for a day, however, and arrived in Hawaii to find the dome in place—it had taken only 22 hours to erect.)

By 1960 Fuller had become, if not America’s vanguard scientist, at least its master dome-maker; and his two associated companies. Geodesics, Inc., and Synergetics, Inc. (which do not construct the domes but direct their manufacture by contractors) began to make money. Even the American Institute of Architects ate a little — too little—crow, and made Fuller an honorary member for life, a designation he might well have thrown back into the A.I.A. face, but of which he is rather proud, although he still has little use for architects.

Architects, Fuller says, are slaves. Their masters are the real-estate ‘ ‘developers.’’ Together they have

PATRON — Matsu taro Sho- riki, Japanese financier and visionary who commissioned work on the Tokyo Bay city.

been responsible for building’s failure to join the industrial age. "First the realtor comes along and buys a piece of land, and he is allowed to put just about anything he wants on it, so he calls an architect and says, ‘Mr. Architect, come on over, Tm going to give you a job.’ ‘Right away, Sir,’ says the architect. ‘I just bought some real estate,’ he says, ‘and I want you to build a building on it.’ ‘Oh, yes, Sir, thank you. Sir.’ ‘Now I’m going to pay you to design it—my wife wants it to look like this.’ ‘Yes, Sir, very good, Sir?

“Architecture is voodoo. The architects don’t initiate anything; they just go to work when the client says so. They know how to draw, but they don’t know how to design an airplane. They don’t go to Douglas [Aircraft] and say tell me what you’ve found out today about the tensile strength of that new steel or aluminum. They have approximately nothing to do with evolution. I think the younger architects may be changing. I think they understand what I’m saying.

“Fortunately, real estate becomes obsolete as man becomes intelligent, so one doesn’t have to wrest power from the realtor. Bell wasn’t trying to wrest power from the pony express when he invented the telephone. Society didn’t tell Bell to invent; it didn’t tell the Wright Brothers to invent Environmental elements simply demanded that the telephone and airplane be invented. If they

TOOL—The tetrahedron, the four-surfaced figure which is the key structural unit in Fullers buildings.

didn’t invent them, somebody else would’ve. Man’s capability is there, waiting for the demand. Evolution, technology—not politics—will eliminate the realtor.”

Fuller once said that there was plenty of everything for everybody on earth, but that it could be had “through design, not politics." The entire population of the earth, he says, could live compactly on a properly designed Haiti and comfortably on the British Isles, so long as the designer was in charge instead of the statesman.

The designer must be equipped to deal with all known aspects of technology. He must use the computer, but not allow the computer to use him: “Asking figures on a computer what they’re going to give you is like asking chemical elements what they’re going to give you.” The designer must understand nature and the materials that men can make of nature’s materials.

And, according to Fuller, the designer must understand modern economics: "In 1927 I said, I see that industrialization requires a very different kind of economics than the old crafts-agriculture system. It used to be that if you grew more peas than you could eat, you traded peas to the cobbler, who made more shoes than he could wear. Money was based on that sort of trading. But with industrialization, you stand by a machine making nuts and bolts, and you can’t exchange nuts and bolts for hamburger. These nuts and bolts get put onto bridges and locomotives— they hold something big together. The real profit is that there is a bridge waiting when you come to it; there’s a river you can cross. That’s the profit”

Fuller has been recognized as the great scientist he is in the last decade principally because conditions have made his prognostication come true.
His influence has been acknowledged by mathematicians and physicists, engineers and economists. Harlow Shapley suggests that Fuller is the outstanding scholar of the age of technology, and Marshall McLuhan regards him as a modem Leonardo, a high priest-philosopher of the machine age.

But Fuller remains an embarrassment to architects—to the older ones, anyway. When I asked several to comment on Fuller’s influence, they replied with a few, dull laudatory comments about his work with materials, or about his sincerity, and then said that he is a great (choose one : engineer, inventor, technician, industrial designer — but "not an architect.”

Younger architects and students, however, have no such reservations. A group of students at the Columbia Architecture School agreed that Fuller’s vision and persistence were the most important explanations for architecture’s current shift of emphasis from the individual building to the environmental complex. Moshe Safdie —the young Israeli-Canadian architect whose Habitat 67, a prefabricated housing complex, shares the architectural spotlight at Expo 67 with the United States pavilion — says that Fuller’s is by far the most significant conceptual influence on his own development.

Paolo Soleri, the Arizona-based architect generally conceded to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s most accomplished former student, regards himself as closer to Fuller in approach than to anyone else—including, by implication, Wright. And yet, Safdie’s concrete boxes and Soleri’s handcrafted "earth houses’ ’ and visionary bridge-cities and mine-cities look nothing like Fuller’s dome. Fuller’s influence is conceptual, not esthetic. It cannot be seen so much as felt.

To argue about whether Buckminster Fuller is or is not an architect seems pointless. Nevertheless, as I listened to the reasons why he is not, I couldn’t help thinking back to the climax of the old Christmas movie, “Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street.” Having been declared insane for insisting that he was Santa Claus, kindly Kris Kringle was on trial for his freedom. Then, just in time, sacks and sacks of mail addressed to Santa arrived at the courtroom, sent by some flustered post office employes who had read about the trial and seized the opportunity to get rid of the space-consuming bundles. That let the judge off the hook: Since the United States Government (he said), through its official agency, the Post Office, considered this man to be Santa Claus, the State of New York would not dispute the issue, case dismissed. Similarly, if you check the official information released by the United States Government regarding its official pavilion at Expo 67, you will find among the data, "Architect: R. Buckminster Fuller.’ ’ Case dismissed.

The Government notwithstanding, Fuller does not have a license proving that he is an architect, and so his work has to be formally submitted to contractors through his architectural partner, Shoji Sadao. Though Fuller has only honorary university degrees, he is on the faculty of the University of Southern Illinois, where his domed house is, although he spends only about eight or 10 weeks a year there. His summers are spent on Bear Island, in Maine, where he passed his boyhood summers. The rest of the year he is on the move, as befits a world man, running his business by telephone and whirlwind consultations.

HOME DOME—Interior of Fullers residence in Carbondale, 111.

"I don’t do anything as a businessman,” he explained during his recent New York visit, "although I have had very large experience with industry. In order to get things done I had to start a corporation and put on some help. For instance, I was supposed to build a prototype transportation unit once. Now, I wasn’t doing this thing for a profit, but just to find out if it would work. So I had to rent a shop and various kinds of tools and hire men, because I needed a lot more hands than my own. Well, when the men found out that we were going to make just this one, they thought they’d like to keep their jobs. They didn’t quit me, but they were in no hurry to finish the prototype, and I had to start a second one just to get the first one finished. This kind of thing always got me in a great deal of trouble. Today I won’t undertake a project unless I can go into somebody else’s shop and make a deal to use his very best mechanics. After we’re finished, the men go back to their regular jobs.”

During the thirties Fuller consistently lost money—and had to live with his wife and children in a nearslum in Chicago. The war provided some consultation work, and a job with the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration; but even when the geodesic dome began to earn money after the war (Fuller receives a royalty on every one built) much of his income had to go to repay old debts. Only during the last decade or so has he begun to make a substantial amount of money: about $200,000 a year, from dome royalties, consultations and lectures (for the last he receives $2,000 each). His traveling expenses are immense; after paying for these, and for living expenses, he puts what he has left into his research.

^I^HE project that has been taking Fuller to Japan is the most colossal of his career. The man behind it is a Japanese businessman named Mat- sutaro Shoriki, for whom Fuller obviously has a great deal of respect and affection. Before describing the project itself, Fuller presented a detailed biography of his friend:

“Mr. Shoriki is one of the richest and most powerful individuals in Japan. He’s now 82 years old. Around the turn of the century he was judo champion of Japan, and he became head of the prefecture of police in Tokyo. Well, there were great food riots in Tokyo at the time of World War I, and Mr. Shoriki was able to take care of them. As judo champion, he was much respected by the people. He’d never send out the police—he’d simply go out and talk to the people himself. ‘Your cause is very just,’ he’d tell them, ‘but you will not help it by rioting, so will you please behave?’ and he would be their spokesman and was able to handle things that way.”

Shoriki became very rich, according to Fuller, not because he lusted after money, but because he “saw and felt evolution very much.” He bought a small newspaper, The Yo- miuri Shimbun, and expanded it until its circulation was among the largest in Japan. (Today it has one of the highest newspaper circulations in the world.) It is characteristic of Fuller that he attributes Shorikis journalistic success to two equal factors: that Shoriki was aware of what the public wanted; that he built one of the worlds largest offset presses. Psychology and technology—the unbeatable combination in Fuller’s view.

“The old man,” Fuller said, “is always very eager to do something for society.’ ’ After World War H, when General MacArthur was essentially the government in Japan, Shoriki quietly circulated within what was allegedly the Japanese Government, kept his ears open and tried to get things going again. The first thing that struck him was the fact that, bad as Japan’s introduction to atomic energy had been, the discovery had a tremendous potential for positive good. Learning all he could about it, he used his own money to bring American scientists to his country to help him re-educate the people and established a quasi-official atomic energy commission. As power gradually shifted from the military conquerors to the civilian Japanese, the commission — with himself as chairman—was absorbed into the administration.

The main obstacle, as Shoriki saw it, to Japanese independence and recovery was money. The racetracks, generally a good source of revenue, had been unable to reopen for fiscal reasons. Shoriki lent most of what was left of his prewar fortune to the Government to open and operate the tracks. They began to earn a profit instantly—first, thanks to the Occupation troops, and then due to the gradually improving economic condition of the people; the Government repaid Shoriki with interest, adding in gratitude permanent royalties on all profits thereafter. The publisher also introduced television and baseball to Japan: he owns the Nippon Television Network, founded the Japanese baseball league and owns the Tokyo (Yomiuri) Giants team.

“The money keeps pouring in,” Fuller said, "and he keeps doing things with it He liked what Disney was doing, so he built Yomiuriland, which is an enormous kind of a Disneyland in a very Japanese way. At any rate hes decided that before he dies he’d like to have Japan make a really great contribution to the world. He feels that the greatest problem is how to house man and give him a standard of living that really means something. So he’s commissioned me to develop a city of a million people.”

Like the project at the University of Minnesota, Mr. Shorikis city will require elaborate planning before it will even begin to materialize. But while in Minnesota Fuller is a member of a team of economists, scholars and systems analysts, in Japan he is the team. Here he is truly a "comprehensive designer.”

Unfortunately, Fuller cannot yet say much about what the city will look like or how it will function. In a project of such vastness, he explained, “you don’t say because we have some money we’re going to build a city. There’s no command here— it’s quite different from when you have a patron that says I own all the real estate and this is what I want the city to look like. You have to approach it very scientifically."

The planning is divided into three stages, only one of which has been completed. In Phase One, which has recently been executed at great expense to Mr. Shoriki at the M.I.T.- Harvard complex, the issue was studied. Statistics were fed into computers, facts and figures examined, the elementary problem of housing was carefully broken down and analyzed. The word "city” was essentially ignored in order that the tests could lead to no predetermined end. The results did indicate a "converging complex,” which is, for all intents and purposes, a city.

In Phase Two, Fuller continued, “we’ll bring the project up to a point where there’ll be no more questions left as to why we’re doing what we’re doing.” The place will be determined along with the city’s extent, the economics will be spelled out, the nature of the design established, and so forth. Not until all these problems are taken care of will Phase Three begin—the actual designing.

"Looking ahead,” the designer said, “it will probably be a floating city anchored in Tokyo Bay—and atomic- powered. The power plant will utilize waste from the city to generate the energy to drive the desalinization plant, and the desalinization plant will produce the energy for electricity, which will be very cheap.

“It will be a tetrahedronal city—so far this is the way it seems to be going. The tetrahedron is the only geometrical form that can grow asymmetrically without losing its symmetry. It provides the greatest possible surface area for the volume it encloses. Nature uses the tetrahedron for basic crystal making: the city will grow like a crystal, cellu- larly, with little tetrahedrons on top of the bigger ones, all forming an organic whole. It will be able to come apart and float around like hydras. This can all be done now. We learned that with the feasibility tests.”

Even Fuller doesn’t know as yet exactly what the city will look like. He did, however, describe it as a "sort of large bookcase” and a “great dwelling machine.” Speculating, one can imagine a gigantic floating pyramid of shelves. The tetrahedronal shape with its slanting face will provide one terrace after another; and individual dwelling units, or parts of dwelling units, will be mass-produced and raised and lowered mechanically to and from the terraces—"like boxes on a shelf.” Parts of the city—the

power plant and probably some heavy industry—may remain stable, but other parts may, in Fuller’s words, "break away and float all around the world.” Dwellers will remain in Tokyo Bay when they must, but at vacation time they might remove their apartment and place it in one of the sections that can sail away.

At first, Fuller explained, the city will be about 200 stories high and accommodate 200,000 people. Eventually, as tetrahedrons are added, it will reach a height of just under a mile and contain a million people.

Fuller thinks that Japan is a logical place for all this to happen. "In Japan they have beautiful trees, and in the wintertime the trees have overcoats on. The people wrap the trunks and every branch. They dont have to find time to do it; they just do it It’s not work. They regard their island as a ship that must be kept in condition. The ship will sink if they don’t keep it in condition. . . , [In the case of our Western cities] we don’t even have the ropes coiled. Were sinking, but we’re just beginning to coil the ropes.

“Japan is the place for the re-entry of industrialization to the Orient. Industrialization was invented in the Orient, you know; they invented alloys there. But it was exploited, and whenever industrialization is exploited, whenever it is used for profit or for some immediate purpose without any regard for future generations, it cannot progress; so it kept escaping westward every time it was exploited, westward in the sailing ships until it reached the United States, and from the United States it is returning to Japan. You feel that very strongly in Japan. From Japan it will return to China.”

Such evolution, he believes, “will make a man a world man—none of this nonsense about who is your enemy. And then—man is going to be successful. In spite of all his ignorance. In spite of his politics. In spite of his bog-downs."

fuLLER returned, for a moment, to Matsutaro Shoriki, as though he wanted to make certain that I understood that Shoriki’s idea was more important than what the floating city would look like, as though he wanted to hammer home what Shoriki was after:

"He’d like to see before he dies some sort of an accommodation for humanity when humanity wants to converge. He wants to do it better than it nas ever been done, incorporating all that’s been learned about humanity and about the principles that are operative in the universe and how to really bring them to bear. He’s a very inspired old man, I assure you. He’s marvelously interested in all the details and understands the fundamental principles behind the engineering and mathematics. He’s really inspired by the pursuit of truth —the pursuit that can make man a success.”

He could have been talking about R. Buckminster Fuller. ■

MECHANICAL PACKAGE-FALLOUT FROM SPACE PROGRAM

The “black box” or mechanical package which will make our controlled environment shell the autonomous living machine is in the process of being developed right now in our space program.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1966

Phone 223-6000 CHMUied¹¹ ml:

That Bucky Fuller

Sure Is a High Flier

Cityscape

Shoots Moon

By Volf Von Eckardt

“THE ANSWER to the housing problem lies on the way to the moon,” Buckminster Fuller, the great prophet of technology, said the other day in an interview.

The inventor of the dymax- ^:on dome and other new structural systems was in town for consultations with the United States Information Agency, which is building his largest dome yet for next year’s world exposition at Montreal.

“Our present approach to housing is totally antiquated and totally wrong,” Fuller said matter-of-factly. “We will never be able to build enough decent homes for the millions of people in the slums in this country and around the world as long as we cling to real estate and heavy shells, like Siamese twins holding on to their guts.”

Fuller is finding salvation at Cape Kennedy in the complex apparatus now being developed there to keep man in outer space for a protracted period of time. The astronauts must have clean air at the proper temperature, water and the means to dispose of their waste. The machinery to provide the ecological regeneraton of these essentials by way of chemical recirculation must be light and compact enough to fit in the space capsule.

.“LETS CALL this complex machinery the little black box,’ ’ ’ said Fuller—like all prophets, forever the teacher, calmly assessing my attention quotient through his thick glasses. “We are investing $7 billion in it. It weighs 500 pounds. We can probably mass-produce it for $2 a pound.

“That means we can give all the things they need foremost in a bouse—water, heat, cooling and waste regeneration—for $1000. And we can give it to them without tying them down to real estate with its wastefully expensive water pipes and sewers. Why; with high-pressure sprays and chemical regeneration, a man can quench his thirst and clean himself for a long time with just a glass of water.

“The little black box alSb solves the pollution problem. Our present expensive sewage system is, of course, part of pollution.

“The shell of the house is not important. But everyone is mesmerized by the shell. The architects never look at the plumbing. There has been only one change since running water and sewers were invented in India in 2500 B.C. That change was made 100 years ago when the air lock was invented to seal water in the plumbing line.

“When I entered the building world 44 years ago,” Fuller continued, “what is called ‘mechanical inclusions’ made up 18 per cent of a house. They were mainly a sink in the kitchen and a furnace. You still bought the ice and put it in a box. Then we had all this fallout from the Navy, electric refrigeration, oil burners, radios and so on.

“At the time of the Depression, the ‘mechanical inclusions’ in the house made up 28 per cent. After W’orld War 11, it was 45 per. cent, with all the new plumbing, heating and wiring. Today it is 60 per cent. The cost of electricity has gone down. The cost of the house shell has gone up and up, though the house has become smaller and smaller. And any barn is better built.”

THE WAY TO bring the cost of the house down, Fuller has long maintained, is to concentrate not on pretty housing shells but on energy regeneration, on the little black box. The time is now ripe for it, he believes, because the big corporations involved in research and development for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are casting around for new things to do.

“We will solve the housing problem with the same money and the same effort we are spending to get to the moon,” Fuller says. That may be wishful thinking. Undoubtedly ofle oi the lew true geniuses of our time, Fuller is also one of the few remaining true optimists. In a way, this is easy because Fuller immerses himself only in technical problems, forever probing the architecture of nature, as it were, and stays completely away from human problems, ideologies, politics, traditions and prejudices. Not that he* evades them. They simply don’t fit his precise, all-challenging logic.

If in that sense he is a technocrat par excellence, he is an endearingly human one, You will rarely meet a man who has absolutely no airs, not even the airs of having no airs. Smallish, with, closecropped gray hair and those owlish thick glasses, he looks like a New England country school teacher and far younger than his 71 years.

Though he has been continually lecturing and expounding his evolving ideas for most of those years, he talked about some of them again in our interview with the youthful enthusiasm of a boy who has just discovered how the bicycle works. But to Bucky (and his humble, friendly personality invites this familiar use of his nickname), you can listen for hours. Thousands of admiring students do, all around the world. He has been know to lecture unceasingly for four and five hours at a time.

Once technology has compressed the essential “mechanical inclusions” of the house into a light-weight, inexpensive “little black box," Fuller believes, people are freed from our static notions about the city and the clutches of the “real estators.” We can dwell anywhere we please on lovely mountain tops or seashore dunes. For the shelter to house us and our little black box is, of course, also lightweight, industrially mass-produced and easily movable.

FULLER DOESN’T think that people will object to such a nomadic, dymaxion tent life. The average American, he points out, already moves every four years. He considers the assumption that people want to stay put in a permanent nest completely outdated.

He cites the fact that millions of Americans live in what used to be called trailers and are now “mobile homes.” They are mass- produced, compact and livable at relatively low cost. The only reason they look awkward, Fuller explains, is that they are designed to be moved on the road with its curves and underpasses.

“They wouldn’t look like trailers if you moved them by helicopter,” says Bucky.

What Bucky himself seems to need is a mobile home with wings and a jet engine.

Buckminster Fuller .

How high the moon.

He is continually flying about, lecturing and consult ing. He stays put in his nest in Carbondale, where he is research professor at Southern Illinois University, no more than about two months out of the year in stretches of two or three weeks at the time.

On the morning of the day of our talk, he had flown in from Carbondale, where he had spent a few days to catch up after a brief vacation in Maine. Before that he had been in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Prague, Belgrade, Cairo … . “about three times around the world this past year,” he said, beaming.

For all his globetrotting, he looks healthier than a man half his age who spends his time on the golf course.

NOR DOES his orbiting interfere with his work, considering that he is constantly inventing, discovering and experimenting with new scientifically based structural approaches “to doing more with less.” He has three books nearly ready to come out. The most important one deals with his mathematical work on what he calls “Cynergetics.”

These books are partly written by him, partly dictated and partly based on his rambling lectures, but he rewrites the concoction as often as seven times.

Oh, yes, there’ll have to be cities, Bucky concedes, but they can’t sprawl horizontally much longer if there are to be mountain tops and seashore dunes left. ‘ ‘We’ll have to go up,’’ he says. He means way up. He has the structure of mile-high cities in the sky all figured out. The cells in these beehives would be assembly line produced, practically self-sufficient dwelling units (no setv- er lines and pipes) and complete with garden terraces.

What happens to the old cities? “Once we really start moving forward into the future, we will also learn to look back into the past,” says Bucky. And in his future, everybody will spend most of his time going to school. The decayed and obsolete parts of the old cities will be weeded out and the rest will be turned into huge universities and museums.

How do we bring this about? Bucky’s answer is a “comprehensive design science.” So far, scientists, he says, work only with weaponry. “What would happen if the scientists helped us to use everything they and we have learned to make the world a success for man?”

Reprinted from “ Architectural Design " 26 Bloomsbury Way, London, W.C.1 Published monthly. Overseas £4.0.0 per annum. U.K. £3.0.0 per annum.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

Photo: Hans Wild

Architectural Design February 1967

The Year 2000

R. Buckminster Fuller

This article is a freely edited version of a lecture given at San Jos6 State College, California, March 1966.

In relation to increments of time and of prediction, I am confident that I cannot predict for A.D. 2000. Though it is only a little over a generation forward, I do not believe that any human being can foresee with any accuracy as far ahead as that 35 years. What will go on in this next period will be more of a change than has occurred in the whole history of man on the whole earth. All the trend curves which we may examine show rates of acceleration which underline the unprecedented nature of the changes to come. In plotting such trend curves over a period of years, I have sought fundamental information on the experiences of man on earth which might govern the shape of all developments men are experiencing. Charts of inventions, for example, are not satisfactory as the list is open-ended and is difficult to assess in terms of the relative importance of specific inventions. The significant area of information is the rate at which scientists have successively isolated the chemical elements.

This is the most important pattern of discovery with which man deals, embracing, as it does, all physical phenomena. The rate at which man found chemical elements seems to be the key controlling the development of the application of science to technology, and, following from this, the application and effect of that technology on economics and, ultimately, the effect of the new technology on society itself.

The chart on the previous page, Profile of the Industrial Revolution, begins with the year A.D. 1200, going up to A.D. 2000. We begin with a list of nine elements: carbon, lead, tin, mercury, silver, copper, sulphur, gold and iron, which were known to man at the opening of our history. We do not know when they were first isolated or knowingly used. The first known isolation of a chemical element is arsenic, in 1200. Following this, there is a 200-year gap and we come to antimony, another 200-year gap and we come to phosphorus. Then the gap narrows to 75 years and we have cobalt. From here on we average an isolation of an element every two years. It is at an extraordinary period in history that the rate begins to accelerate.

If you check the date 1730, not long before the American Revolution, you will notice that there are some separate shoulders, or plateaus, appearing on the chart. These shoulders are slowdowns when we have major wars—the American revolution, various civil wars and World War I. They show that pure science does not prosper at the time of war— which is contrary to all popular notions. Scientists are made to apply science in wartime, ratherthan lookfor fundamental information.

We can also see that in 1932, which was thought to be the depth of the depression, man made his 92nd isolation of a chemical element. This completed the element table representing the full family now mastered by man—in the sense of his ability to repeat element isolation and to rearrange elements, as fundamental ingredients of physical environment, in preferred patterns of use. From this point on we may notice something strange. Previous to completion of the table, element isolation occurred irregularly—for example, element number 19 would be the 43rd element isolated; the 45th isolation would number 30, etc. With the post-uraniums the isolations show an absolute regularity of increase—they come in by number. Man begins to control consciously the rate of development of his capability.

We must note this in reviewing the contiguous developments in environ control (as shown at the top of the chart). Just as man is able to go into cold climates by putting on fur skins or into hot by taking off clothes, he enters more hostile environments by having more control devices. The development of these devices is a fundamental measure of man’s degree of advantage over his environment. The first time, to our knowledge, that he goes around the world in an invention was, as shown on the chart, in a wooden sailing ship. It comes after the second isolation. Then there is a gap of 350 years and he now goes around the world in a steel steamship. This is an entirely new magnitude of control, no longer dependent on the wind. Upon this, there swiftly follows the world journey in an aluminium airplane, then in the exotic metals rocket. There is a very great contraction in time between these developments. The wooden ship takes two years to circumnavigate the earth; the steamship two months, the airplane two days and the orbiting satellite just over an hour. We have at least three accelerations of accelerating accelerations involved here.

The consequence of what we have considered then, in relation to our charting, is that the next point for a significant new chapter would be around 1975, nine years from now. What that will be we can only guess at—sending ourselves around the world by radio?

The key realization is the degree of acceleration of change, and that better than 99 per cent of all important technologies affecting such change are invisible. Man cannot see what is going on. He cannot see the chemistries, he cannot see the alloys. Most of the important rates and patterns of change cannot be apprehended by him directly in a sensorial manner. Not only does man have a very narrow range of tunability in the electromagnetic spectrum where he can actually see, but he also has a very narrow spectrum of motion apprehension. He cannot see the hands of the clock moving or the stars or any of the atoms in motion.

In the same way, man has had a limited understanding of the invisible historical factors. Few people are aware of the tremendous power wielded by a relative handful of men, of world masters, in respect to the whole world up to the time of the Great Crash in 1929. World War I was a struggle between one handful, the outs, and another, the ins. But the old invisible pirate masters who ruled the seas and the men on land were not displaced until 1929 when the corresponding developments in science and technology outran their traditional capacities. The J. P. Morgans and the like had operated for centuries through manipulation of the visible, and seasonable, apprehendable, physical factors influencing trade, economies and ‘power¹ balances. Probably 99 per cent of humanity never knew that they existed and didn’t know that they had gone. Control passed to their manager/lawyers, the peoples politicians, and they are making a mess of it. One finds people around the world feeling extraordinarily well disposed to other people and with none of the emnity and suspicion which is claimed by their political leaders.

We need not be against politicians to realize that their local preoccupations

fuutile. They have good convictions ⁼ aare individually moved as human ^9!s by what they regard a responsi- to their side or our side. But ^=ry ’ political ideology and all extant jtitxal systems assume that there is - eanough to go around—it is either J onr me—there can’t be enough for -h… So we eventually assume war, and ⁼t iiis the cause of the weapons race. “S ^reasoning was once correct. When -^res is enough available a healthy "naan will eat three pounds of dry food ■iayy, drink six pounds of water and -at,the fifty-four pounds of air or six =unnds net of oxygen. For most of the =tonry of man on earth there has not “Ent enough of that dry food and hsanity has fought about this, time -d ■ again. Many times there has not -ani enough water, and humanity has ugtfht over this. There has been no 2^e when there has not been enough

• H-lumanity has so much air available st i no one has even thought of putting Btears on air and trying to make money t oof it. But, there are times, for example a great theatre fire, when humanity, mppletely unused to competing for air, "> dss itself suffocating and goes mad.

secerns perfectly clear that when there ennough to go around man will not fight ’y more than he now fights for air. hesn man is successful in doing so uc:h more with so much less than he ⁵ⁿ take care of everybody at a higher -anadard, then there will be no funda- enntal cause for war.

i thhe years ahead, as man does become jcocessful, the root cause of war will be •mninated. Scientists assure us over nd lover again that this is feasible. There an i be enough energy and organized apaability for all men to enjoy the whole artlih.

hiss is the most important prediction I ^an* make: in ten years from now we will avire changed so completely that no one ill I say that you have to demonstrate ouiir right to live, that you have to earn liwving. Within ten years it will be normal srtman to be successful—just as through II ilhistory it has been the norm for more naiin 99 per cent to be economic and hyysical failures.

olilitics will become obsolete.

tt the present moment, we could take II the machinery from all the countries roound the world, all the railroad tracks, II the wires, etc., everything we call nctdustrialization—and we could dump hiss all in the ocean. Within six months, wo billion people would die of starva- oun, having endured great pain. On the ithher hand, supposing that we take ijway instead every politician, all the deeologies, all the books on politics—and jeend them into orbit around the sun. everybody would keep on eating as Jesfore, down will go all the political Jaarriers and we would begin to find ways in which we could send the goods ihaat were in great surplus in one place o» another. So people may even begin to» eat a little better—in a hurry. This would not bo said before.

Tthere are many prognostigations about immediate technology. It seems likely, □or example, that there will be considerable advances in transportation, but our puresent ignorance in handling traffic is ajippalling. At the bottom of our air-ocean world we are still like flounders and ccrabs travelling in burrows. In surface tnravel we restrict ourselves to crowded imjbes and lines between buildings and ==»^es^^e9 w® could go omni-direction- aaiiy. This is in dramatic contrast to airtravel in which as soon as you go any distance at all you lose sight of other airplanes and can go thousands of miles without seeing another human being. It is only when you slow down that you begin to re-establish close contact. The slower we go, the more crowded we get. Finally, as we leave an airport and get out onto a free-way we have the pre- posterness of running in lines in opposite directions at 65 miles per hour five feet apart—with everybody practicing steering. A decade from now this will look rather silly. With current technological trending in omni-directional transport we will finish our great highway programmes just in time to turn them into some kind of roller skating rink. It may be fun to roller skate from California to New York—and you will have the time to do it if you like.

It is all Buck Rogers and it will happen. But, such speculation is a waste of time, it is more important to consider what will happen to our relationship one with another.

In its broadest aspect this area must be considered under population’. There has been a great debate about the so-called population explosion in recent years. This has been occasioned in part by the fact that we have only recently had accurate census in many countries. Even in Europe population figures only go back a short tirne.

In the USA, though there was an increase in the post-war birth rate between 1947 and 1954, since then it has declined. This trend is also evident in all the industrialized countries, including Russia. During the last twelve years then the birth rate has been declining in the industrialized countries, yet the main problem is thought to be population increase. The cause of the bulge in census population of these countries is, of course, that more people are living longer. But the underlying reality of the population problem, if there is a problem it is that as we industrialize, the rate of births decrease. We may see this most clearly in, for example, the US, where the early settlers had an average of thirteen children per family and survival rate was very poor. We may then plot the decrease in number of children per family against improvement in technological services, public health, indoor water supply, bathrooms, refrigeration, general improvement in life expectancy, and so on. Clearly, as man industrializes and improves the probability of human survival, whatever the drives or controls of nature are, she does not have to have anywhere as many birth starts. This is one of the fundamental points about industrialization.

We should also consider the rate at which countries become industrialized. England took two hundred years to get industrialization going and up to the present level. The United States ‘took off’ from England’s vantage point and did it in a hundred years. Russia came in and accomplished in fifty what had taken the USA a hundred years, because it was able to start at a more advantageous point. We find that the new countries come in where others left off, not where they started. Japan did not start flying with the Wright Brothers bi-planes, but with the Zero and Spitfire types; China has never flown anything but jets. China came into the world of industrialization after the transistors, computers and atomic fission were available—so she will come to industrial parity with the West in about five years. India will probably be even faster. The acceleration of capabilities coming to bear on India and Africa are of the very highest. As far as one can see, industrialization will be wbrld wide by 1985.

By this date, as the world industrial process is completing, and birth rates reducing, every individual human being will still have about ten acres of dry land and approximately twenty acres of ocean averaging half a mile deep. In terms of a family of five that would be fifty acres of land and 100 acres of ocean —150 acres of acres per family. The amount of food supply would be ample.

We may glimpse in such patterning certain total behaviours in universe that we know little about. We noted, for instance, that as survival rate and life sustaining capability increased, fewer birth starts were required. This may be related to our developing capacities in interchanging our physical parts, of producing mechanical organs, of having progressively fewer human organisms to replenish. The drive in humanity to reproduce as prodigally as possible decreases considerably. This may be reflected in social behaviours—when all the girls begin to look like boys and boys and girls wear the same clothes. This may be part of a discouraging process in the idea of producing more babies.

We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted.

Central to such readjustments will be the concept that man is not alone the physical machine he appears to be. He is not merely the food he consumes, the water he drinks or the air he breathes. His physical processing is only an automated aspect of a total human experience which transcends the physical. As a knot in a series of spliced ropes of manila, cotton, nylon, etc., may be progressively slipped through all the material changes of thickness and texture along the length yet remain an identifiable pattern configuration, so man is an abstract pattern integrity which is sustained through all the physical changes and processing.

We become more aware of this uniqueness of organized and organizing principle in the universe, in science. The long-held myth that science wrests order out of chaos is fast disappearing in due ratio to the extent that all great scientists have found the universe to exhibit an a priori orderliness. All the various specialities are discovering that their variously remote studies which seemingly ordered local aspects of nature are converging within progressively simpler and more comprehensive patterns. The ordering is coming together. When we refer to the computer and automation taking over, we refer really to man’s externalization of his internal and organic functions into a total organic system which we call industrialization. This metabolic regenerating automated organism is going to be able to support life in an extraordinary way. The machines will incYeasingiy assume various specialized functions. Man who was born spontaneously comprehensive but was focused by survival needs into specialization is now to be brought back to comprehensivity.

As enormous numbers of men are freed for more education and research and as they become more and more comprehensive in their dealings with nature, there will be engendered a total philosophic awareness of the significance of the whole of human experience. There will be a rediscovery of what Einstein described in 1930, in an article on the cosmic religious sense—the intellectual integrity of the universe and an orderliness that was manifestly a priori to man.

We are going to have an increasing number of human beings as scientists and philosophers thinking about the total significance of human experience and realizing that there is an intellect far greater and far more powerful than that of man—and anticipatory of the whole trend of his development. An era of extraordinary integrity might ensue.

This would be for me, the most important and exciting aspect of all the trend curves—that in A.D. 2000, to a marked extent, the integrity of humanity will be of an unbelievably high order. What one human being says to another regarding what he thinks or what he has observed will be reliable. There will be play-acting still, but it will very clearly be play-acting. In looking forward to the year 2000, it is not the ‘Buck Rogers’ details which are important but whether the world will be a good place for our children and grandchildren. In the past, man had to do many things shortsightedly and we have wasted a great deal of our natural heritage. We have squandered the fossil fuels which represented an extraordinary savings or energy capability account stored up in the earth. The great change now will be in a new type of accounting when we begin to draw more consciously on the fabulous income energies of sun, water, and wind and tidal powers—which if not used will not be saved or impounded on the earth. We will adopt new accountancy standards for all wealth. To account our success in terms of gold and various traditional banking practices is irrelevant. Real wealth is organized capability. One ot its important characteristics is that it is irreversible—no matter how much wealth you have, you cannot change one iota of yesterday. Wealth can only be used now and in the future. What we really mean by wealth is how many days forward we have energy available and organized i’or work to keep the machines running, to keep the foods growing, the refrigera tion transportation and so on. The basis for our new accounting system will be— How many forward days of organized capability do we have available to serve how many men. We will be able to make the working assumption that it is normal not only for man to be successful but also normal for him to move as freely as he wishes without interfering with any other man. Our overall accounting assumption will be based on whatever amount of organized energy capability is required so as to make it possible for any man to travel around and enjoy the whole earth, and be completely supported in doing so. There will be no such thing as deficit accounting. You cannot live on deficit accounting. You cannot eat deflcitly or drink water deficitly. What is to eat is there—as the water is there.

All such negative accounting procedures went along with the need for exploiting others in the ‘you or me phase of mans past struggle for basic survival.

Much of the most exciting and important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation at all, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday relations of what we term the naivete and idealism of the child. This will be completely justified and not exploited or exploitable in any way. I think then that the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.

1250A.D. 1270 1290 1310 1330 1350 1370 1390 1410 1430

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ALGORISMA INTROOUOS CYPHER INTO EUROPEAN OVIUZATION FROM ARABS, THUS PROVIDING SCENCE WITH PRACTICAL CALCULATING FACILITY

EARTH ORBIT IN MAN MADE ENVIRONMENT CONTROL: PRODUCT OF SUCCESSFUL APPLICATION OF HIGH PERFORMANCE PER UNIT OF INVESTED RESOURCES

PROFILE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AS EXPOSED BY THE CHRONOLOGICAL RATE OF ACQUISITION OF THE BASIC INVENTORY OF COSMIC ABSOLUTES-THE 92 ELEMENTS

9 ELEMENTS wtit ACQUIRED BY OVIIIZATION PRIOR TO HISTORIC RECORD OF THE EVENTS, PROBABIY IN ASIA MlltENIUMS AGO

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Fullers floating Triton Tetrahedronal City—concept model—1968.

vol. 15, no. 1—January, 1968

PLAYBOY.

CONTENTS FOR THE MENS ENTERTAINMENT MAGAZINE

PLAYBILL 3

DEAR PLAYBOY 11

PLAYBOY AFTER HOURS 27

THE PLAYBOY ADVISOR .51

PLAYBOY’S INTERNATIONAL DATEBOOK—travel PATRICK CHASE 57 THE PLAYBOY FORUM . 59 PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: NORMAN MAILER—candid conversation . 69

THE YELLOW ROOM-fiefion JOHN CHEEVER 86

GOD AND THE HIPPIES—article . HARVEY COX 93

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE—Helion KURT VONNEGUT. JR. 95

MIDNIGHT EXPLOSION & BREAKFAST IN BED—food and drink THOMAS MARIO 96 DEATH WARMED OVER—opinion .RAY BRADBURY 100

ENCORE FOR STELLA—pictorial … 104

A LATIN FROM KILL ARNEY—fiction BUDD SCHULBERG 115

REMEMBER THE YAVUZI—humor MAMN KITMAN 116

WHEN EARTHMAN AND ALIEN MEET-artido . ARTHUR C CLARKE lit

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS—humor JUDITH WAX 123

INFORMALLY FORMAL—attire ROBERT L GREEN 124

TWO NEW POEMS—verse … EVGENY EVTUSHENKO 127 WORD PLAY—satire ROBERT CAROLA 12B

MOVING UP IN THE WORLD—playboy’s playmate of the month - 130 PLAYBOY’S PARTY JOKES—humor 131

THE OLD SYSTEM—fiction - . SAUL BELLOW 140

PAPER PLIMPTON-humor. ART BUCHWALD 143

THE VARGAS GIRL—FROM THE THIRTIES TO THE PRESENT—nostalgia 145 ROSATI—man at his leisure LEROY NEIMAN 153

THE MYSTIQUE OF THE RACING DRIVER—sports . STIRLING MOSS 157 SAYING NO TO THE YES MENTALITY—artide J. PAUL GETTY 159

OUT ON A LIMERICK—humor OGDEN NASH 161

THE WAR OF THE TABLOIDS-artide J’M BISHOP 162 4

THE CASE FOR LOBBIES-article . U.S. SENATOR STEPHEN M. YOUNG 165 An CITY OF THE FUTURE—article R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER 166^H

PLAYBOY’S PLAYMATE REVIEW-pictoriol - 169 wi

THE NEW GIRL—opinion… JOHN CLELLON HOLMES 179 "

THE BLOODY BEYS SILVER CUP—ribald dassic . ALEXANDER DUMAS 184 THE ELEVENTH-HOUR SANTA—gifts 137

SILVERSTEIN IN HOLLYWOOD—humor SHEL SILVERSTEIN 190

LITTLE ANNIE FANNY—satire HARVEY KURTZMAN a~d WILL ELDER 263

walls of 5000 living units Is and base forming a the sky large

a master architect and inventor of the geodesic dome unveils his visionary plan for a floating, self-contained community

i have been asked many times: "What would you do if you were building commissioner of the United States of America or even of the entire world?”

I would resign. I am an inventor and so have far vaster prerogatives than any politician. Edison, Bell Marconi and the Wrights needed no licenses from anyone to light the night, to shrink the earth and to interlink all humanity. So I will pass up any hypothetical political appointment, but will accept the housing challenge as an inventor.

The drawings of the tetrahedral city on these pages represent an entirely feasible and practical new way for men to live together economically. The drawings cannot be understood, however, without knowing

The authors city of the future consists of three triangular i apiece, the wall: tetrahedron; each unit faces over a spacious terrace. The cutaway drawing shows a public garden at the bottom the interior of the superbuilding, which the sun pierces through broad openings at every 50th floor. Its transport system (in red) includes funicular as well as interior vertical and -j

horizontal units. Though shown here on land, the city also can float.

article By R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

CITY OF THE FUTURE

■k drawing of the 200-story city superim- pposed on a photo of the outskirts of Tokyo vies for attention with Mount Fuji. The lowermost figure in the small cutaway drawing is at the back of the down- kstairs level of his duplex. Seven stories above him is a section of one of the three city centers that rim the structure. Here the transport system has a terminus at a community park, complete with lagoon, palms and shopping center in geodesic domes. Offices and maintenance facilities (in brown) line the transport tracks.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY REED SHINN

the trends in housing and cities that lead up to them. And their full appreciation requires knowledge, too, of the importance of technology—and therefore of the inventor—in human affairs.

Yesterday’s capitalists disliked inventors, who made the capitalists’ machines obsolete. Businessmen were powerful enough to persuade. society that inventors were screwballs. All that is changing; businessmen now find change profitable and inventors are becoming respectable. Inventors pay attention only to physical laws—which alone govern what man ultimately may do in the universe. If humanity succeeds, its success will have been initiated by inventions and not by the debilitating, often lethal biases of politics.

Our higher potentials are unrealized because environmental conditions have frustrated man’s potentials. We have learned much, however, through recent behavioral-science research. For instance, we know that environmental conditions determine how much of the child’s total brain potential will blossom into effectiveness.

Politics undertakes to reform only man, not his environment. For decades, society has tried to reduce automobile accidents by reforming drivers—with arrests, fines, behavioral exhortations and laws. I always thought that, instead, it is physically possible to prevent accidents: by split-level crossings, banked turns and divided highways. In 1906, people said, “You can’t do that, it would cost millions.” After trying unsuccessfully for 61 years to reform the drivers, and after seeing a greater mortality on our highways than in World Wars One and Two combined, society has at last undertaken to reform the driving environment. A 51-billion-dollar national highway program has already safely multiplied the 1906 auto speeds fivefold, while greatly reducing the accident rate per passenger mile.

Inventions alone have raised the number of people enjoying an advanced standard of living, from one percent of all humanity in 1900 to 40 percent in 1966, despite continuously diminishing natural resources. That same advantaged 40 percent are also living three times the number of years that man lived only a century ago. All of this has come about through inventions. Inventions have induced appropriate social reform, but only as accessories after the fact of invention itself.

Take away all the inventions from humanity and, within six months, half of us would die of starvation and disease. Take away all the politicians and all political ideologies and leave all the inventions and more would eat and prosper than do now.

My task as an inventor is to employ the earth’s resources in such a way as to support all humanity while also enabling all people to enjoy the whole earth—all of its historical artifacts and its beautiful places—without one man interfering with another and without any man enjoying life at the cost of another.

The first thing I must understand in order to undertake this task is the history of man’s dispersal around the globe. In chapter one, humanity lived in huts on rafts beside the rivers, lakes, bays and oceans. Fish were plentiful and the rafts kept men safe from wild animals on shore. Some of these raft dwellers were blown out to sea, preponderantly eastward around the earth’s surface. In the second chapter of history, men learned to sail to windward, following the sun, to which they intuitively attributed their metabolic regeneration. Almost all of the past 6000 years of recorded history took place during diapter twos westbound movement. In the Eurasian continent, diis westward motion finally fun- neled into western Europe. As humanity converged, it crossbred. Western Europe represented an amalgam of previously isolated “nations.” These nations had developed unique local subsistence patterns through millenniums of inland, inbred adaptations. Those in the north had become bleached and blond; those isolated in the hot equatorial sun had become darkened. Further inbreeding heightened the differentiations. Along the waterfronts, the sailors crossbred and dieir skins became pink or swarthy.

Crossbreeding Europeans, intermingling with the Angles and the Jutes, poured into the British Isles to crossbreed even more. Westbound Indian Ocean people and others inhabited Africa —inbreeding, ever darkening their skin. Then western Europeans jumped westward across the Atlantic to the Americas. For 11 successive generations, they have settled farther westward. As they moved westward, they crossbred acceleratingly, not only with their own westbound, "chapter-two” Eurasian stocks but with the Eurasian stock of chapter one, which had drifted eastward to the American continents between 30,000 and 10,000 years earlier. Into the North and South American continents and their islands there also flowed westward, by both slave trade and migration, a swiftly crossbreeding homogenization of the inbred African tribesmen.

In California, at the mid-point of the Western shores of America, crossbreeding man has become so genetically integrated that he frequently is unidentifiable with any of the earlier inbred national characteristics of Eurasia. Chapter two climaxes in the emergence of world man, who is poised on an epochal springboard. He will fly both skyward and into the seas’ depths and thus open chapter three of history—that of universe man, who will enjoy free, four-dimensional occupancy of the universe. Man will free himself from local time and geographical bases and will progressively discard encumbrances, giving all heavy, static and economically non transportable properties to libraries, museums and universities, scrapping them as he is able to rent superior devices and services everywhere around the earth.

Before envisioning the way this new and eminently mobile man will live, we must have a clear idea of the development of the home and of the city. On the old farmstead, there were a great many buildings—the great barn containing hay and cows, stables, corncribs, silos full of fermenting ensilage, a woodshed, a pigsty, a carriagehouse, a cold cellar and a warm cellar. All these buildings and many others on the farms are disappearing or have disappeared, because machinery in the house has displaced the functions the buildings performed. Small electric-refrigerating devices took the place of the icehouse and the icebox system. Electric current took the place of wood, woodshed and stove. In two decades, die windmills, formerly found on every farm, have also gone. Still, the layman fails to understand what Corbusier meant when he said, “A house is a machine to live in.”

When the early homesteaders went onto the land with few or no tools, they had to spend every minute of daylight working in the fields or building their energy-controlling structures. The design of their farmhouses told the story—little boxes with vertical walls going down into the ground. There were no porches or stoops. There were a few windows, enough for the farmers wife to see where he was and to see if Indians were coming. When tools, and more tools, came to shorten the time taken to do a given job, the farmer gained more time for leisure. Finally, he had enough time before twilight to sit and look at the scenery, and he built porches around his house. As he began to have more and more time, he put screens on the porches. With still more time, he put glass windows on the porches. Sitting on his porch, he watched other people go by.

Then came the automobile, which, in effect, put wheels under his glassed-in front porch, so that instead of waiting for people to pass by, he could drive down the street to look for them. Because we are conditioned to think of the house as static, we fail to realize that the automobile is as much a part of the house as was the addition of a woodshed. The automobile is part of the house, broken off, like a hydra cell, to enjoy a life of its own. Young people who used to court in the parlor, then on the glassed-in front porch, now do their courting in the porch on wheels, often driving their mobile parlor to the drive-in theater.

In 1920, 85 percent of the cost of production of a single-family dwelling in the United States went into the house’s shell and foundation. Only 15 percent of the general contract went into what we call “met hanical inc lusions.” In North America. that 15 percent covered a kitchen sink and a furnace. T here was no elec trical refrigeration at that time. Only a small percentage of houses had indoor toilets. Only a very small percentage had electrical wiring. But the post-World War One ■’fallout” ol advanced technology brought one mechanical inclusion after another. By 19-10. 45 percent of the general contract went into mechanical inclusions. At the present time, (>5 percent of the general contract goes into mechanical inclusions, which embrace wiring and plumbing, as well as the obvious machinery. During this same period, the si/e of the various domestic machines has continuously decreased. The sewing machine, for example, has shrunk from a very big device to a small one. As transistors and other miniaturizations are developed, the machinery of the general contract continuously produces more service with smaller apparatus and less effort. Through the years, the cost of the electrical current to power mechanization hits continuously decreased, despite increased costs in all other directions. Concurrently, the size of the house also decreased as servants were replaced with machines, which eliminated servants rooms. Family size has also decreased as life expectancy continues to increase. But despite the continual decrease in the size of individual homes, the cost per cubic foot of the enclosing structure has rocketed upward. Clearly, machinery is giving man more and more for less and less, while the structural arts give man less and less for more and more.

House trailers are modern, lightweight aluminum boxes, full of the mechanical devices that reflect the improved standard of living—and minus the expensive house. The home-trailer business, despite its product’s lack of aesthetic appeal and despite cultural inertia, has become a major industry, without any Federal subsidy, while the whole homebuilding business has been kept going only by 40-year Government mortgageloan guarantees and, even so, has been in fundamental decline for 20 years.

But the conditioned reflexes of society make laws that force the mobile-homeowner to emulate the static horizontality of the real-estate business. Zoned trailer parks grow up everywhere, to capture the swiftly multiplying mechanical-house packages. Rapidly expanding fiberglass, plastic and metal boat production is turning out houseboats, motor cruisers, sailing cruisers—all containing living machinery of the highest order. Mooring or storage of these boats is also absurdly horizontal, in harbors or marinas. Visionless realtors, backed by Government funds, operate indiscriminatelv in acquiring low-cost options on farmland, upon which they build houses on speculation. This continuouslv retimes die productive pcr-capita land area anti unbalances the ecological regeneration of life on earth. Despite the fact that one out of five Americans now moves every year, we arc forcetl by Govenmicnt- backetl realtors to buy homes on decades- long mortgages.

Man was designed with legs—not roots. Oser 10.000,000 humans have now traveled more than 3.000.000 miles around their spinning spaceship, the earth s surface, in contrast wit!) the 30.000 miles per lifetime averaged by all humanity prior to the year 1900. So ignorantly, myopically and statically conceived—and so obsolete—is the whole housing art that its death led to the crash of 1929. Since then, its ghostscript has been kept in rehearsal by the U.S. Government, at a total underwriting cost to date of 200 billion dollars.

But the reactionary bias of real-estate agents and land developers is really trivial in the face of the technological advances we arc about to make. The advances. as usual, will find much of their impetus in the weapons systems of great countries.

Now that scientific warfare has gone into space, it has been necessary for science to package human environmental and metabolic-regeneration systems for economic delivery by rocket. To do so, science must understand man as a process. When astronauts go beyond the vacuum-bottle-and-sandwich excursion limits, all the regenerative conditions provided naturally by the great biological interactions within the biosphere around the earth’s surface will have to be reproduced—in a miniaturized and capsulized human ecology. All the apparatus to accomplish this will be contained in a little black box weighing about 500 pounds and measuring about 20 cubic feet. With the little black box. a man in space will be able to regenerate his many organic processes, needing only small annual additions to the recirculating chemistry. The first men living comfortably in space will be watched on TV by billions on earth. Humanity will be swiftly educated in an entirely new set of environmental-control mechanics.

Though the first black box will probably cost the United States and Russia well over seven billion dollars, it will be mass-reproducible on earth at around two dollars per pound. A $1000 box could rent profitably at S200 a year. An individual or family could take a black box (costing approximately $18 a month) and go to any wilderness—mountaintop or island—and enjoy essential set vices superior to those now available in any city complex. The black box will constitute the first direct application of science to making man a physical and economic success anywhere¹ in the universe— which, of course, includes on earth.

In 1927. a single-family dwelling machine was proposed whose structuie was similar to that ol a wire wheel—laid horizontal) on its side—with its axle elongated vettically to act as a supporting mast, around which the- circular structure was supported. This high, catrom<T like dwelling machine had advanced Using apparatus suitable for a family of six. It had a sun deck above and an ait plane hangar and garage- below the dwelling zone. It was finally prototyped in the aircraft industry in 19-1-1. It weighed only three tons, which was approximately three pet cent of the weight of the equivalent facilities in conventional structured. It was popularly hailed. All that was lacking was the little black box to make this air-deliverable dwelling machine the world’s most luxurious, remotely installable and economic family habitat.

The historv of cities points to the same conclusions as the history ol the home (which we can confidently predict will reach its logical conclusion with the perfection of the little black box). Cities developed entirely before the thought of electricity or automobiles or before any of the millions of inventions registered in the United States Patent Olhce. Cities developed as warehouse trading posts. All warehousing has gone out ol the modern city. Warehousing has become dynamic and now- is mostly done on wheels, wings or in ships. Cities wete later med to house vast hordes of immigrants to wotk in the factories, which were also centered in the cities. Now- the factories have also left the cities obsolete in terms of yesterdays functions. Trying to tebuild them to accommodate the new needs of world man is like trying to reconstruct and improse a wrecked ship impaled on a reef pounded by sinf. The surf of technical obsolescence is invisible but much more powerful than the waves of the real ocean.

Mankind now- converges in the old cities essentially for abstract, almost weightless activity. Columbia University, New Yotk University, Fordham University and City College of New Yotk are now the prime real-estate holders in New Yoik Cits. Only a few cities can persist as prestigious cultural or stockexchange centers—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and a banditti of others. These cities will turn into great universities as automation replaces humans who now function only as automatons.

A few elementary engineering concepts point clearly. I believe, to what the new cities will be like. For example, when we double the length of an airplane Imelage, we increase its surface area by four and increase its volume byeight. The surface area ol a ship—rather than the volume—governs its friction anti drag. The larger the ship, the more economically its cargo may he carried. Yesterday’s airplanes were limited in size because they required extremely long landing strips. The emerging generation ol large airplanes—which will carry 70(1 to lotto passengers or more—is being designed for vertical take-oil and landing. which does away with the necessity lor prepared landing strips.

To take advantage ol the progressive economy gains of increasing size. leading airplane manufacturers already have planes on their engineering hoards big enough to carry 10,000 passengers or their etpiivalent in cargo. The 10.000- passenger ship has a length etpiivalent to that of the Empire State Building. The leading aircraft manufacturers realize that it will be possible to produce Empire State Building-size skvserapers in a horizontal position under factory- controlled conditions in mass production.

The Empire State Building was erected under conditions of wind. rain, heat and cold in the heart of New York City’s traffic. One man was killed for every floor of the building. No men should be killed in the production of the horizontal skyscraper in the airplane factory. Such skyscraper-size airplanes may then be taken from their factory and— with vertical take-oils and temporary wings—flown horizontally to any position around the world. Using their vertical takeoff ccpiipmcnt, they will be upended, anchored and braced to serve as skyscrapers. Thus we see that whole cities can be llown to any location in the wot Id and also removed in one day, just as fleets ol ships enter and leave ports.

If we build vertically, both out from and into the earth’s surface, we may use less land and return good soil to metabolic piodut tivity. We can also install vertical habitations upon and within the three quarters of the earth covered by water.

I he new Queen Elizabeth is a luxuriously comfortable abode either at sea or in port. She is a mobile city. She is shaped to get passengers across oceans in a hurry. 11 such floating cities didnt have to speed, they might hate an efficiently symmetrical shape. It is eminently feasible and economical to develop flattable organic cities of immense size. To visualize the carious designcontrolling conditions under which such cities could be constructed, imagine pinching a camera tripods legs together, taking hold ol the bottom ol the tripod in one hand and trying to hold it vertically on the top of an automobile going 70 miles an hour, over rough terrain. As you opened the legs ol the tripod—each time you spread them—the tripod would get steadier and steadier. This is the stabilizing effect obtained when tension stays arc rigged from top to bottom on three sides ol a mast, as with radio towers. Il is equally effective to have the legs spread outwardly, as in the Eifiel Tower. When the three legs are spread apart so that the length ol the edges of their base triangle equals the length of each of the legs themselves, the tripod attains its maximum stability. This conformation is that of the regular, or ecpiilatcral. tetrahedron. As the tripod’s legs go farther apart than the regular tetrahedron, its top can support less and less load. Thus we learn that the most stable structure is the regular, equieclged tetrahedron.

Following this design science due, we find that a tetrahedral city to house 1,000.000 people is both technologically and economically feasible. Such a hollow tetrahedral city can be constructed with each of its 300.000 families having terraced “outside” apartments of 2000 septare feet each. The terraces would permit the storage of mobile trailers, houseboats and other mobile homes, leaving an additional 1000 septare feet for a garden. The living units would he weatherproofed and would require no additional “walls,” or external skins, to be fastened onto the tetrahedral city. Such a city would consist of an open-truss- framework “structural mountain.” whose sides are covered with parked mobile homes. At night, it would be ablaze with light, as are the great petroleum refineries. All of the organic machinery necessary to its operation would be housed behind the three principal “walls” ol the tetrahedron.

Tetrahedrons are also geometrically unique in that they grow symmetrically bv additions to any one of their faces. Tetrahedral cities may start with 1000 occupants and grow to hold millions without changing their over-all shape and always providing each family with 2000 septare feet of floor space. (The city illustrating this article, for example, while much smaller than the model discussed here, is technically identical.) Such a city would be so structurally efficient and therefore so relatively light that, together with its foundation—of hollow sections of reinforced concrete—it could float. The model floating city would measure two miles to an edge. Its foundation would be 200 feet or more in depth and several hundred feet wide. On land, the structure could float in a three-sided moat, which would make the whole city earthquakeproof. Or the structure could be floated out into the ocean to any point and anchored. The depth of its foundation would go below the turbulent level of the seas, so that it would be. in ellect. a floating triangular atoll. Its two-mile base would provide landing strips foi jet airplanes. Its interior. two-mile harbor would provide refuge for the largest ocean vessels.

The total structural and mechanical materials involved in production of a number of such 1,000,000-inhabitant tetrahedral cities are within the capabilities of several companies in the major industrial nations. Withdrawal of materials from obsolete buildings on the land will permit the production of enough of these floating cities to clot the oceans of the earth, at distances negotiable by relatively small boats. Because their foundations would be below wave turbulence, such cities would also permit mid-ocean cargo transfers, extraordinarily increasing the efficiency of material and passenger traffic. The cities would generate their own energy with atomic reactors, whose by-product heat would be used to desalinate sea water for the citys water supply. In short, these habitats would greatly facilitate both travel of all sorts and the coming large-scale exploitation of the oceans.

In 15)54, the United States Marine Corps helicopter-lifted a geodesic dome large enough to house an American family. The latest helicopters being built for Vietnam can air-deliver geodesic domes large enough to cover a lootball field, including the end zones, the quartermile running track and side bleachers. By 1975. it will be possible to air-deliver geodesic domes large enough to cover small cities. (It is now possible to cover a large city in three months by delivering large subassemblies of a dome.)

There are already 5000 geodesic domes in 50 countries around the world, many so light and strong as to have been air-delivered.

Domed-over cities have extraordinary economic advantage. A dome calculated for mid-Manhattan has a surface that is only 1 the total area of the buildings that it would cover. It would reduce energy losses—either in winter heating or summer cooling—to 1 85 of the present level. It would obviate snow removal. The savings in ten years would pay for the dome.

Domed cities tire going to be essential to the occupation of the Arctic and the Antarctic. The Russians are already experimenting with them in the Arctic. They will be used in desert areas to shield new growth from the sun. while preventing wasteful evaporation of piped-in, desalinized water. Gradually, the success of new domed cities in remote places will bring about their use in covering old cities, particularly where antiquities need to be protected.

The domes over our cities will be so high and their structural members so delicate as to be nearly invisible. They will bring shadow when shadow is desirable and sun when sun is desirable, always keeping out rain, snow and storms as well as exterior industrial fumes, while collecting rain water in reservoirs.

The temperature inside the domes will be so stabilized that a semitropical atmosphere will exist. Inasmuch as there will be no rain or snow, people will live in garden-terrace skyscrapers, with screening only for privacy.

Because of the geodesic domes, the increasing trend toward mobility will find expression not only in individual "homes” but also in entire cities. A 100- foot-diameter geodesic sphere weighing three tons encloses seven tons of air. In a ■100-foot geodesic sphere—the size of several domes now operating—the weight of the air inside goes to about 500 tons, while the weight of the structure is only 15 tons. Here, the air-to- structure weight ratio is 33 to I. When we get to a geodesic sphere one-half mile in diameter, the weight of the air enclosed is so great that the weight of the structure itself becomes of relatively negligible magnitude, a ratio of 1000 to 1. When the sun shines on an openframe aluminum geodesic sphere of one- half-mile diameter, sunlight is reflected by the concave inner surface back into the sphere and gradually heats the interior atmosphere. When the interior temperature of the sphere rises only one degree Fahrenheit, the weight of air pushed out of the sphere is greater than the weight of the spherical-frame geodesic structure. This means that the total weight of the interior air, plus the weight of the structure, is much less than the weight of the surrounding atmosphere. The entire assemblage would then float into the sky.

As geodesic spheres get larger than one-half mile in diameter, they become floatable cloud structures. If their surfaces were draped with outwardly hung polyethylene curtains to retard the rate at which air comes back in at night, the sphere and its internal atmosphere would continue to be so light as to remain aloft. Such sky-floating geodesic spheres may be designed for altitudes of thousands of feet. The weight of human beings added to such prefabricated “cloud nines” would be negligible. Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard a milc-diametcr cloud structure. The passengers could come and go from cloud to cloud, or cloud to ground, as the clouds floated around the Girth or were anchored to mountaintops. While the building of such floating clouds is several decades hence, we may foresee that—along with the floating tetrahedral cities, air-deliverable skyscrapers, submarine islands, subsurface dwellings, domed-over cities, flyable dwelling machines and rentable, autonomous-living black boxes—man may well be able to converge and deploy at will around the earth, in great numbers, without further depletion of our planets productive surface.

As people live and move completely around the earth, changing from “summer” to "winter” in hours, the old concept of man as a cold-area or warm-area dweller—or as a fixed, static dweller anywhere—and all the old concepts of seasons and of work related to only daylight hours will gradually be eradicated from our conditioned reflexes. This will mean more efficient occupancy of environment-control facilities. Nowadays, at international airport hotels, people with one-to-eight-hour flight stopovers follow one another in rooms and beds that are made up as soon as each occupant leives. The rooms are occupied, not on a noon- to-noon schedule but on a use schedule, which we may call a frequency-modulation schedule. Such frequency-modulated occupancy of rented space in mobile hotels or in dwelling machines will become man’s fundamental life pattern.

The great world housing problem is an educational problem. By and large, man s inertias are overcome only by virtue of his own personal discoveries and his understanding of what is happening to him. There will be no instant world housing solutions. There are fundamental rates at which the educational gestation takes place. Publishers who try to exploit man’s imagination by giving him only the end-product concepts, without showing how man will get from here to there, postpone the opportunities for helping man educate himself as to how these events may come to pass. I, for one. am unwilling to allow anyone to be amused by startling concepts of tetrahedral cities and air-deliverable Empire State Buildings while keeping from society the opportunity to understand the complex of factors that lead to such tangible results.

The comprehensive introduction of automation everywhere around the earth will free man from being an automaton and will generate so rapid a mastery and multiplication of energy wealth that we will be able to support all of humanity in ever greater physical and economic success anywhere around our spaceship, earth. Quite clearly, man free to enjoy all of his planet, free to research the bottom of his ocean and to re-explore earlier patterns of man’s life on earth, will also be swiftly outward-bound to occupy ever greater ranges of the universe. Within decades, we will know whether man is going to be a physical success here or is going to frustrate his own success with his negatively conditioned reflexes of yesterday—bringing about his own extinction. My intuitions sense success. despite our negative inertias. But my intuitions will mean nothing unless man learns to understand and control the forces shaping him and the new patterns of living available to him.

Fuller design for a 2-mile diameter geodesic dome over a section of Manhattan island.

Think

Published by

January-February 1968

Contents

The Ideal City—Can We Build It? by George A. IK Boehm

A West Coast architect and urban planner is convinced we can. page 2

Why Not Roofs Over Our Cities? by R. Buckminster Fuller £

A practical visionary foresees a domed future for urban dwellers, page 8 V

What Executives Should Know About Industrial Designers by Ralph Caplan

They are the consumer’s advocate, often the conscience of industry, page 12

Your Built-in Weapon Against Viruses by Samuel Moffat

What science knows about a protein called interferon, page 17

Science for Nonscientists by I. I. Rabi

A Nobel laureate’s persuasive case for "stick-to-the-ribs” teaching, page 22

Is There An Obsolescent Executive in Your Company—or in Your Chair?

by Harry Levinson

If so, there are steps to take before it’s too late, page 26

Advice to Educators: Be Candid About Your Money Problems

by McGeorge Bundy

Why there is no longer room for reticence, page 31

Thoughts page 35

Horizons page 36

Why Not Roofs Over Our Cities?

by R. Buckminster Fuller

The author—inventor, engineer, architect, philosopher—is best known for his geodesic domes; thousands have popped up all over the earth, one of the most recent at Expo 67. Here, he offers a prophetic glimpse of the future, how man may live and travel.

Those who have had the pleasure of walking through the great skylighted arcades, such as the one in Milan, Italy, are familiar with the delights of covered city streets, in which outdoor restaurants and exhibits are practical. They can envision the effect of a domed-over city, where windows may be open the year round and gardens bloom in the dust-free atmosphere. From below, the dome would appear as a translucent film through which the sky, clouds and stars would be visible. It would not create a shut-in feeling any more than carrying a parasol above one s head on a sunny summer day.

There are other persuasive arguments Copyright »> 1968 by R. Buckminster Fuller
in favor of domed-over cities. (It is no aesthetic accident that nature gave us no cubical heads, eggs, nuts or planets, but encased the contents in curvilinear structures.) There is, for example, no method more effective in wasting heating and cooling energy than the system employed by New York and other skyscraper cities of the world. A dome over mid-Manhattan would reduce its energy losses approximately 50-fold. Such a dome would reach from the East River to the Hudson at 42nd Street on its east-west axis, from 64th to 22nd Street on its north-south axis, and would consist of a hemisphere two miles in diameter and one mile high at its center. The cost of snow removal in the city would pay for the dome in 10 years.

Studies made at the Snow Institute of Japan and by Japan’s Mitsubishi company indicate the cost of heating the surface of the dome with electric resistance wires imbedded in the skin. To maintain a temperature sufficient to melt snow and ice (with the heat turned on only during the time of snow and ice formation, for cities in the snowfall
magnitude of New York) would cost far less than amortizing the expense of the additional structure necessary to support the cumulative snow loads throughout the winter months.

When rain falls on New York City and its counterparts around the world, it runs down the buildings into the streets, then into the gutters and on to the sewers to be polluted with all the other waters. Year after year, New York and other cities have suffered water shortages, though they are deluged with summer thundershowers, when enough water falls to take care of the city for days. With a domed-over city, both the melted snow water and the rain would run neatly to a guttering, clear of the pollution of the streets, down into a canal around the dome’s lower rim from whence it would flow to great collecting reservoirs. The dome would be high enough to cause the water to flow gravitationally back to the storage reservoirs in Westchester County.

Because the energy losses would be so greatly reduced for the covered portion of the city, its heating and cooling could

be handled most economically by electrical energy wired in from generators, far from the domed-over city. A new ultra-high-voltage electrical conducting system will soon bring New York electrical energy, by wire, all the way from the Pennsylvania hills, where the coal is to be mined and burned in steam-driven electric generators at the mine mouths. This will eliminate all fumes from the dome-covered atmosphere. The dome would also be able to umbrella away the fumes occurring outside the dome.

The Wire Strainer Effect

Calculations on the two-mile dome for mid-Manhattan indicate that the individual structural elements would be invisible, as invisible as the wires of a screened porch when viewed from a 100-foot distance. For this reason the appearance of the dome would be seen as a glistening translucent form. One would get the same effect if he photographed anordinary kitchen wire strainer turned upside down and placed 100 feet away.

Such a shielding dome would also exclude the sound of passing jet planes. The lower edge of the dome would be at such a height as to make it appear an oversized umbrella above the city, with plenty of blue sky visible under its rim.

The dome’s skins, consisting of wire- reinforced, one-way-vision, shatterproof glass, mist-plated with aluminum, would have the exterior appearance of a mirrored dome, while the viewer inside would see out without conscious impairment. This will cut down the interior sunlight to nonglare level. Such domes would also provide a prime shielding against atomic radiation fallout.

When such large domes are made, the captive atmosphere in itself is enough to support the structural shell, as in a large pneumatic tire. Double the diameter of a tractor tire and it takes eight times as long to let the air out through the same sized valve. The larger the dome, the lower the pressure necessary to carry a given load. With such very large domes, the air introduced with the air-conditioning would keep up the shell-sustaining pressure.

As three-quarters of planet earth is water, and man is now trending swiftly to occupy the world’s waters, as well as space, spherically-enclosed floating cities will soon dot the oceans at safely negotiable small yacht distances apart that will permit world-around cruising. Spherically-enclosed subterranean cities, sky-floating spherical cities and independent spherical spaceship cities probably will be developed by humanity during the next century.

Before we build our spherically- enclosed and domed-over cities, however, we must know how humanity is going to get from one to another. This involves studying every aspect of world transportation, and within that the air transport industry.

The whole industry of the earth could be integrated in such a way as to employ credit cards, computerized ticketing and automated follow-through of the whole transportation process—with all its economic and technical ramifications. A traveler could thereby “book" by vending machine in the nearest downown office, or be ticketed in any hotel

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lobby or corner store, or even over his two-way TV facsimile, cable or radiobeam closed circuit system, operating from any spot from which he may wish to initiate his travel. He would insert his credit card into the transmitter and press buttons to indicate the time he would like to leave from one point and arrive at another, anywhere on earth, in the shortest possible time, and in the most economical way, including terminal helicopter flights, automobile rentals, stopover hotel accommodations, et al. Out from the vending machine would come a ticket printed with his routing and booked passage with the amount automatically charged to his credit card for officially automated accounting.

Whenever necessary, the traveler could cancel his ticket by putting his credit card back in any travel-vending machine and pushing the canceling button for the same routing, plus the transaction number which had been imprinted on the vending ticket when he received the machines commitment to carry him. The travel vending machine would thus be able to print out bookings in split seconds, or cancel them in another split second. The ticket would be all the individual needed to take with him as his automatic key-of-entry at the most convenient downtown embarkation point.

At his downtown airlines contact point he would enter his private traveling quarters and be transported therein to the point of major flight embarkation. These quarters would be within an angular segment of what 1 call a “fuselage cartridge.” Each cartridge would be a circular section, like a banana slice or a Lifesaver mint, as one of many such units packed in parallel as a section of a cylinder cut perpendicularly to the cylinders axis. The long, tubular assembly of these sections would fit together to form a complete cylindrical cartridge fitting neatly into the tubularshaped fuselage of the air transport. There could be hundreds or more of these sections. Within any angular segment of one of these, the traveling quarters would provide the maximum sitting space without one human physically touching another; the integrity of each individual’s privacy would be physically ensured. The sitting device would convert to a full-length bed that could move within the cartridge section by mechanical means. Luggage would be stored within the passengers circular cartridge section.

All of these sectioned compartments would be routed by helicopter lift from “downtown” to the dispatching airports. At the airports, the cartridge cross sections would be loaded into the next transport bound for their particular destination, or series of destinations— the cartridges being loaded in proper sequence for detachment on jigs at their respective destinations. The cartridge sections, recombined at each airport, would be loaded through the open tail of the tubular fuselage as cargo loadings are made through the open tail of cargo planes. This marshaling or separating

“like a banana slice”

out and recombining of cartridge sections could be accomplished at each airport with computerized switches.

At destination airport, the passenger cartridge sections would be helicopter lifted or vacuum tube sucked to the nearest downtown disembarkation points. The same world travel and freight traffic computerization would also take care of all hoteling and dwelling accommodations.

Rocket Cities

The design of future cities will therefore be inexorably linked with transportation design. Some experimental cities will be undertaken scientifically by advanced industry as a general systems problem in the same way design scientists organize the comprehensive and detailed planning of great steamships and the soon-to-be giant ships of the air which later, as veritable sky cities, will become air-deliverable at supersonic speeds. Next will come cities on the oceans, in space, on the moon

January-February 1968 and, last, scientifically organic cities rocket-delivered around the earth.

The first officially undertaken experimental city in the USA is now going through its initial phase of official consideration. It is prescribed by its backers—the Federal and Minnesota State Governments acting with private industry, banks and press—that it be located somewhere in Minnesota at least 100 miles away from any present city. This is to guarantee its not becoming a dormitory extension of an already existing city. Logistical engineering considerations show that the research, development and government-financed prototyping, fabrication and installation of such a city will take a minimum of 10 years, even employing today s most advanced science and technology.

This means that the city cannot be realized before 1977. By then, major world traffic between the Americas 12 percent of the human family and the 72 percent of all humanity living in Asia and Europe will be carried on over the northern polar routes, which are the shortest distances between these people. Since Minnesota occupies precisely the center of North America, it is the most inclusively effective marshaling point of the continents part of the world air traffic pattern as it interconnects North America with both the Eurasian continent and South America.

If we assume that the present rate of acceleration of mans technoeconomic evolution is to persist, we also will have to assume that the world s present political divisioning into separate, sovereign states will have become as obsolete as the days of history when men belonged to city states because they were inherently immobilized by lack of transport or were even identified only as lifelong members of a single tribe, or township, or even a single borough or ward within a township—or with a single room in a single building as a numbered prisoner. The degrees of freedom to be attained are physical as well as metaphysical. ■

The technology to make every man on earth a success is available, so are the resources as determined by Fullers World Resources Inventory. The problem is one of doing- more-with-less and distribution; equalizing our wealth between the haves and have-nots. The “World Game” as presented in the following paper illustrates a computerized gaming concept through which we can make 100 percent of humanity a physical success on our Spaceship Earth.

WORLD GAME*

R. Buckminster Fuller

HOW IT CAME ABOUT

In 1964 the United States Information Agency asked me to consider the design of a building and an exhibition which might be adopted as the United States entry in the Montreal World’s Fair of 1967, later known as “Expo ’67.”

I made a proposal and the exhibition part of it was rejected. I was asked to continue, however, as the architect of the U.S.A, building to house an exhibition designed by others. Insofar as I know I was the only one considered as architect of the building. I think this was because of the success the United States had experienced with my world around, air-delivered, geodesic dome, trade fair pavilions and the U.S.A. Moscow Exhibit dome of 1959, which was purchased by the Russians as a permanent building after the United States exhibition was concluded.

Fortunately my U.S.A, geodesic dome for Expo ’67 proved a success. Also, but more gradually however, it is being realized by many that my rejected idea for the American exhibit is looming into ever greater prominence as a highly desirable social facility. I will therefore review the-concept and development of my original idea.

I told the United States Information Agency in 1964 that by 1967 the regard of the rest of the world for the United States would be at its lowest ebb in many decades—if not in the total two centuries of the U.S.A.’s existence. Since each country’s World’s Fair exhibit would be well published all around Earth, I felt that it would be very important that the United States do something that would tend to regain the spontaneous admiration and confidence of the whole world. This could be done by inaugurating at Expo ’67 a computerized exploration for the most universally creative and economically sound internal and external U.S.A, policy formulation.

What I proposed was based on my observation that world people had become extraordinarily confident in the fundamental reliability of the computer and its electronically controlled processes. I know that a great many people will contradict me, but I had predicated my conviction—of society’s subconsciously established confidence in the computer’s reliability—upon vital, therefore undeniable, behavior facts.

I refer to the equanimity with which world-around air jet travelers now commit their lives to the computer’s reliability. I have been flying regularly, both as pilot and passenger since 1917. I have been an almost constant airlines’ passenger since the first building of the commercial planes with aluminum in 1930. In the early days the ten to twenty air passengers were generally and genuinely nervous about their safety, particularly when their airplane’s course ran into thunderstorms. The passengers knew that the pilot would do his best to get them through the troublesome condition. His own life was at stake. But the passengers also knew that the pilot had to guess his way through the clouds not knowing exactly where he was nor whether the invisibility reached all the way to the ground. Everybody in the plane sat tensely and later admired the pilot’s skill, courage, and cool skill in getting through the blind

1 Paper delivered June 18, 1969, to Joint National Meeting of Operations Research Society of America and American Astronautical Society, Denver, Colorado. © 1969 R. Buckminster Fuller. condition. But without question all were frightened until a clear view was restored of the Earth lying below at a safe distance.

As I now fly around the world in jets in the company of 125 to 135 passengers, we frequently find ourselves coming in for a landing in the night and fog. But everybody is occupied in reading, sleeping, listening to the music or talking. They pay but little attention to the flying conditions. Why? If they thought the pilot had only his personal senses to get them through the mess they would be very very apprehensive and rightly so. Under such conditions it would be a pure miracle if he accomplished a safe landing. However by learning to use the modem electromagnetic communications devices and “blind flight” routines, he is able to come in for a safe and comfortable landing with his 75 ton jet ship hitting the runway at speeds well over 100 miles an hour. The reason this is both feasible and safe is because it is entirely instrument controlled, with ample “fail safe” standby equipment. The pilot has to employ faithfully the instrumental data and indicators and, sometimes also aided by ground operated instruments and personnel, is guided with reliable precision to a safe landing, under “zero visibility” conditions. The pilot’s senses are used only to see and hear the instruments and to coordinate his hands and feet to operate the right buttons, pedals and levers. Within the short decade of successfully routined, automated instrument landings humanity has thus come to risk its life in high confidence of the successful performance of automated instruments.

It is thus proven that society has established fundamental confidence in the reliability of properly maintained and programmed computers. The fact is that in going from here to there by some kind of transport in 1968 the most dangerous way is by automobile. Next most dangerous is by railroad, and it is safest to go by airplane. That is a new era condition brought about by the extraordinary degree of reliability of computerized controls. As a consequence much more automation is about to take place and the computers, to do the myriad tasks, are proliferating at an amazing and popularly unrecognized rate.

On the working assumption that humanity now has established implicit confidence in the computers and automated instrumentation, I proposed in 1964 that the United States’ Expo ’67 exhibition should have a 400 foot diameter 5/8 sphere building similar in shape to the 250 foot diameter building actually built for Expo ‘67. In the basement of this building would be housed an extraordinary computer facility. On entering the building by 36 external ramps and escalators leading in at every ten degrees of circumferential direction the visitors would arrive upon a great balcony reaching completely around the building’s interior quarter-mile perimeter. The visitors would see an excitingly detailed one hundred foot diameter world globe suspended high within the 400 foot diameter 5/8 sphere main building. Cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles would appear as flattened out basketball sized blotches with the tallest buildings and

radio towers only about one-sixteenth of an inch high.

Periodically the great spherical Earth would be seen to be transforming slowly into an icosahedron—a polyhedron with twenty (equilateral) triangular facets. The visitors would witness that in the processes of these transformations there are no visible changes in the relative size and shape of any of the land and water masses of the 100 foot diameter miniature Earth. Slowly the 100 foot diameter icosahedronal Earth’s surface will be seen to be parting along some of its triangular edges, as the whole surface slowly opens mechanically as an orange’s skin or an animal’s skin might be peeled carefully in one piece. With slits introduced into its perimeter at various places it would be relaxed to subside into a flattened-out pattern as is a bear skin rug. The icosahedronal Earth’s shell thus will be seen to gradually flatten out and be lowered to the floor of the building. The visitors would realize that they were now looking at the whole of the Earth’s surface simultaneously without any visible distortion of the relative size and shape of the land and sea masses having occurred during the transformation from sphere to the flattened-out condition which we call a map. My cartographic projection of the “SKY OCEAN WORLD” functions in just such a manner.

This stretched out football field sized world map would disclose the continents arrayed as one world island in one world ocean with no breaks in the continental contours. (See illustration.)*

The great map would be wired throughout so that mini-bulbs, installed all over its surface, could be lighted by the computer at appropriate points to show various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world conditions, events, and resources. World events would occur and transform on this live world map’s ever evoluting face.

I proposed that, on this stretched out reliably accurate, world map of our Spaceship Earth, a great world logistics game be played by introducing into the computers all the known inventory and whereabouts of the various metaphysical and physical resources of the Earth. This inventory, which has taken forty years to develop to high perfection, is now housed at my Southern Illinois University headquarters.

We would then enter into the computer all the inventory of human trends, known needs and fundamental behavior characteristics.

I proposed that individuals and teams would undertake to play the “World Game” with those resources, behaviors, trends, vital needs, developmental desirables, and regenerative inspirations. The players as individuals or teams would each develop their own theory of how to make the total world work successfully for all of humanity. Each individual or team would play his theory through to the end of his predeclared program. It could be played with or without competitors.

The objective of the game would be to explore for ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of another.

To accomplish the game’s objective, the resources, pathways and dwelling points around the surface of our eight thousand mile diameter, spherical Spaceship Earth must be employed by the players in such a way that the world’s individual humans would each be able to exercise complete actional discretion; and would have such freedom of decision regarding the investment of their time in their waking hours

* See also B. Fuller’s “Education Automation” published by Southern Illinois University Press for deeper discussion of the ‘geoscope,’ and the ‘Mini-Earth.’ that they would be able to travel independently, or in groups, either to-and-fro locally, or continuing intermittently on around the world, dwelling from time to time here or there, finding everywhere facilities to accommodate their needs in an uncompromising manner. The game would seek to use the world’s resources, interprocesses and evolutionary developments in such a way that all the foregoing would be possible. It might involve moving whole city-sized groups of buildings from here to there in a few hours.

Let us assimilate World Game playing as I envision it, in order also to envision the kind of information most probably to result from such forward re-integration of our present world inventory of systematically differentiated-out physical and metaphysical variables.

First we are confronted with the present type of custom- tolerated frustrations of otherwise efficient designs. As things are now organized all big businesses have to make profits to provide a living for those dependent upon their corporate shares. To make the most profits, businesses exploit peak loads and bottlenecks. They want the highest earnings out of their apparatus and payroll investment. One eight-hour, or shorter shift a day usually seems most profitable. Airports, restaurants and transportation services try to operate only when every seat can be filled. Their owners attempt to close down and save payroll and energy costs at all other times. This accelerates further the tendency to concentrate all business and travel into a few coming-and-going hours in the ever later “morning” and ever earlier “evening” with an ever longer lunch period during which most of the critical executive decisions are made. (The latter are incidentally all the as yet nonautomatable decisions.) For sixteen hours each day the airports, “downtown” restaurants, offices, and wholesale businesses are extraordinarily quiet or altogether closed. This gives people so much time to spend their money in their home neighborhoods that business gets a second chance at them in the widely deployed shopping center supermarkets which operate near their homes. Their home hours being sixteen hours long the supermarkets are geared to as nearly full automation as labor unionism will permit in order to be able to stay open sixteen hours a day with the minimum of human attendants working in two or three eight hour shifts.

All the beds and bedrooms around the world are empty two-thirds of the time. All the automobiles are empty and motionless five-sixth’s of the day. There are two main causes of this vast uselessness. Firstly, we try to do everything at peak loads. Secondly, we try to “own” too many objects that we use too infrequently to justify “ownership.”

Assimilating the running of the world by computer we see quickly that we must find ways in which humans can be induced to employ all equipment all the time, thus smoothing out the peaks and valleys and eliminating the 66% empty time and servicing 100 percent instead of only 40 percent of humanity.

You may say, “Oh, I want to own my own bed. You can’t possibly do that kind of thing to me!” Answering you I point out that as we go into any motel or hotel room today we find a clean, fresh bed, “made-up”, as far as we can see, of all new linen. Everything about the room is apparently “brand new.” You come into any modem telephone booth within which as far as you can tell is a new telephone and you may be the first and last ever to have used it.

I have owned fifty-five automobiles in my sixty years of

DYMAXION

SKY-OCEAN

driving. I have an unblemished driver’s license. I drive about fifteen thousand miles a year, but I’m not going to own any more automobiles because I found that I was leaving my automobiles at airports and never getting back to them. I now fly about a quarter of a million miles a year and find it much simpler to rent a car at the airport of each briefly visited locality. I get a fresh new car. As far as I can see it is just nicely broken-in but is otherwise show-room new. All the insurance, car licensing, and maintenance problems are eliminated. It saves me much negative time, costs less, and gives greater satisfaction. Instead of “buying” a new car every year, I now “buy” a new one twice a week at less expense. I “own” it only as I use it. The idea that equipment is satisfactory only as permanent property is no longer valid. Many customs of humanity that have long defied political reform on strictly ethical or ideological premises are about to evaporate on a practical obsolescence basis. The computerized World Game may obviate vast manslaughter revolutions by disclosing in advance and thus accelerating the elimination of, “unwanted” or “unfair” customs and practices. Such obsolescence is unanticipated by the political revolutionaries; who, had they known that evolution was about to establish the desirable conditions by new invention and insights might have foregone vast and unnecessarily continuing mayhem.*

Amongst other grand strategies for making the world work and taking care of everybody is the design science revolution of providing ever more effective tools and services with ever less, real resource investment per each unit of end performance. For instance, a communications satellite, weighing only one-quarter of a ton is now out-performing the transoceanic communication capabilities of 175 thousand tons of copper cable.

The World Game will explore for, and experiment with, more-for-less uses of our resources so that instead of taking care of only 44% of humanity at a high standard of living, we can take care of all of humanity at an even higher standard of living than man has as yet conceived.

In playing the game I propose that we set up a different system of games from that of Dr. John Von Neuman whose “Theory of Games” was always predicated upon one side losing 100 percent. His game theory is called “Drop Dead.” In our World Game we propose to explore and test by assimilated adoption various schemes of “How to Make the World Work.” To win the World Game everybody must be made physically

■ successful. Everybody must win.

Most games have not been thought of that way except for such group ways-and-means explorations as mountain climbing. Von Neuman’s game theory relates to World War strategies for mastering the Planet Earth’s economic and political activities, as it has been played over the great ages, particularly as played in the last century where elimination of the competitor was accomplished by delivering the greatest hitting power, the greatest distance, with the greatest accuracy, in the shortest time with the least effort, under the most widely varying environmental circumstances. Von Neuman’s game theory derived from past experiences, first of the British Navy and later of the American Navy, as gained in their operations around the three-quarters of the Earth’s surface which is covered by water.

Before the airplane had developed to its supremacy over the battleship the mastery of the Earth was accomplished through mastery of the sea. You can float fantastic fortresses that you

* See B. F.’s article in I.B.M.’s Think Magazine, copy attached. can’t possibly move over land to the most effective places to control the world’s ever shifting lines of supply. The resources of the Earth are so unevenly distributed that the control of the lines of supply in turn controlled industrialization’s ability to make the most powerful, incisive and efficient tools and weapons of the moment’s known organized production potential. Whoever controlled the seas ruled the world.

The United States Navy and its war college have for long played the war games seeking the most effective means for controlling the world and meeting any challenge of any enemy. The Navy (or Von Neuman) game is played in the terms of the optimum logistics and ballistics permitted by the thus far mastered world resources, total geography and total humanity. However the world war games have always been played on the axiomatic assumption (now proven false) that Thomas Malthus and Darwin were correct in concluding; firstly, that there would never be enough of the world’s resources to support more than a small minority of humanity; and secondly, only “the fittest would survive.” Wherefore, axiomatically it always had to be you or me.

By the year 1900 so many vital statistics and world resource data had been collected that the modified working assumptions adopted in the 20th century’s world war games no longer maintained that it was just a matter of you or me surviving. The ever more scientifically gleaned odds indicated that less than 1% of humanity would be able to live out its potential four-score and ten years of life while at the same time affording an adequately fed, medically attended, and culturally literate standard of living.

Vital statistics and insurance acturians showed that the average world man in the year 1900 probably was going to die, as he had throughout all known history, with an average life span of only 27 years (42 years if in the U.S.A, where conditions were more favorable). Those odds were the working basis of the naval officers’ assimilated world war games of 1900. 99% of humanity had “everything to win and nothing to lose” by waging war. Better to “have at it” while you are young and strong than to wait to rot away in the slums.

In abrupt contradiction to the foregoing working assumptions, and only within the last decade (1958-1968), science has been able to say authoritatively that it is now feasible to take care of all of humanity at an ever higher standard of living than has as yet been realized for anyone but that we can’t possibly do so if we continue the economic and political restraints of the you-or-me cold, warm or hot, warring or the world’s production, distribution and consumption restrictions imposed by the world’s militarily maintained sovereign boundaries.

All the sovereign boundaries of the powerful nations were established and are maintained on Malthus’ now invalidated assumption that there is not and never will be enough of the life regenerating resources to support more than a meager minority of humanity and that the lands embraced by the most powerful world states had much higher promise as an operating base for sustaining life than had the excluded lands. The lands were claimed by the sword. They were taken under conditions of abysmal ignorance and general illiteracy, when no one knew of the chemical riches and lever-moving, inanimate energies hidden within the “natural” landscape.

A world-around game of musical chairs was forever being played in which each time the music of so-called peace ceased there was only one chair of continuing life to accommodate every one hundred people. With cessation ot the (people-being- polite-to-one-another) music there ensued the periodic Armageddon wherein war, disease and other disasters eliminated the vast numbers of humanity that could no longer be supported. These past experiences and the long overshooting momentums of bureaucratic systems together account for the fact that all the as yet powerful World States assume such Armageddon to be forever inevitably recurrent. The great states therefore doggedly maintain their respective sovereignties and their preparedness for the ultimate trial of physical power. To fortify the very concept of sovereignty they keep inventing and officially reorganizing the sovereignties of ever littler and weaker nations who with false pride of recognition and admission to membership in the Union of World Nations vigorously defend as fundamental the concept of sovereignty as a step to political autonomy and freedom quite oblivious to the fact that their respective exclusive physical resources cannot support any but a primitive hunting, fishing, and grubbing life. They altogether overlook the reason that they had previously been ruled by others was that the others had been economically motivated to seize and rule them in order to participate in the powerful advancement of living standards provided exclusively by industrialization which operating at minimum adequacy involved free intercourse and interaction of all the world-around very disorderly distribution of the 92 chemical elements whose unique behaviors and their chemical combinings were altogether essential to the success of the industrial process.

In complete contradiction to all the war experts’ assumptions, between 1900 and today, in just two-thirds of a century, while the world’s population has approximately doubled, we have at the same time also gone from less than 1 percent of humanity to 40 percent of all humanity enjoying a higher standard or living than was known to or was dreamed of by any monarch before the twentieth century. This was not only unexpected by any economists but is inexplicable in the terms of formal academic economics. It is this utterly surprising reversal of yesterday’s expertise which inspires the “initiation” of our World Game playing.

We see then that during that same period of the two-thirds of a century, within which humanity was escalating from less than 1 percent to 40 percent of its numbers enjoying a higher standard of living than any historic king’s, that the per-world- man amounts of the world’s total metallic resources were continually diminishing. Yet it was out of these ever diminishing per-capita metallic resources that all the machinery was contrived which in turn produced the high standard of living support of the forty-fold greater percentage of a simultaneously doubling human population.

All the metals that have been mined and put to work are now invested in machinery and structures which operating at • full capacity can take care of only 44 percent of humanity. That full capacity rate is 4 percent more than those actually being served. The unrealized difference is due to inefficiencies occurring in the use of the equipment.

How then can we explain that during the two-thirds of a century in which we rose from less than 1 to 40 percent of all humanity enjoying a higher standard of living (than had been realized by any pre-twentieth century monarch), that this realization occurred despite a continually diminishing percentage of metals per each world man—a ratio occasioned by human population increasing faster than humanity’s discovery

of new metallic ores.

We can’t say that the eighty-folding (40 percent of twice the original population) of the number of humans being taken care of, was accomplished by a greater exploitation of physical resources per capita. We can explain the escalated physical success only by the fact that we have produced vastly higher and products and services performances with ever less time, energy and weights of resource invested per each accomplished unit of end functioning, within our comprehensively evoluting, world around technological complex.

All the historical concepts of economic security of dry land man are predicated on doing more with more, that is, with wider, heavier and higher walls to protect him, more and more food in ever bigger grain bins and ice boxes, more and more money in ever bigger and more numerous banks—“secure as the Rock of Gibraltar.” But this grand economic strategy of ever more profitable “tonnage” which assumes the heaviest and the biggest must be the most successful is no longer valid. It ceased to articulate its validity in the economic indices of 1925 when “energy consumption” supplanted “tonnage” as the most sensitive and end-telling characteristic of the vitality of industry. (See Fortune’s 10th Anniversary issue of 1940.) Despite tonnages’ post-1925 invalidation the long-time, conditioned reflexes of society and their economic intercourse conventions keeps this obsolete socio-economic viewpoint as yet “operative” for the 99 percent of humanity dwelling around the dry land surfaces of Earth.

Thorough investigation discloses that the doing more with less originated in the science of designing the combined cargo and weapons carriers of the sea and sky, where the ship of the sea had to float and the ship of the sky had to be lifted by pulling or pushing its wing foil through the air at suprahurricane speeds. The ships of given sizes and tonnages of displacement which did the most with the least could out-perform all others and gave their possessors mastery of the planet Earth. The doing-more-with-less technology which has now eighty-folded the numbers of economically successful humans came into being entirely within the “top secret” weapons carrying technology of the sea, sky, and space.

So the great economic change that has come about in the last two-thirds of a century has not come as a consequence of the declared policy of any of the political ideologies. To prove that statement we will employ the mathematical strategy of “Reductio ad absurdum.” Let us take (hypothetically) all the machinery, engines, motors, pipes and wires away from all the countries around the world; from the communists and the capitalists alike; from the Europeans, Asians, North and South Americans, Africans and Australians, and dump all that machinery in the ocean. We find that without the industrial network of machinery, within six months two billion people— (not two million) i.e. half of humanity—would die of starvation. That is how intimately the world’s machinery is tied into the regeneration of human life. Since that proved to be a disastrous idea we will leave all the machinery where it now is and will leave all the people who know how to run that machinery at their jobs, and instead we will (hypothetically) take away from all the world’s countries, all the politicians of all and every kind of ideology and we will send them on a perpetual trip around the Sun accompanied by all their militarists. We will melt up all the guns and other weapons and stock pile the metals for manufacturing more machinery to produce goods and services for more humans. As a consequence of the politicians’ removal (computation quickly indicates) that as many people as had been eating would keep right on eating but that with the international political boundaries removed—the politicians being no longer present to enforce their barrier schemes and laws—man would stop “plowing under” and instead begin shipping more food and goods freely across the borders.

Freed of their arbitrary political boundary controls humanity soon would stop the nonsense of using all of its highest scientific and technical capabilities only to knock one another out of the sea, sky or space. We would have to change the working assumptions. We would accept and test science’s word, that it is now possible to take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than any have ever known, provided we eliminate the sovereignties and stop wasting our resources on weaponry and experimental warfare.

I propose that if anyone playing the game employs ideological biases and attempts to enforce the dominance of one by another through resort to guns that such players be disqualified. The game must be won by peaceful means, by the use of intelligence and proper use of our resources. The players will not compete. They will engage in cooperative exploration to see how all humanity can win a successful, pollution-free, life.

Prizes will be given in succession to those who computer accounting shows have attained the support of progressively greater numbers of human beings than had previously been attained. After final attainment of the support of all humanity at an unprecedentedly high standard of living prizes will go to those who discover ways of measurably accelerating the rate at which total success of humanity is attained. Then prizes will be given to those who successively improve the living standards for all while living within our “income” energy and not upon our savings account energy supply and thus guard the living of future generations of humanity to come. Finally, prizes will go to those who open progressively greater vistas of human and metaphysical interest in Universe, and to those who progressively enrichen human experience and reinspiration of others.

Quite clearly the game will develop into a design revolution, not just of the tools themselves but of the services, and of the ways in which we organize the use of the computers; for instance, in programming the ticketing of people from here to there, in keeping the important tactical information available, and in keeping track of every available hotel bed and bath in the world. It is also perfectly feasible for the computer to keep track of every seat in every airplane around the world, the empties would be clearly registered. It is feasible for the computer to program any man’s travel anywhere around the world, local or long distance, without having one man interfering with another. (See B. Fuller’s I.B.M. THINK Magazine article).

Out of the large number of U.S.A, and Russian spy satellites now orbiting the Earth there has been an extraordinarily surprising fall-out of information vital to humanity. The spy satellites are equipped with sensors. The sensors can recognize the specific temperature of different types of woods, flesh, furs, metals, etc., each of which has specific temperature characteristics. Every system gives off energy. The sensors are able to pick up unique electromagnetic and thermodynamic frequencies, and to identify the whereabouts of discrete quantities of a multitude of unique objects. Recently one satellite has inadvertently been identifying, locating and counting the number of beef cattle grazing around Earth. Other sensors have been able to tell exactly what and where the living grain crop is. For the first time in man’s Earthian history he can learn exactly where both his shifting and fixed resources are.

We have also reporting of the Earth’s total weather patterns. These can and will be correlated with the total crop patterns. We will know where the rains are, where the cattle and crops are and how the weather may eventually be guided to insure the crops. Thus we are to have extraordinary correlation of information resulting in the adequate support of all humanity. We will also know where all the people are and how they move about.

Thus our confidence in the computers is progressively enhanced.

Society has learned that no politician can ever yield to another politician. To do so means “losing face.” But any politician can yield to the computer without “losing face.” In fact he gains applause for his logic and wisdom in so doing, for all of humanity is in agreement that for even a brilliant, beautifully trained, astronaut to defer to the computer is not an admittance of intellectual or physical inadequacy nor of incompetence or poor judgment. Quite the reverse. It is the astronauts superior knowledge of the computers’ capability and his superb coordination with and reliance upon the strategems and tools of science which win society’s spontaneous confidence and admiration.

The most trusted senior airlines pilot does not “lose face” when he says, “It is not up to my physical senses to get us through clouds. I cannot possibly navigate through the night and cloud with my bare senses.”

The politicians are going to confess the obvious—that “No human beings can keep in mind all the special interests of all people and all the whereabouts and unique interbehaviors of all the resources of the Earth.” No human beings can persuade other people to behave in various unfamiliar, untried ways, but the computer can integrate and disclose the critical information, and be completely convincing to all in respect to which of various programmed patterns the computer selects as being of the most long run benefit and least cost to society. Any one of us can yield becomingly to the computer.

I am quite confident that as the world game is played progressively it will disclose a myriad of politically untried, unprecedented yet amazingly effective ways of solving hitherto unsurmountable world-around problems.

These unprecedented computer disclosures will not only be kept track of by the computer but will become “big news” items of the world’s press, and of the international news wire services. As man gets into more and more critical proximity to a full scale World War Three, due to the inherent political biases and intransigence, the people of the world will begin to say in increasing numbers, “Now that we can see a way in which this and that can be done, as indicated by the computerized World Game, we must obviously adopt the policies indicated by the computer.”

The popular pressures will gradually force world politics to yield to the computer-indicated, mutually-beneficial world programs. There will ensue a series of world “summit conferences” and a series of computerized treaties of the world powers.

The computers will show all men everywhere that automated machinery can produce much more wealth than man s muscles and conditioned reflexes. The computers will indicate that everyone in the world must go back to school and learn about all of humanity aboard Spaceship Earth and of their combined potentials. The computer will stop humanity from competing as a machine against the machine. It will put everyone in research and development. It will allow the machines to generate copious wealth. The computer will show that when everyone has gone back to school or into research and development at a tax free, generously adequate incomepeak loads and bottlenecks will subside—service capacity will swiftly increase, birth rates will decelerate further.

The World Game playing computer will disclose the vast overall, long-time economy of paying whatever it costs to eliminate pollution at sources. The computer will show the overall long-run increase profit and economic advantage to society of switching our prime moving away from expenditures of our fossil fuel energy savings account, and to energy income sources.

Southern Illinois University, where I am a Professor, is celebrating its centennial. Though the charter for Southern Illinois University had been granted by the State of Illinois in 1869 the University did not begin operations until five years later in 1874. For those and other reasons Southern Illinois University is planning to have its centennial run for five years—from 1969 to 1974.

President Delyte Morris and some of his University officers asked me to make suggestions regarding their plans for the five-year centennial. They wished to inaugurate some kind of activity that would bring world scholars and leaders in many fields to Southern Illinois University. To attract them Southern Illinois University foresaw that they would have to initiate some fundamental contribution toward humanity’s realization of its highest potential. I then told them about the World Game. This interested them. Since that meeting they have tentatively undertaken to make the World Game one of the features of their centennial. Obviously, we won’t be able to start full-scale operation in 1969, but we probably can get it going before the five-year centennial celebration is completed.

The whole idea has progressed. A feasibility study has been completed. It indicates a sixteen million dollar budget for buildings, computer equipment, and general maintenance.

The legislature of the State of Illinois has passed a bill appropriating four million dollars as a “matching fund” to be activated only by another twelve million dollars to be appropriated by others, e.g., the Federal Government, foundations or private enterprise; Governor Kerner of Illinois signed the bill into law in September, 1967; the fact that the State of Illinois has already subscribed matching funds should be very attractive to foundations and others who may consider backing the World Game.

Advantages of World Gaming

Since human babies and children demonstrate an intense interest in all things in all directions from the stars to the atoms, from whales to butterflies, and from wintry indoors to summery outdoors it is obvious that they are not designed to be specialists. If nature intended humans to be specialists, she would have delivered them at birth with a vast variety of integral equipment, for instance with one eye and a microscope attached. Nature designs all kinds of specialist birds with integrally attached wings which greatly hamper the birds bobbled walking.

Humans are unique amongst all living creatures in their degree of general adaptability to all the extremes of environmental changes, which include the capability of the human to extract generalized principles from his special case experiences and his teleological capability developed thereby to rearrange the environment, as by the generalized principle of leverage. Man is teleologically equipped to cope with and survive within extreme variations of the environment that would be lethal to any naked human or other living species. Man can put on and take off his wings and telescopic eyes.

We may conclude that human society’s deliberately cultivated specialization is unnatural and debilitating to both its group and individual welfaring and evolutionary development. We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization.

We find that the historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of highly specialized brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically o’erwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest. They also simultaneously DIVIDED and CONQUERED any and all “bright ones” who might otherwise rise within their realms to threaten their supremacy. The war lord vitiated their treat by making them all specialists and reserving to himself exclusively the right to think about and act comprehensively. The war lord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself.

So important were the brain slaves’ developing schools, as assets of the physically mighty, that they had their own sons and their henchmen’s (noble’s) sons attend the brain developing schools as liberal arts bachelors in order to familiarize themselves with the ramifications of this most important resource for effectively detailing the realm’s capabilities, which they, the top men, would secretly integrate into the grand strategy of their realms’ conquests and the guarding and maintaining of this ruling might, over the commonwealth productivity of the realms’ peasantry and the latter’s support of the non-productive soldiers. They then schooled their “noble birth” sons, equally diligently, in the mastery of arms, horses and fighting men. So old and dignified by time have such brain slaves developing schools become, that their origins have been forgotten and remain as yet unrediscovered by an ever more widely literate society whose often illiterate political leaders always have been assured of election through their promises to get the rich man’s schooling facilities for their low-or-no-income constituents.

Now, biological and anthropological scientists have discovered and verified that extinction of past biological species and human tribes always has been the consequence of overspecialization.

The extinctions are consequences of the following set of scientific facts.

“A”. Nature’s high energy devastations are far less frequent than her low energy disturbances of the regenerative biological life patterns. In the physical interchangings and local transformations of universe tire numbers of occasions on which nature will have large amounts of energy concentrated at any one locality to effect great changes is far less frequent than the number of times she will have small amounts of energy at any one locality to effect small changes. Insects and microbes are far more frequent and numerous than are tornadoes and earthquakes.

“B” When inbreeding toward greater biological specialization occurs, the concentration of similar genes tends to dominate at the expense of general adaptability. Specialized, ergo, generally vulnerable species may survive during long periods of low energy environmental confrontations, all the time increasing their special advantage while losing their unused general adaptability. Inevitably however the infrequent high energy change imposing event occurs. Bereft of general adaptability, the specialist is unable to cope with the unfamilar and overwhelming magnitude and velocity of events. Thus devastated they became extinct.

Humanity lost its physical world masters soon after World War One, when they too abandoning their comprehensive command to the world military, became extinct through their over-specialization in exclusively sensorial judgments and their brain slaves scientists wandered off into the vast and utterly non-sensorial ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum’s (invisible) reality.

With the old pirate masters extinct, society accepted unquestioningly the momentum of the utterly specialized educational trending. Specialization was never questioned as being other than logical, inevitable and desirable.

Humans as super-specialists have now developed the atomic energy capability to blow themselves to eternity, with no integrating capability to turn the vast energies to the comprehensive advantaging and regeneration of all humanity, and thus avoid swift, self-imposed extinction.

But evolution, apparently intent to continue man’s existence aboard Spaceship Earth as its most effective metaphysical protagonist, has produced the anti-body to his extinction. The anti-body to his extinction is man’s invention and development (under exclusively cold warring auspices) of the electronic computers. The computers are about to make humans obsolete, as either intellectual specialists or as specialized muscle and conditioned reflex automatons. The computers and automation can completely out-perform man as either specialized intellectual differentiators or as wealth producing tools which will be able to secure humanity’s forward days of metabolic regeneration. The computers can work all night, at super human speeds, selecting the blues from the greens under environmental conditions intolerable to man.

So the computer will, as an enormously expanded and accelerated brain facility, enter into an omni-man-serving function altogether replacing the inadequate public policy formulations of politicians. Men will act as local managers of the computer discovered ways and means of serving the best interests of all men for the longest foreseeable ages.

The programs that the computers will select as being most favorable for all humanity will go far beyond man’s ignorant ways of assessing what he “can afford.” The computer will demonstrate that he can afford nothing short of the best, which is to make all the Spaceship Earth a successful developmental environment for universe exploring man.

***************** * * *

In 1810 the U.S. Treasury Department calculated by a national census that the total wealth present in the U.S.A.’s developed facilities and undeveloped wilderness was worth a total of three billion dollars. The telegraph and railroad were as yet undreamed of, let alone the whole array of modern scientific technology and industrialization. The wisest and most farseeing citizens of 1810 would have said that any such technology as has been since developed was only the concep- tioning of lunatics and that society could only afford to invest its annual income and not its capital to develop man’s further economic advantages.

This would have meant 5% of three billion dollars to be invested annually in research and development; that is, one hundred and fifty million dollars a year. For a 150 year period, 1810-1960, that would have meant that we could only have afforded to make a total 150 year’s cumulative investment of 150 x $150,000 = 22 1/2 billion dollars.

Forced entirely by next war, or present war, emergency conditions in the United States during those ensuing 150 years, we say that we have “spent” 1,000 times that amount in acquiring all the vast tool networks of industrialization which are now, altogether, producing an annual income close to a trillion dollars. This earning figure means, on a conservative basis, that the physical plant of our U.S.A, industrialization, which includes highways, et al, is worth twenty-two trillion dollars. This is to say that while we thought we were “spending” a thousand fold what we could afford, we have established instead an entirely paid for, in fact, wealth producing capability worth at least one thousand times what we thought we had “spent.” $22,000,000,000 $22,000,000,000,000.

What we have now.

Our capital obviously isn’t spent as the organized energy processing national plant to produce more wealth for more people for more of their healthy years is there in full operation.

In 1810 the U.S.A. Treasury found there were one million U.S.A, families and one million human slaves, or an average of one per family, with no steam engines, motors or any other work producing machines than the one slave per family could provide. Now only one hundred and fifty years later we have over 1,000 inanimate energy slaves per each family, and no human slaves, with the inanimate energy slaves being utterly tireless and able to work 24 hours a day, year around, under physical conditions intolerable to humans.

All this is to say that as the computer confronts man with the price tag of the work that has to be done in the next three decades to make all of his planet Earth a success for all humanity, it will be preposterous of organized society to say we cannot afford to do those things. But the probability from the past record is that despite all the political hand wringing world society will buy the chance to be successful, and once again we will find that wealth can only increase and that we will in fact demonstrate that we could and did afford to be logical. Wealth is irreversible, and having attained all we need for all, we will be so obviously wealthy as to be able to afford to make eternally wise everyday decisions.

Who dares to buy the World Game package, no matter what its initial cost will convert the trend of humanity toward extinction into a trend toward universal physical and metaphysical success.

These are the thoughts and insights evoked by the first assimilated playing of the World Game.

MODERN LIVING

FULLER IN FULL CRY Man is a pattern, not seven tons of vegetables.

DESIGN

The Dymaxion American

(See Cover)

He has been called “the first poet of technology,” “the greatest living genius of industrial-technical realization in building,” “an anticipator of the world to come—which is different from being a prophet,” “a seminal thinker,” and “an inspired child.” But all these encomiums are fairly recent. For most of his life, R. Buckminster Fuller was known simply as a crackpot.

He is also something more than the mere sum of his praise and criticism. He is a throwback to the classic American individualist, a mold which produced Thomas Edison and Thoreau—men with the fresh eye that sees and questions everything anew, and the crotchety mind that refuses to believe there is anything that cannot be done. What Fuller sees excites him with the vision of man’s potentialities, and he has made it his mission to help man realize them. Says he: “Man knows so much and does so little.”

Last week this crackpot stepped off a plane in London, spouting words the minute his feet touched ground, and headed for a dinner in his honor at the Royal Institute of British Architects. On Sunday he went to Bristol for two days of touring and talking. His next stop: Ghana’s University of Science and Technology, which has been waiting a year for his arrival this week to conduct a four-week research and development project.

Today Richard Buckminster Fuller, 68, of Carbondale, Ill. —whose college career never got beyond his freshman midyears—is famous for houses that fly and bathrooms without water, for cars and maps and ways of living bearing the mysterious word “Dymaxion,” for things called “octet trusses,” “synergetics” and “tensegrity.” But he is best known of all for his massive mid-century breakthrough known as the “geodesic dome.”

Plastic, Cardboard & Bamboo. In ten years the famed domes of Bucky Fuller have covered more square feet of the earth than any other single kind of shelter. U.S. Marines have lived and worked in them from Antarctica to Okinawa. Beneath them, radar antennas turn tirelessly along the 4,500 miles of the DEW line, which guards the North American continent against surprise attack. For eight years, the U.S. has been using Fuller domes to house its exhibits at global trade fairs; they have represented America in Warsaw, Casablanca, Istanbul, Kabul, Tunis, Lima, New Delhi, Accra, Bangkok, Tokyo, Osaka. The Russians were so impressed by the 200-ft.-diameter dome at the 1959 U.S. exhibit in Moscow that they bought it. “Mr. J. Buckingham Fuller must come to Russia and teach our engineers,” garbled Premier Khrushchev.

They are being made of almost anything and everything—polyester fiber glass, alloy aluminum, weatherproofed cardboard, plastic, bamboo. More than 50 companies have taken out licenses to make them in the U.S. alone. The small domes are light enough to be lifted by helicopter, and they practically build themselves. Non-English-speaking Eskimos can put them together in a matter of hours out of color-coded components. The day his company began erecting a geodesic auditorium in Hawaii, Henry J. Kaiser hopped a plane from San Francisco to see the work in progress, but it was finished by the time he got there, and seated an audience of 1,832 at a concert that same night.

The Weatherproof City. Structurally unlimited as to size, cheap to make, requiring no obstructing columns for support, the geodesic dome uses less structural material to cover more space than any other building ever devised. The diameter of the one built for the Union Tank Car Co. in Baton Rouge is the length of a football field. Next year the Union of South Africa expects to be using geodesic huts for low-cost housing. And within a decade it is quite possible, if Bucky has his way, that cities will roof their centers over with vast translucent domes, beneath which mass air conditioning and weatherproofing will enable houses and stores to be constructed only for privacy and aesthetic delight. Bucky has already proposed one to cover Manhattan from river to river and from 22nd St. to 62nd St. which would soar nearly three- quarters of a mile above the Empire State building, but would contain less steel than the Queen Mary.

Such superdomes are in fact already feasible; several New York designers are • still smoldering at World’s Fair President Robert Moses for vetoing a proposal to cover the 646 acres of the fair with a Fuller dome a mile or so in diameter. “What an opportunity missed!” says Arthur Drexler, director of architecture and design at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. “It would have had the same impact on the world of design as the Crystal Palace at London’s great exhibition in 1851—probably more so, because the Crystal Palace prefab pieces had classical roots, whereas Buckys dome is totally new.”

Romantic Pioneer. Bucky Fuller, as he calls himself and urges everyone else to call him, is a charismatic man who attracted a cultic following even in the days when he seemed to the unclouded eye little more than some kind of a nut. Today, at 68, he is more charismatic than ever and evokes an impressive chorus of enthusiasm from many of those best qualified to judge his work.

Architect Nathaniel Owings of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill pronounces Fuller “the most creative man in our field; he’s the only one that’s dealing with something that’s totally dissimilar to what everybody else is doing. He’s tried to find out how nature really works.” Architect Minoru Yamasaki calls him “an intense, devoted genius, whose mind, which is better than an IBM machine, has influenced all of us.” Italy’s famed Architect Gio Ponti feels that Fuller is “not only a romantic pioneer who sees 50 years ahead, but a genius who has already realized his dreams as to what humanity needs and how the world must look in the future.”

Fuller unquestionably agrees with them all. He sees himself quite simply as a kind of technological avatar, come for the liberation of mankind. Says he: “In 1927 I made a bargain with myself that I’d discover the principles operative in the universe and turn them over to my fellow men.”

That year of 1927 was the low point

of his life, the dark night of the soul in which his real work began, when he stood on the shore of Lake Michigan and tried to decide whether or not to kill himself.

He arrived on that shore with the best New England credentials. His greatgreat-great-great-grandfather came from the Isle of Wight only ten years after the Mayflower s famous landing at Plymouth Rock and fathered a male line of descendants of which every one was a clergyman or a lawyer except Bucky’s father, who became a merchant importer. But his most illustrious ancestor was a woman, Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, the literary friend of Emerson and discoverer of Thoreau, whose strong-minded individualism presaged Bucky’s own.

The major influence upon him as a child, he feels, were his summers spent at the small island his family owned, eleven miles off the mainland in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. Boats were the chief preoccupation on Bear Island, and here young Bucky reveled in the lore and learning, puttering and fixing and improvising of the nautical world. Winters he went to prep school as a day pupil at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, an oddball, lonely child whose hazel eyes swam grotesquely behind the thick-lensed glasses ‘he wore to correct the extreme farsightedness he was born with. Bucky was small but sturdy, and he was aggressive enough to achieve the position of quarterback on the football team, though he could never see the ball until it was on top of him, and was haunted by the fear that his bad eyes would trick him into running the wrong way.

Wrong Turn. When he got to Harvard in 1913, Bucky soon realized that things were going to go badly wrong. His best friend at Milton did not room with him. Other Milton classmates explained that they could not afford to associate with him much because he was obviously not going to make a club. When he tried out for football, he broke his knee. So, as he explains it today, “I deliberately set out to get into trouble.”

He cut his midyear exams and took off for New York, where he went on a spending spree that included wining and dining Dancer Marilyn Miller and her chorus line, whom he had got to know by standing outside the stage door in Boston with his family’s white wolfhound as conversational bait. When considerably more than his year’s allowance had gone up in the heady smoke of this lonely freshman debauch, Bucky cabled a rich cousin and was promptly packed off in disgrace to a cotton mill in Quebec. Harvard gave him a second chance, but Bucky was not having any. “Once again I determined to get fired simply by spending more money than I had. I succeeded.”

Long Drinks. Fuller was married in 1917—he was 22—to dark and beautiful Anne Hewlett, daughter of a prominent New York architect. In World War I, Bucky, despite his bad eyes, enlisted in the Navy as a chief boatswain, showed such promise that he was sent to the Naval Academy and commissioned an ensign. Studying logistics, ballistics, navigation and early naval aviation, he suddenly found himself in a world rapidly moving from “the wire to the wireless, the track to the trackless, the visible to the invisible, where more and more could be done with less and less.”

But the troubles piled up. His daughter Alexandra sickened and died when she was four. For the next five years, Fuller worked out of Chicago for a company set up to market a building material invented by his father-in-law. They actually put up 240 houses, and Bucky learned a lot about building, but he was a hopelessly poor executive and as much of a fool about money as he had been at Harvard—living wildly beyond his means and rapidly laocoonizing himself in debts and superdebts. He was also hitting the bottle. “The minute I was through work for the day,” he has written of that period, “I would go off and drink all night long, and then I d go to work again. I had enough health, somehow. to carry on.”

MODEL OF THE 4D-DYMAXION HOUSE (1927) quart-sized bath, and a nude in the bedroom.

But eventually Bucky’s father-in-law had to sell his stock in the company, and the directors were delighted to tell Bucky that his services would no longer be required. It was a bad time to be fired: his second daughter. Allegra. had just been bom. The year was 1927.

Long Silence. Standing by Lake Michigan "on a jump-or-think basis,” as he has put it, he decided that he had faith in what he calls, in Fullerese, “the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call God.” His next step was to come to the decision that this meant that there was an “a priori wisdom” in the fact of his own being. From there, he decided: “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.”

At this point, the Fuller legend has it, Bucky came to the conclusion that words—the things people had told him —were responsible for the mess he was in, and that he would henceforth not utter a sound until he really knew what he thought.

Fuller admits that this picture of complete Trappist silence may be somewhat exaggerated. He may have communicated with Anne by something more than sign language. But he did move with her and their infant daughter into a one- room apartment in a Chicago slum, withdrew completely from all friends and acquaintances for more than a year. And he thought.

The Great Leap. Bucky asked himself the most basic of questions. He began by examining the nature of the universe, as a manifestation of God himself. He concluded that it was governed by relatively few principles. Its essence was not matter but design. Even the new knowledge of the atom seemed to confirm his thinking; what gave the atom, and therefore all matter, its individual character, was nothing but the patterning of its component electrons and protons. He began to see man himself as "a complex of patterns. Man is not weight. It isn’t the vegetables he eats, because he’ll eat seven tons of vegetables in his life. It is a pattern integrity that goes on.”

Bucky further reflected that with the huge acceleration of technological capability, mankind was on the verge of tremendous achievements that were not even being attempted because men were stuck in traditional molds of thinking. The time for a great leap forward was at hand, a revolution in which the old Newtonian world would be replaced by Einsteins. “Newton said in the first law of motion that a body persists in a state of rest except as it is affected by other bodies. Normal was ‘at rest.’ Einstein turned it the other way: 186.000 miles a second is nor

mal. We are living in a world where change is normal.”

Lighter Means Better. Bucky first turned his new perceptions on the industry he knew best: building. In the era when the aircraft industry in particular was devising a new technology of lightweight engineering and materials, the traditional building methods seemed to him absurd. Traditional buildings depended on compression on their walls to support the roof. But modern technology has developed tensile materials, which are many times stronger in relation to their weight than compression materials. A house designed to use tension as its basic structural principle could be made infinitely lighter, built with fewer materials, and therefore far more cheaply. If mass- produced, such houses could solve the world’s shelter problems.

His first plan was pretty far out: apartment houses built of the aircraft industry’s lightweight alloys, each floor hung from a huge central mast. A dirigible would carry the whole building to the selected site, then drop a bomb, plant the building’s mast into the resulting crater, and buzz off—leaving a ground crew to fill in the hole around the mast with concrete.

Fuller’s next “anticipatory” design was more practical. It was for a singlefamily house that carried Corbusier’s “machine-for-living” concept farther than the Continental avant-garde had dared to think it. The rooms were hung from a central mast. This left free the ground, which could be landscaped to taste. The outer wall was of continuous glass, which enclosed both rooms and garden like a conservatory, with air

conditioning from the central mast. The house was supposed to be independent of its location, and therefore easily movable if the family decided to change cities; the whole thing could be picked up and replanted anywhere.

by means of a Fuller invention a “fog gun,” and provision was for even this water to be re-col- from the air. The toilets emptied waterless device which mechani-

To avoid being tied down by sewage pipes, the bathroom was as nearly waterless as a bathroom can be; a ten-minute “bath” was supplied from a quart of water called made lected into a cally packaged and stored the wastes for eventual pickup by a processing plant. Dusting was automatic, by a combination of compressed air and vacuum. Mass-produced, the house was planned to sell at about $1,500 on a 1928 level —approximately $4,800 today.

This “4D House,” as he called it, was the launching of the new Bucky Fuller. Though it only existed as a scale model (in which he included a tiny nude doll lying on a bed for verisimilitude and headline-catching purposes), and though it called for alloys, plastics, photoelectric cells and the like, which did not then exist, newspapers wrote it up, and the Marshall Field department store contracted for its display, to go with some daringly “modern” furniture just imported from France. Fuller’s 4D (for Fourth Dimension) title for the house seemed drab to the promotion-minded store executives; they assigned a couple of high-powered word-sculptors to work out a new word for it. After two days of hectic brainstorming, the result was “dymaxion”—vaguely compounded of “dynamic. and “ion.” Marshall Field copyrighted it in Fuller’s name, and in the years to come Bucky turned it into what amounted to a personal trademark. Today he explains that it means the “maximum gain of advantage from the minimal energy input.”

Messiah of Ideas. After the Marshall Field show, Fuller moved himself, his model house, and his wife and daughter back East. For about a year they stayed with Anne’s family at Hewlett, L.I., and the Hewlett tribe still talks about the alarums and excursions that centered around Bucky and his one-manband personality. He might insist that the occasion called for an operetta, and no one would be allowed to leave until he had composed the words and music and performed it on the spot. He might fall off the dock, between wind and water, and insist that he never got wet. He might wax furious. “His idea of mass housing seemed so silly in those days,” remembers a family friend. “We were much more interested in having fun. Bucky would become so annoyed with us that he’d put on his hat and coat and walk the 20 miles into New York. It could be two in the morning. But Bucky would say, ‘There are big things to be done in the world,’ and off he would go. He might be gone for two or three days.”

In 1930 Fuller moved to a $30-a- month flat in Greenwich Village. When he was not lecturing around town on

‘maximum’’

SUMMER PAVIL ON

GEODESIC SKY EYE

ATOP MOUNT WASHINGTON

UNION TANK CAR CO. ROUNDHOUSE IN BATON ROUGE

Gods signature was in Patent No. 2,682,235.

FULLERS HOME DOME

it out like an automobile body. Fuller really loved this contraption. He mounted it on the back of a truck and rode it out to Long Island. Remembers an old friend: “He went tearing around town, he had some child sitting on the john, and he was throwing toilet paper all over the place.” All together, about a dozen bathrooms were made and installed (Fuller’s close friend, Author Christopher Morley, bought two), but Phelps Dodge never bore down very hard on getting them into production— perhaps because of nervousness about the plumbers’ union. Bucky’s diagnosis: “It was only the general inertia of the building world.”

None of these enterprises brought much money into the family till. And sometimes even Bucky felt a sense of embarrassment. “My friends would say to me that I was not taking care of my wife. Then I’d go out and get a job, sell flooring tiles—anything. But when I did, things always went badly. So I’d go back to my task.” What made things go even more badly in these times of strain was Bucky’s conviction that money was not a serious problem and would always come from somewhere. His wife Anne views this with indulgence, still treasures a bit of family doggerel contributed by her brother Roger celebrating their 25th anniversary:

Lady Anne, Lady Anne, keep the coffee hot,

Bucky’s found a sixpence, and he’s gone to buy a yacht . . .

With the coming of World War II, Bucky Fuller made a major sacrifice. “I drink very well,” he explains, “but I found that if I was talking about my inventions and drinking, people just wrote them off as so much nonsense. The war was something serious, and I wanted to be properly accredited. So I stopped drinking and smoking.” He has done neither since. He got a regular job—as chief of the Mechanical Engineering Section at the Board of Economic Warfare, later as special assistant to the dep

ARTHUR SICGtL

FULLER AT HOME, DANCING FOR WIFE (WHITE HAIR) & FRIENDS “Sucky s found a sixpence and hes gone to buy a yacht.”

his Dymaxion House, he liked to hang out at a Village joint called Romany Marie’s with artists and writers, talking his and their heads off. Remembers Sculptor Isamu Noguchi: “He used to drink like a fish. He had become a God-possessed man, like a Messiah of ideas. He was a prophet of things to come. Bucky didn’t take care of himself, but he had amazing strength. He often went without sleep for several days, and he didn’t always eat either.”

The Steer in the Rear. In 1938 he was taken on by Fortune, persuaded the editors to celebrate the magazine’s tenth anniversary by making an inventory of world resources. In 1942, Fuller briefly joined the staff of Life, working on a “Dymaxion Globe”—a cut-out-and-fold map that was the first that displayed the round globe in flat facets without the distortion inherent in the Mercator projection, and in Fuller’s words, “revealed the world’s land masses as a one-world island at the bottom of the air-ocean.”

But Bucky’s major energies in this period were devoted to trying to improve the lot of mankind by improving two of man’s proudest creations: the automobile and the bathroom.

The Dymaxion Car was one of the most dramatic leaps forward in automotive design that have ever been made. In a pre-streamlined world, where the old-fashioned buggy’s boxy look prevailed, Fuller’s car was built like an airplane fuselage. It had frontwheel drive with the engine in the rear. The steering wheel w&s connected to its single rear wheel, which enabled the car to run in circles around a man within a radius of a few feet or to drive straight into a parking space and swing in with only inches to spare. The body was aluminum, the chassis of chromemolybdenum aircraft steel. It was air conditioned. And its streamlining was so perfect, even including the underside, that its standard 9O-h.p. Ford engine could move it at 120 m.p.h.

With financial backing from friends, Bucky turned out three prototype Dymaxion Cars between 1933 and 1935. The U.S. automobile industry refused to admit his car to their annual Manhattan show, and Bucky retaliated by driving it around and around the block outside. An English group sent over a representative to test its performance. But Bucky’s hopes of attracting a manufacturer went glimmering when, with the English visitor on board, the car was rammed by another automobile in Chicago and the driver killed. The car that had hit them, which belonged to a city official, was removed from the scene before the reporters arrived, and early newspaper stories carried screaming headlines, such as three-wheeled car KILLS driver. So ended the Dymaxion Car.

The Dymaxion Bathroom, developed in the experimental laboratory of the Phelps Dodge Corp., was designed to slash the cost and increase the ease of installing a bathroom by stamping

uty director of the Foreign Economic Administration. The war also brought Fuller another change; for the first time since he started his life over again in 1927, he was able to originate something that was not “anticipatory” but actually put to use: adapting mass- produced grain storage silos for military living units. Hundreds of these “Dymaxion Deployment Units” saw service in the Pacific and the Persian Gulf before restrictions tightened on steel and the project ground to a halt.

Shape of Nature. “Failure-prone” Fuller had another disappointment in store for him; just as a new version of his Dymaxion House seemed about to go into production in a three-way deal between venture capital, big labor and the aircraft industry, the war’s end and a changed economic picture killed the project. But then suddenly, it seemed, he produced the jackpot invention: shelter that was transportable, versatile and cheap—the dome.

But it was not really sudden, nor was it an invention. It was a slow discovery. And it had begun where Bucky Fuller likes to begin: with a probe into the pattern of the universe. To make that probe. Fuller was struggling to develop a new tool—a geometry of energy. In this search of such a geometry, Fuller was using spheres as idealized models of energy fields. Crowding the spheres as close together as possible around a central sphere, he found that instead of forming a still bigger sphere, they made a 14-faced polyhedron—six of the facets in the form of squares, and eight as triangles. Fuller called this figure a vector equilibrium because the outward thrust of its radial vectors is balanced by the restraining force of its circumferential vectors.

Combining a number of vector equilibriums creates a complex of alternating squares and triangles. Dividing the squares once again, he found he had a symmetrical, twenty-sided globe-shaped skin which could be constructed out of

DOME OVER MANHATTAN

Why not?

tetrahedrons—the triangle-sided pyramid shape that provides the greatest strength for the least volume (or weight). In a sphere made of such interlocked tetrahedrons, the weight load applied to any point was transmitted widely throughout the structure, producing a phenomenal strength-to-weight ratio. Bucky produced his dome by cutting a hollow sphere in half.

Unlike classic domes, Fuller’s depends on no heavy vaults or flying buttresses to support it. It is self-sufficient as a butterflys wing, and as strong as an eggshell. Fuller calls it a geodesic dome because the vertexes of the curved squares and tetrahedrons that form its structure mark the arcs of great circles that are known in geometry as “geodesics.”

Stresses & Strains. The geodesic dome, then, is really a kind of benchmark of the universe, what 17th century Mystic Jakob Bbhme might call “a signature of God.” It crops up all over in nature—in viruses, testicles, the cornea of the eye. And for the time being at least, Bucky Fuller has this signature of God sewed up tight in U.S. patent No. 2,682,235, issued in June 1954. It is almost like having a patent on Archimedes’ principle.

And it is making Bucky rich. In the last ten years he has grossed about SI,000,000, and his income is continually rising; this year it will be about $200,000. But the only way Easy Street seems to have changed him is to have eliminated the need for the defiant extravagances that used to burden his family and amuse his friends in the days when the only things that crackled in his pocket were overdue bills. Unquestionably, Bucky could have made much more by incorporating himself or going into organized production. But Bucky is not interested. Says he: “Whatever I do, once done, I leave it alone. Society comes along in due course and needs what I have done. By then, I’d better be on to something else. It is absolutely fundamental for me to work and design myself out of business.”

In 1959, he accepted a $12,000 appointment as a research professor at Southern Illinois University, at Carbondale. Bucky’s duties are vague and undemanding: he sees students only when he feels like it, and he is in residence no more than a couple of months a year in the medium-sized, blue-and-white plywood dome where he and Anne live in Carbondale. It looks like an overgrown pincushion without pins. But Bucky does not mind, and does not see why anyone else should. As he once wrote in a light moment, to be sung to the tune of Home on the Range:

Let architects sing of esthetics that bring

Rich clients in hordes to their knees;

Just give me a home, in a great circle dome,

Where stresses and strains are at ease.

Bucky is indebted to S.I.U. for providing him with both a home base and a springboard, and Fuller’s fame has helped repay the debt. Sixteen years ago, there were only 3,013 students on the Carbondale campus; today there are no fewer than 18,201 students and a faculty of 1,154. And the university hhs just been awarded a $10 million, three-year space project, which Bucky will head.

Ten months of the year he spends traveling—and talking. Fuller gets $1,000 per lecture these days, but he gives his audiences an exceptional $1,000 worth. Rare is the lecture that does not run four hours, and often he is still going strong after six—his younger listeners entranced and his older ones falling out of their chairs with fatigue.

Cities in the Sea. In these talks, and in long hours with his friends, Bucky spins off a constant stream of ideas. The project nearest and dearest to his heart these days is the worldwide inventory of the globe’s resources. Bucky views this as a matter of war or peace. Says a friend: “Bucky sees the population explosion, man’s myths and antagonisms as foretelling a possible new deluge. If resources are not utilized according to Fuller principles of ‘comprehensive design,’ and therefore become scarce, men will begin to club each other to death.” He has drumbeat such enthusiasm for his project that he has enlisted the help of many of the worlds architectural organizations, including the International Union of Architects, which last year agreed to hold a special convention in Mexico City because Bucky could not go to the regular congress, scheduled years ago for Havana.

Bucky sees no reason why mankind should not utilize “the three-quarters of the world that is water.” He has projected service stations anchored to the sea bottom for submarines to nestle up to. “It is well known that below 40 feet, turbulence is manageable,” he says. He proposes that the automobile may be the next fossil. “We will put little jet wings on our backs and fly out the window on high-frequency beams.” Divining that the compression and tension factors can be separated in any structure, he has designed a “tensegrity mast” that seems to be held up by nothing at all. But Fuller insists that with this mast combined with his frame of tetrahedron-octahedron combinations which he calls the “octet truss,” he could bridge the Grand Canyon itself.

So far, no one has put the tensegrity mast to use, except as decoration. But Fuller is not discouraged. As he wrote recently: “My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they’re accepted. So I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”

When not talking about everything and anything, he is writing about it—in language that can only be described as a sesquipedalian fractured English all his own. A sample sentence, from Page One of a recent autobiographical sketch about his boyhood, begins:

“By ‘teleologic’ I mean: the stibjec- tive-to-objective, intermittent, only- spontaneous, borderline-conscious, and within-self communicating system that distills equatable principles—characterizing relative behavior patterns—from our pluralities of matching experiences; and reintegrates selections from those net generalized principles into unique experimental control patterns . . .”

The Garden of Eden. In conversation, though, he is usually as clear as spring water—and far more stimulating.

“Do you remember as a child what it was like playing house out in the woods? It was exciting. It was wonderful—until it rained. Well, I could build you that house today, where the sunlight would come through just as in the forest. A house with no walls, no doors, no windows—only paths of green ferns and green trees through a rainbow of

flowers. And it would never rain. I call this house ‘the Garden of Eden.’

“I told my friend John Huston, the movie director, I could build him one like it in Mexico. Huston was fascinated and suggested that I tell Liz Taylor—both of them have bought property in Puerto Vallarta. She loved the idea too, but I don’t know if anything will come of it.”

Fuller visualizes his Garden of Eden as a dome within a dome. “I might use a 114-ft.-diameter dome, inside a 128- footer. I’d plant vines around the base of the outside dome. Because the lines of the dome are geodesic, the vines will follow those lines. You now have the outer dome covered with vines. You then go up between the two domes, winding a translucent plastic around the surface of the inner dome. This will keep the rain out, letting the sun come through your forest of vines. The plastic can be wound in such a manner that the grooves of it serve as raincatching troughs. These, in turn, can be run into the swimming pool.”

Big Jump. Bucky’s peculiar distinction is that, while many of his fellow intellectuals are depressed by the “materialistic” 20th century, he is exhilarated. He is excited by “humanity’s epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic 19th century into the dynamic, abstract 20th century.” He feels that there is an “important reorientation of mankind, from the role of an inherent failure, as erroneously reasoned by Malthus, and erroneously accepted by the bootstrap-anchored . custodians of civilization’s processes, to a new role for mankind, that of an inherent success.” He is sure the whole world can be fed, housed and happy, if designers can just put to work all the world’s skills with Fuller-like efficiency. He is endlessly excited by the massive strides mankind has made in just the last 50 years, of which one of the most dramatic has been the increase in range of the average man’s “toing and froing.” For thousands of years primitive man traveled on foot by necessity, never covered more than an estimated 300 miles in his entire lifetime. Even with the coming of the horse and later the railroad, as late as 1900, the average man was still traveling no more than 30,000 miles in his entire lifetime. This is less than 1% of Bucky’s own travels. Jetting around as he does, Bucky has already covered 1,500,000 miles, though he started his serious traveling career only five years ago.

Bucky envisions the day when any man anywhere can jet to work halfway round the world and be home for supper. “Today the world is my backyard. ‘Where do you live?’ and ‘What are you?’ are progressively less sensible questions. I live on earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”

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Index

Accounting.
See Economic accounting

Anticipatory design science, 22

Anti-entropy, 101–102 See also Entropy

Areas. See Topology

Astronauts: all humans as, 56

Atomic energy, 129.
See also Energy Automation: of human biological processes, 54; and loss of jobs, 124

Automobiles: ownership of, 134

Bank wealth, 89

Behavioral sciences: in educational process, 26

Brain: as coordinating switchboard, 25; difference between mind and, 101; imitated by computer, 118

British Empire and the great pirates, 37–38

Categoryitis, 31

Children: as comprehensivists, 25–26 Circle. See Great circle Comprehension: defined, 77 Comprehensivity of Great Pirates, 34–35; Great Pirates abandoning their, 50–51; man forced to reestablish, 53

Computers: provide new impersonal problem solutions, 45; as superspecialist, 53; strategy combined with general systems theory and synergetics, 93–94; as imitation of human brain, 118; beginning of, 122; resolving ideological

dogmas, 138

Craftsmen: early specialized, 29; tools of, 122; in the industrial economy, 123

Cross-breeding: of world man, 131

Cybernetics: defined, 95

Darwin, Charles: theory of animate evolution, 47

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 35–36

Democracy, 92–93

Design: capability of early world men, 28–29; of spaceship Earth’s internal support systems, 59–60; of universal evolution, 111–112; revolution in, 134

Design science: anticipatory, governing yesterday’s naval mastery, 22

Divide and conquer: grand strategy of, 39

E = MC{^2}, 69, 96. See also Energy

Economic accounting: by great pirates, 94–95; synergy in, 103; need for realistic, 112

Educational task: to allow physical and metaphysical success, 130

Einstein, Albert: formula E = MC{^2}, 45, 69, 96; definition of physical universe, 70; reassess universe, 97

Electromagnetic spectrum: great pirates’ first use of, 43–44; effecting human evolution, 110 Energy: impounding of sun’s radiant, 58, 59, 93; generalized law of, 73; savings as fossil fuels, 94, 129; in synergetics, 95; finite, 96; harnessing of, 129; atomic exploitation of, 129

Entropy: energy systems eventually run down, 46; assumed universe subject to, 96; wealth as antientropy, 101

Environment: early society inability to cope with, 26; evolution synergeticaily produced, 103–104; changes in physical, 110

Euler, Leonhard, 81

Evolution: success of human dependent on mastering metaphysical, 46; design and patterns in, 49, 54, 111–112; man’s feeling about, 53–54; inexorable, 55; our present position in, 65–66; effected by electromagnetic spectrum, 110; comprehending phases of, 127

Experiences: to extract generalized principles, 62; is finite, 70

Exploitation: of atomic energy, 129; of fossil fuels, 129. See also Energy

Extinction, 48

Failures: humanity’s, 24–25 Fellowships, 125

Forecasting, 22

Fossil fuel: energy savings account, 94, 128; expending of, 129. See also Energy

Generalized principles: minds discovering, 21; extracted from human experience, 61–62; first was leverage, 63; surviving with, 118; inventively employed only through mind, 127

Genera! systems theory: as tool of high intellectual advantage, 67, 70–71; combined with computer strategy and synergetics, 95

Geodesic lines, 76

GI Bill, 115

Gold: demand system inadequate, 88–98; used by Great Pirates for trading, 90

Grand strategy: divide and conquer, 39; organizing our, 65.

See also Strategy

Great circle: defined, 76

Great Pirates: as sea mastering people, 34; feared bright people, 35; use of logistics by, 37; and British Empire, 37–38; use of local strong man as king by, 39; tutoring of bright specialists by, 40; in world competition, 41, 43; becoming extinct, 44, 50; rules of accounting still used, 45

Gross national product: estimate for 1970, 108–109

Growth: physical and metaphysical, 61

“Have-nots” struggle with “haves” produces war, 87

“Haves”: struggle with “have-nots” produces war, 87

Heisenberg, Werner: principle of indeterminism, 72

Human beings, as astronauts, 56; will be free, 111; employing real wealth, 124; characteristics in Mexico, 132. See also Man

Humanity: exists in poverty, 23–24; on Earth’s surface, 27; extinction of, 49; place in evolution of, 66; function of, in universe, 83–84; and standard of living of, 102–103

Ideologies: political, 48; resolving dangerous dogmas of, 138

Indeterminism: Heisenberg’s principle of, 72

India: population problems in, 113 Industrialization: demonstration of world, 104

Industry: tooling of, 22, 116, 122, 133; production increased by world wars, 116; craftsmen in the economy, 123. See also Tools

Information: multiplies wealth, 104–105 Initiative, 45

Intellect: as humans’ supreme faculty, 60–61; frees man of special case superstition, 63; use of as man’s function in universe, 99

International Monetary Fund: 1967 deliberations of, 88

Invention, 134

Inventory: of variables in problem solving, 67–68

Jobs: loss of in automation, 124

King: as great pirate’s local strong man, 39, 40

Law of conservation of energy: defined, 98. See also Energy

Learning: always increases, 99; man’s past, 131; industrial retooling revolution, 133

Lesser circle: defined, 76

Leverage: first generalized principle, 63. See also Generalized principles

Life: as synergetic, 79–80; hypothetical development of support systems in, 107–108

Lincoln, Abraham, 45–46

Lines, 81. See also Topology

Machine: spaceship Earth as, 59–60 Macrocosm: as universe outside the system, 70

Malthus, Thomas, 47

Man: utterly helpless as newborn, 61;

as adaptable organism, 118–119.

See also Human beings

Mass production: and mass consumption, 123

Mathematics: improved by advent of zero, 36. See also Topology

Metals: not destroyed in war, 117 Metaphysical: initiative confused between religion and politics, 45; masters the physical, 46; experiences not included in physical universe, 68; defies “closed systems” analysis, 69; in synergetics, 95; need for, in educational task, 130

Mexico: human characteristics in, 132 Michelangelo, 35–36

Microcosm: universe inside the system, 70

Mind: comprehends general principles, 24, 127, 128; difference between brain and, 101; fellowships of, 125

Money: as bank wealth, 89.

See also Wealth

Moon gravity: as income wealth, 94 More-with-less: and generalized principles of, 63

Myth: of wealth as money, 114;

of population explosion, 136 Natural laws: and Great Pirates, 34.

See also Generalized principles Navies: and Great Pirates, 38 Negatives: yesterday’s, realized, 24 North America: early crossbreeding men in, 131

Photosynthesis: impounds sun’s energy, 59

Pirates. See Great Pirates

Planck, Max, 97

Planners: more comprehensive than other professions, 67

Points. See Topology

Politicians: local, asked to make world work, 51.

See also Ideologies

Pollution: as survival problem, 85 “Poluto”: as new name for planet, 85 Population: problems in India, 113;

explosion in as myth, 136 Poverty: humanity existing in, 23–24 Principles. See Generalized principles Problem solving: by yesterday’s

contrivings, 21

Resources: of Earth unevenly distributed, 29; no longer integratable, 52; unique materials made “on order,” 106

Revolution: design and invention, 134

Safety factor: in man’s evolution, 111–112

Schools: beginning of, 41.

See also Specialization; Strategy Second law of thermodynamics, 46 Senses: Great Pirates relying on, 43 Ships: logistics for production and maintenance, 37. See also Vessels

Slavery: of specialist expert, 41; human, 107

Sovereignties: claim on humans in, 37–38; categoryitis in, 31

Spaceship Earth: present condition of, 121

Specialist: computer as super, 53 Specialization: society operates on theory of, 25; early leaders who developed, 26, 30, 33; intellectual beginning of schools, 41–42; specialist as slave, 41; over causing extinction, 48, 49; scientific, applied toward weaponry, 52–53

Speed of light: discovery of, 97 Spending: regarding energy is obsolete, 98

Spoken word: as first industrial tool, 122

Strategy: secret and anticipatory, of Great Pirates, 35; comprehensive of naval war colleges, 37

Structures: industrial tool enclosing, 116–117

Students: comprehend elimination of war, 134

Sun: radiation as income wealth, 58, 94. See also Energy

Survival: physical and metaphysical, 61; potentials increased by intellect, 63

Sword: powerful men of, 26.
See also Great Pirates

Synergetics. See Synergy

Synergy: defined, 78, 95; defines universal evolution, 79; combined with computer strategy and general systems theory, 95; wealth develops interest through, 102; in economic accounting, 103; in humanity escaping from local identity, 106

System: universe as biggest, 68; thought is, 72; first subdivision of universe, 71, 83;

variables in evolution, 83

Technologies: as substitute after war, 117

Telford, Thomas: as Great Pirates’ specialist, 37

Thinking: long-distance future of, 22; in terms of whole, 67; as a system, 72; dismissal of irrelevancy in, 76–77; tackling problems with, 83; humans free to, 126.

See also Intellect; Mind

Time: as relative, 135

Tools: industrial, 116; externalizations of integral functions, 117; craft and industrial extinctions, 122; spoken word, 122

Topology: mathematics of comprehension, 77; discovered by Euler, 81; patterns of lines, points and areas, 80–81. See also Geodesic lines; Great circle; Lesser circle

Underlying order in randomness, 74–75 Universe: as biggest system, 68, 96; physical defined by scientists, 68–69, 70, 72, 97; subdivision, 71; generalized law of energy conservation in, 73; defined by synergy, 79; humanity’s function in, 83, 112

Van Allen belts, 58

Variables: inventorying of and
problem solving in, 67

Vectorial geometry: mathematics
of comprehension, 75–80

Vessels: use of, in venturing, 28

War: beginning of the great class, 47–48, 87; as age-old lethal formula of ignorant men, 52; as taking priority over real problems, 87; students comprehend elimination of, 134

Water: desalinization of, as problem solution, 85–86. Pollution

Wealth: generated by integrating resources, 29; as a safety factor, 61; defined, 88, 93; irreversible in evolutionary processes, 91; society’s real, 91, 94,124; income is sun radiation and moon gravity, 94; as anti-entropy, 101; can only increase, 101,105; common, of humanity, 105; of the U.S., 108; of know-how produced by GI Bill. 115

Weaponry: scientific specialization applied toward, 52

Wholes: thinking in terms of, 67; systems in synergy, 78. See also Systems

World: and first seafarers, 28; sea ventures thought in terms of, 30; asking local politicians to make it work, 51; defined, 104, 119; veterans returning from World War II, 115; increase industrial production in, 115–116; cross-breeding in, 131-132

In 1977 these files are in Fullers office in Philadelphia where he serves as World Fellow of the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Swarthmore College, and the University City Science Center. ↩︎