1 Man With a Chronofile

By Buckminster Fuller

I was born cross-eyed. Not until I was four years old was it discovered that this was caused by my being abnormally farsighted. My vision was thereafter fully corrected with lenses. Until four I could see only large patterns, houses, trees, outlines of people with blurred coloring. While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair until I was four. Despite my new ability to apprehend details, my childhood’s spontaneous dependence only upon big pattern clues has persisted.

Most children like to collect things. At four I started to collect documents of my own development as correlated with world patterns of developing technology. Beginning in 1917, I determined to employ my already rich case history, as objectively as possible, in documenting the life of a suburban New Englander, born in the Gay Nineties (1895)the year automobiles were introduced, the wireless telegraph and the automatic screw machine were invented and X-rays were discovered; having his boyhood in the Turn of the Century; and maturing during humanity’s epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic nineteenth into the dynamic, abstract twentieth century. I named my documentation the Chronofile.

As the era of this case history loomed into greater perspective for me, as readable in the Chronofile, it became more accurately identifiable as that which, on the one hand, terminated Sir Isaac Newton’s normally “at rest” world of myriadly and remotely isolated, hybrid cultures, to which change was anathema; and, on the other, opened Einstein’s normally “dynamic”, omni-integrating world culture to which change has come to seem evolutionarily inevitable. By 1917 I was convinced that, unannounced by any authority, a much greater environmental transformation was beginning to take place in our generation’s unfolding experience than had occurred, for instance, between my father’s, grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, and great-great-grandfather’s successive generations. Their writings contain glimpses of their lives in their successive undergraduate days in the classes of 1760, 1801, 1840, and 1883 at Harvard. They tell of day-long trips walking or driving from Cambridge to Boston via Watertown Bridge.

As in 1913, in Fair Harvard’s “Age that is past/surrendered her o’er (once more)/ to the age that” was “waiting before,” I felt intuitively in our freshman year that the subway, which then opened to connect Cambridge and Boston by a seven-minute ride, was harbinger of an entirely new distance-time relationship of humanity and its transforming environment. It seemed to me that the science-quaking fact of our boyhood was that light has a speed. Though fantastically fast, its 700 million miles per hour is not as absolutely fast as Newton’s “instant universe.” Newton’s foundation was experimentally unrealistic. Light was realbut 99 per cent of reality’s electro-magnetic spectrum was invisible. We could no longer pilot with our physical senses. We had henceforth to rely upon intellect and its power to invent and navigate with the instruments which could tune and scan the vast ranges of nonsensorially tunable reality. This called for intellectual confidence in the fundamental but non-obvious trends, and disregard for the only momentarily spectacular news.

Average life-span expectancy for our classmates born circa 1895, as then calculated by the life insurance actuaries, was forty-two years. During our lifetime, the average life expectancy in the United States has increased to seventy years. Up to the time we were born, the average total distance covered by a member of humanity in his all-time, average life span of twenty-seven years, was 30,000 miles. My total travel to date, by land, sea, and air, is a hundred-fold that distance. It aggregates more than 3,000,000 miles and now, at

First published in “Saturday Review”, April 1, 1967.

seventy-two years, I find my work often taking me annually several times around the world with many lesser to-and-froings. This is in no wise a unique record. It is average for ever increasing millions of humans who have responsibilities in the vast frontiers of technology, business, and statecraft of a swiftly emerging spherical world city. Today’s air hostesses far outravel me, and Gemini astronauts outdistanced my 3,000,000 miles in one week’s orbiting. Quite clearly, a complete transformation of human ecology in universe is occurring. It is not surprising that man, burdened with obsolete “knowledge”-his spon- taneous reflexing conditioned only by past experience, and as yet unable to realize himself as being already a world man-fails to comprehend and cope logically with the birth of Uni- verse Man.

By 1927 I felt that three big questions were posed by what the Chronofile as then made visible by the foregoing type of information.

First, what could society, backing up into its future, with eyes fixed only on the ever receding and less adequate securities of yesterday, do to make this evolutionary pro- cess a gratifying rather than a painful experience?

Second, what could the average intelligent and healthy, moneyless individual best contribute, singlehandedly, toward bringing the earliest and happiest realization of advan- tage for society in general through taking and maintaining the comprehensive, anticipatory design-science initiative-in the face of the formidable axiomatic errors and inertias of aca- demic authority as well as the formidable economic advantage of the massive corporations and their governments and mutually shortsighted foci of resource and capabilities exploit- ation?

Third, assuming that by competently reforming only the environment instead of trying to reform man, a favorably designed environment can be realized which will both per- mit and induce man to accomplish the same logical degree of physical success in universe as is manifest, for instance, by the hydrogen atom, how then can the economic and tech- nological capability of all humanity to enjoy freely all of its world be accomplished exclu- sively by design science, without any individual interfering with another and without any individual being advantaged at the expense of another, with a design that will also induce its spontaneous adoption by world industrialization’s managers?

In 1917, in the U.S. Navy, as I studied these questions the Chronofile-disclosed a technological-environment-regenerated acceleration of technical evolution. This concept of accelerating acceleration, which had been-discovered by Galileo and was later identified with gravity by Newton, had not been conceived of as accelerating social evolution. During 1922-1927 the Chronofile also disclosed a trend of comprehensive ephemeralization-i.e., the doing of ever more with ever less, per given resource units of pounds, time, and energy. Ephemeralization was vastly augmenting the standards of living of ever increasing numbers, but only inadvertently, as fallout from the defense-subsidized preoccupation of science with a weaponry supporting industrialization.

Ephemeralization was also accelerated by ever increasing quantities of invisible energy events of universe, detoured by human intellect from their previously only cosmi- cally flowing patterns to flow through engineered channels and impinge upon intellect-invented levers and thereby to vastly augment the work accomplishable by mankind’s muscles in re- arranging the energetic environment events to more effectively sustain the metabolic regen- eration of human life.

Ephemeralization, which constantly does more with visibly less-as does, for instance, the one-quarter-ton communications satellite outperform 150,000 tons of transoceanic cables-

Man With A Chronofile 3

has not as yet been formally isolated, recognized, and discussed in print as such by any economists. Until economists recognize it, ephemeralization cannot be popularly compre- hended and be adopted in public policy formulations.

However, as the years have gone by the combined effects of accelerating-acceler- ation and ephemeralization account primarily for the technical and economic augmentations which are now overwhelming man-trying to make him a success in universe despite his age- old Malthus-supported conviction that humanity, regardless of its composite significance and fate, is, with but a few exceptions, destined to demonstrate personal economic failure and premature death. Public policy the world around as yet assumes that Malthus was right-ergo, the vital necessity of Defense in view of the inexorability of the next Great War.

My Chronofile gradually disclosed the invalidity of that great superstition. It showed, for instance, that the metals in 80 per cent of all of yesterday’s obsolete mechanics and structures, contrary to popular conception of their “exhaustion,” have been recovered, re- fined as “pure metals,” and put to work again. Eventually, 99 per cent of the all-time mined metals will be recovered and put into the recirculating-metals bloodstream of world indus- trialization as we go competently into the sea to recover all of yesterday’s lost ships and cargoes-in particular, the war-sunken munitions vessels. But the rate of discovery of ad- ditional metal ores is slower than human population increase.

Throughout the twentieth century, therefore, the metals mined or unmined and ma- terials in general have continually decreased in ratio to each individual. At this moment the cumulative total of metals-mined and refined by man throughout history-is wholly em- ployed in machines or structures which, operating at full design-limit capacity, can suc- cessfully support only 44 per cent of living humanity. Therefore, no exclusively political act of any political system can make the world’s resources take care of more than 44 per cent of humanity. But the over-all mechanical efficiency of the extant machinery and struc- tures is only 4 per cent. An over-all efficiency of 20 per cent is engineeringly feasible at present. It could go to 80 per cent someday. A design-science revolution could solve the problem.

Despite the constant increase in human population and constant decrease of mater- ials per person, between 1900 and 1965 the number of people attaining economic and phys- ical success-by full participation in the highest standard of living progressively developed by world industrialization-rose steadily from less than 1 per cent to 40 per cent of all liv- ing humanity. This is a personal standard of living and health superior to that ever enjoyed by a pre-twentieth-century monarch. The 40 per cent of humanity thus surprisingly grown successful, despite constantly diminishing material resources per capita, can be explained only by accelerating ephemeralization.

Paradoxically, the self-accelerating doing-more-with-less invention revolution has been generated thus far almost exclusively by the technology of the world’s weaponry race, whose ultimate objective has always been to deliver the greatest blows the farthest, most accurately, and most swiftly with the least effort. Evolution seems intent upon making man a success despite his negative fixations. The doing-more-with-less economic success of 40 per cent of humanity, accomplished in only half a century, cannot be attributed to any political doctrine. Technology has flourished equally under exactly opposed ideologies.

Take away the energy distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same

countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.

Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world-transforming and world-shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the invisibly generated and inexorable design-science revolution. Politics is, inherently, only an accessory after the fact of the design-science revolution. Despite this historically demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologies for world problem-solving.

Within all the foregoing concepts and in view of the low technical advance in everyday dwelling facilities as compared to transport and communication developments, my 1927 Dymaxion House was invented to function in due course as a prime instrument in an air-deliverable, mass producible, world around, new human life-protecting and nurturing, scientific dwelling service industry as the preferred means of transferring the scientific do-more-with-less capability from a weaponry to a livingry focus. I saw that a technology which produced total economic success for humanity 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 us both”: the seemingly scientific fact established by Thomas Malthus and later fortified by Darwin’s survival-only-of-the-fittest. All else that I have done since then has related to these design-science considerations.

Thus in 1927 I embarked on a lifelong undertaking whose earliest possible realization lay a quarter of a century ahead, i.e., in 1952 (the year the Ford Motor Company acquired my first large Geodesic Dome) with full-scale, world-around industrialization of the livingry service industry to be realized only half a century ahead in 1977. I predicated the economics of my grand strategy upon my own superstition-free concept of wealth as consisting exclusively of integrated intellect and energy. Since science’s Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy may neither be created nor lost and experience shows that every time intellect experiments with energy it learns more, wealth can only increase.

Despite their negatively accounted cost and theoretically incurred debt and wastage of more than a trillion dollars, World Wars I and II and subsequent cold warring have rendered the United States ever more vastly wealthy, despite the additional hundreds of billions of dollars lend-leased or given away. Why? Because those wars required ever more automated tool-up to harness more universe energy to do ever more continuous work on an earth whose total industrialization’s percentage of strictly killing tools has become a progressively negligible minor fraction. The harnessed energy, production, distribution, communication tools, and techno-scientific literacy thus inadvertently established-all of which can produce peace-supporting prosperity-is the wealth.

There are two prime sources of energy to be harnessed and expended to do work. One is the capital energy-saving and storage account; the other is the energy-income account. The fossil fuels took multimillions of years of complex reduction and conservation, progressing from vegetational impoundment of sun radiation by photosynthesis to deep-well storage of the energy concentrated below the earth’s surface. There is vast overabundance of income energy at more places around the world, at more times to produce billions-fold the energy now employed by man, if he only knew how to store it when it is available, for use when it

Man With A Chronofile 5

was not available. There are gargantuan energy-income sources available which do not stay the processes of nature’s own conservation of energy within the earth crust “against a rainy day.” These are in water, tidal, wind, and desert-impinging sun radiation power. The exploiters of the fossil fuels, coal and oil, say it costs less to produce and burn the savings account. This is analogous to saying it takes less effort to rob a bank than to do the work which the money deposited in the bank represents. The question is cost to whom? To our great-great-grandchildren, who will have no fossil fuels to turn the machines? I find that the ignorant acceptance by world society’s presently deputized leaders of the momentarily expedient and the lack of constructive, long-distance thinking–let alone comprehensive thinking–would render dubious the case for humanity’s earthian future could we not recognize plausible overriding trends.

The only visible means of converting the momentum of negative employment of the physical principles operative in universe into making man a lasting success is in the design-science invention revolution, which fortunately may be joined by individual initiative founded on comprehensive intellectual integrity.

Whether all of my assessment of our historical position is correct and whether my grand strategy may be winning or not may possibly be readable in statistics that reflect the sudden surge of attention to and application of my ideas in the past five years. Though for more than half a century I have been purposefully disregarding the “earning of a living” or “money-making” in my occupational deliberations, my efforts sustaining but only incidentally accruing income, the income–low and slow at first–has steadily increased to ever more effective magnitude.

What, if any, is the significance of this upsurge? It seems to say that the generalized principles governing world industrialization which I seemed to discern, and the evolutionary events which they seemed to make predictable, are now tending to be confirmed by unfolding events. My activities’ upsurge also probably reflects the fact that my world-around buildings are enclosing thirty-fold the clear-span interior space per pounds of material of any known alternative clear-span engineering systems designed to withstand the same hurricanes, snow loads, and earthquakes. It also reflects the recent years’ experimental confirmation in various regions of science of nature’s use of the mathematical coordinate system which I long ago discovered and developed.

The upsurge probably further reflects the growing realization by world youth that its desire for success for all humanity can never be accomplished by politics, which is inherently divisive and biased and, to be effective, must eventually have recourse to its ultimate tools of war-making; and that fundamental world peace probably can be accomplished only by a design-science revolution which can and may realize the feasible potential by upgrading the performance per units of resources to provide 100 per cent of humanity with an ever higher standard of living.

The upsurge probably reflects as well the realization of increasing numbers of the world’s youth that world peace probably can be accomplished twenty years faster by a deliberate design-science revolution than by waiting for the inadvertent twenty-years-later-fallout into the standard-of-living-advancing-commerce of the accelerating ephemeralization, as originally promulgated by only a wide variety of basic fear motivations, all of which result in the self-protective world-munitions racing. The world youth intuit that the twenty-year difference could be the difference between humanity’s success or extinction.

The upsurge also probably reflects the support I am receiving from industry and

the National Aeronautical and Space Administration in my answer to those who say, “Why don’t we stop spending billions for going to the moon and spend the money solving the world’s housing problems!” My answer is that we will not have developed the high level of technology with which to successfully sustain all of the games-preoccupied human passengers on the promenade deck of the Good Ship Earth until we give total chemical, physical, and medical science and technology the task of understanding and successfully supporting humans as regenerative metabolic processes anywhere in universe for protracted periods, remote from the complex, regenerative, life-sustaining conditions unique to the biosphere surrounding earth, with the total scientific information translated into the mechanisms and content of a little black box weighing about 500 pounds and requiring replenishment only yearly. Only by the stark, resourceless conditions thus imposed upon experimental science will humanity be forced to transcend its erroneously conditioned earthian reflexes which would otherwise continue to frustrate it with worthless opinions, politics, and war after war.

The upsurge in the accrediting of my functioning is also probably related to my forty years’ earlier forecast of the last decades’ admission by world-around science that Malthus is wrong and, granted removal of all political boundary restrictions, that the physical resources of earth can support all of a multiplying humanity at higher standards of living than anyone has ever experienced or dreamed.

The upsurge further reflects the recent enthusiasm of scholars and natural scientists for my definition of universe as the cumulative aggregate of all humanity’s nonsimultaneous experiences, all of which are finite and include both the ponderable physical and the imponderable metaphysical; with the entropic, increasingly orderly contraction of anti-entropic, metaphysical universe.

The scholars have also commented favorably on my philosophic observations that the omni-interacting, weightless, generalized principles apparently governing universe–discovered only experimentally and progressively by human-intellect-directed science–disclose an a priori, anticipatory, amorphous, and only intellectually conceivable, omni-integrity of universe. By virtue of this integrity the generalized intellectual principles governing physical universe interactions and transformations never fail to provide an orderly set of consequences for any of its interacting events or for our own arbitrary or accidental experiments. We are thus confronted by a universe in which an intellect such as Einstein’s could hypothetically take the measure of the physical energy universe, a measure which atomic fission later verified experimentally, thus demonstrating intellect’s embracing and equating the integrated and differentiated energy of physical universe as E=mcš. There has not been, however, either experimental evidence or intuitive suggestion of the reversibility of those conditions and results whereby physical energy might take the measure of intellect, equate and inscribe the integral and differential equation of intellect and the metaphysical universe.

No scholars have published refutations of my widely publicized conclusion that all of the foregoing brain-recorded, mind-sorted, and comprehended experiences clearly disclose an infinitely greater a priori, omni-anticipatory, intellectual integrity embracing and permeating universe than that demonstrable or suggested by any known capability of any individual human intellect–nor of the integrated, cumulative capabilities of all of history’s human intellects–to control total universe in such a manner as to account for all the foregoing experimentally evidenced, omni-integrated, complex behaviors of universe. Wherefore the comprehensive, superhuman, nonanthropomorphic, Universal Intellectual Integrity thus altogether manifest to man by the integrated discoveries of experimental science may be spoken of as God, for that is the most economical term

thus far intuitively formulated by humanity to identify such a macromicro, human-capability-transcending, anticipatory, embracing, and inspiring relationship.

What intellect invented the integral of all the only intellectually conceivable, weightless, generalized principles discovered by science to be omni-operative as governing every physical experiment? Until man can answer that question he will have to accept an a priori intellect greater than his own.

I am convinced that neither I nor any other human, past or present, was or is a genius. I am convinced that what I have every physically normal child also has at birth. We could, of course, hypothesize that all babies are born geniuses and get swiftly degeniused. Unfavorable circumstances, shortsightedness, frayed nervous systems, and ignorantly articulated love and fear of elders tend to shut off many of the child’s brain capability valves. I was lucky in avoiding too many disconnects.

There is luck in everything. My luck is that I was born cross-eyed, was ejected so frequently from the establishment that I was finally forced either to perish or to employ some of those faculties with which we are all endowed–the use of which circumstances had previously so frustrated as to have put them in the deep freezer, whence only hellishly hot situations could provide enough heat to melt them back into usability.

2 Introduction to Design Strategy

CHANGES IN CURRICULUM INTENDED TO PREPARE THE INDIVIDUAL TO TAKE THE DESIGN INITIATIVE IN ECONOMIC, SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY MATTERS

by Buckminster Fuller

Taking the initiative means that the design scientist–like the medical scientist–will no longer operate on a basis of having to be retained by a client to carry out the client’s prime design concepts.

The curriculum will prepare the design science graduate to undertake fundamental invention, self-underwriting, development and experimental proof of invention as demonstrated for instance by the Wright Brothers wherein the design science pro- fessional will be equipped with all of the economic, legal and technological knowledge necessary for reducing such inventions to going industrial practice.

To realize such “breakthrough magnitude” inventions–commercially, militarily, or even socially–involves the individuals preparing himself for the competent taking of the initiative in a whole new industry and its progressive development, testing, proto- typing, tooling marketing, servicing, maintaining, operating and phasing-in of pro- gressive evolutionary components within the totally new industrial system together with designed phasing-out of the obsolete equipment and functions made obsolete by the new industry. This, in turn, releases metals, and other materials, time and energy re- sources for reinvestment in the newest phase of the evolutionarily emerging system. (See “Letter to Dean X”) (See “Universal Requirements”) Ref.- Buckminster Fuller booklist, See Appendix “B”.

For instance, the design scientist would not be concerned exclusively with the seat of a tractor but with the whole concept of production and distribution of food, which might possibly lead to developing a whole new industry of hydroponic factories for automated growing, canning, and packing the food within large 3/4 sphere, geodesic greenhouses, within which are circularly operating, planting, cultivating, pruning and harvesting mechanisms, in a tree-like arrangement. He would initiate a total industry.

In short, it is assumed by the curriculum and professional initiative which I propose that the design scientist will not wait to be retained before tackling problems and will not be concerned exclusively with carrying out the local detailing of a part of a component product within a general industrial venture system which has already been primarily designed by the industrial client.

2. Encourage the design science school students to organize themselves to study whole industries and the relationship of total industry to general society needs, e.g. what component disciplines such as chemistry, economics, etc., they must master will become self-evident and will be made available to them within the universities on the students’ own scheduling. (See my “Designing a New Industry”, 1946).

For instance, one of the design science schools might undertake to have all of its students spend all of their college years studying every aspect of the air-transport industry.

This study could start with the new ecology of world and space man. (See Vision 65 Summary Address page 73). The students might under- take to redesign the whole industry of transportation service 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–whereby a traveler could go to a vending machine in the nearest downtown office, or possibly to any hotel lobby or corner store. Possibly over his two-way TV facsimile, cable or radio-beam 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 showing the time that he would like to leave from one point and arrive at such and such another geographical point–anywhere around the Earth, in the shortest possible time, and in the most economical way including terminal helicopter flights, automobile rentals, stop-over hotel accommodation, et al–and out would come from the vending machine, a ticket printed with his routing and booked passage with the amount automatically charged to his credit card for officially automated accounting within his whole continually–processed annual income and outgo along with the economic accounting of his whole social security, medicare, education, travel, and new wealth generating credit accounts.

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 has been imprinted on the vending ticket when he received the machine’s commit- ment to carry him.

Such booking-billing, clear-route seeking, alternate-travel-plan-ascertaining computer systems would interlink the total information storage of all the airlines and their feeder systems anywhere around the world. The travel- vending machine, thus, would be able to print out commitments in split seconds, or effect their cancellation in another split second. The printed out ticket would be all that is necessary for the individual 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 travel- ing quarters and be transported therein to the point of major flight embarkation. His private traveling quarters would be within an angular segment of what I call a “fuselage cartridge”. Each fuselage cartridge would be a circular section like a banana slice or like a Lifesaver mint candy, as one of many such circular units packed in parallel as a circular section of a cylinder cut perpendicularly to the cylinder’s axis. The long, tubular assembly of these cartridge sections would fit together to form a complete cylindrical cartridge fitting neatly into the tubular-shaped fuse- lage of the air transport. There could be hundreds or more of these circu- lar cartridge sections. Within any angular segment of one of these cart- ridge sections, the traveling quarters would provide the maximum sitting space without one human physically touching another human being. The integrity of each individual’s privacy would be physically insured by ade- quate space and omni-directional design science considerations. The planning would be omni-directional and not just a planar expansion of the

Curriculum Changes For Design Initiative

seat row count. The sitting devices would convert to a full length, horizontally reclining bed. The bed could move in space within the cartridge section by mechanical means.

The passenger’s luggage will be stored within the same circular cartridge section in which he travels. The same circular cartridge section will hold several people and their luggage, can take a whole family, and can be cur- tained off for chamber privacy. All the people in any one cartridge section will be going to the same destination. A number of these circular cartridges with their passengers, and their luggage, will be joined together making an increasingly long cylinder through which runs a continuous walking passage- way, or corridor, made up of the cartridge sections locked continuously together.

All of these separate destination routed, circular, sectioned compartments, within each of which the individual may change his position of sitting to stretch out and in which whole families can be given private enclosures, each section having its separate toilet compartment, will be routed by helicopter lift from “downtown” to the dispatching airports. At the airports, the cartridge cross-sections will 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 destin- ations. The combined cartridge sections, recombined at each airport, will be loaded through the open tail of the tubular fuselage as are cargo loadings made through the open tail of cargo planes.

Each of the cartridge sections will have circumferential trackage gears for smooth ball-bearing shunting into and out of the tubular fuselage or local marshalling racks on its own three annular roller bracings. Guided by the fuselage or marshalling racks circularly arrayed three trails. The cartridges will slide into longitudinal aisle alignments and lock together, or be detached for local routing to downtown disembarkations. The cart- ridges, with corridors running through them, can be sandwiched together with freight and mail cartridge sections so that both passenger, cargo and freight will be automatically dealt in or out of the various destination fuselages to be replaced by each airport’s outbound cartridge group. This marshalling or separating-out and re-combining of cartridge sections can be accomplished at each airport with computerized switching equipment.

The cargo sections can be swiftly let out or in at each marshalling point by gatewayed cartridge-holding tracks, which will at each point sort the cartridges anew for most economical flight aggregation, as continually processed evolvingly by the world traffic computers to most effectively integrate the unexpected new peaks and valleys of frequency and magnitude variations. Based on ever accumulating past performance the computers will calculate probability at all time correcting as they go to the newest patterns of evolutionary changes. At destination airport, the passenger cartridge sections will be helicopter lifted or vacuum tube sucked to the nearest downtown disembarkation points. The same world travel and freight traffic commuterization will not only take care of all hotelling and dwelling accommodation at “way” or destination ports but will clearly provide the guide lines for the future living facilities industry’s production and distribution requirements. Such an overall living and travel accommoda-

tion service industry may most probably be evolved through design science by a merging together of such present service industry management corp- orations as the International Bell Telephone System, hotel system, etc.

Such general concepts can be worked on by a given design science school over a period of time as a continuing research in a given art. The students involved, and their faculty, will be continually confronted with an awareness of all the disciplines essential to the individual in order to enable his most effective attack upon such comprehensive designing.

What will the student have to know to make it possible for him and his colleagues to reduce design science research to effective practice, superior–in order to provoke use by humanity–to that already in operation?

What will those taking the design initiative need to do to eliminate frustrat- ing contiguous industrial factors and social indifferences?

What will the students have to know, not only to make the most effective solution, but to be able to make effectively known the results of their work to all industrial and governmental agencies as well as to the segments of the public concerned with use of their unique and comprehensive design science innovations?

3. To undertake comprehensive, generalized system theory research in a systematic manner by which the individual design science schools will each tackle an individual industry while correlating all their efforts one with the other on a world basis.

It will then be appropriate for the professional Design Science Society of the world and its various continental sub-societies, as spokesman for the profession, to coordinate the world-around design science school curricula and to notify each and all the industries concerned of their undertakings and to make recommendations to the various industries regarding the progressive availability of the individual professional graduates most competent to carry out the finalizing phases of the new serivces to be provided.

This taking of the initiative and assumption of prime responsibility–vacated a third of a century ago by the “great world pirates” and left ignorantly by society to their politi- cal representatives to discharge–all seems very new to the professional world of architecture, engineering, and all of the sciences other than the medical sciences. However, this is exactly the initiative and responsibility the medical sciences are already now shouldering in respect to man’s internal organisms.

I propose that, in due course, design science–as the objective–applied–discipline accomplished by combined industrial design, engineering, architecture, and all the sciences–shall be so organized as to provide effective anticipatory strategies for formulating and managing the evolution of mankind’s external, metabolic regeneration of the industrial self-organisms in the same anticipatory service manner that the medical profession has anticipatorily dealt with individual man’s interior, organic processes of metabolic regeneration.

Curriculum Changes For Design Initiative

I propose that the comprehensive design initiative be officially seized by the professions. If it isn’t done on the North American scene, it will be done elsewhere–possibly in Japan, China, or Russia–possibly in newly developing countries such as Africa, or Australia. It will be done! And, I am confident, in the very near future.

The professions now have the opportunity to “roll on” and “recover”, and make a touchdown with the football fumbled a third of a century ago by the great pirates and ever since ineptly booted around by the world politicians in general–albeit each has “booted” the ball with his own degree of practical benevolence, according to the behavioral conditioning automatically manifest by the biases of the booters respective environmental circumstances. Nobody has done anything wrong. We had to have almost overwhelming experience with failures to learn that we could be successful.

But from now on I think we must all assume that Malthus was wrong and this it is normal for man to be a physical and economic success–that it is abnormal for any to be a failure–that man’s preoccupation must be with his exquisite anti-entropic function- ing in universe at-large and at-small–that by producing machines and tools that will produce more with less than was ever produced before, man must continually demon- strate the mastery of the physical by the metaphysical faults with which he is endowed.

3 Design Strategy

Statement to a Leading Figure in the World Building Industry - 1966

Programmed to seek a weather protected building site a worker wasp will sometimes fly in through open windows of human habitats. Failing to find the programmed requirements for a site, the wasp flies as programmed, back toward the light. Very frequently it runs into invisible window glass whose atoms are far enough apart to permit light and radio waves to pass through, but not wasps. The wasp crashes against the glass but its soft landing-gear readjusts its mechanisms whose arrested wing foils, having lost their “lift”, stall and allow the wasp to be pulled by gravity to a second crash on the window sill. From here it takes off on a spiral climb back into the room for a second and many successive flights outward toward the light. Only the “probability” statistics governing the chances of success with a half open window and x numbers of flights, initiated from below the glazed portion of the window opening, can hold any hope for the wasp’s avoiding ultimately lethal re-encounters with the unprogrammed contingency – an invisible barrier.

Eddington said, “Science is the earnest and sustained intellectual attempt to set in order the facts of experience”. Humans’ intellects subjectively comprehend the wasp’s problem but the wasp’s sting is also a fact of human experience and despite a compassionate urge few humans are objective, energetic and scientifically ingenious enough to invent safe ways of helping the wasp to escape. They think of the wasp instead of the window whose open half could be shifted from the top to the bottom – or whose glass portion could be covered opaquely with a newspaper, so that the wasp’s light seeking mechanism would steer safely only for the brightly illuminated, free, outward passage into the open air.

In short the humans spontaneously try to “shoo” the wasp, i.e. to reform the wasp’s behavioral pattern instead of spontaneously thinking of how to reform the environment so that the wasp would be spontaneously stimulated by the reformed environment to escape and thus terminate the interference episode between man and wasp.

The unprogrammed lethal frustration of wasps lends insights into many of humanity’s present day frustrated behaviors. The human’s same fear frozen, subconscious reflexes – usually mistakenly identified as apathy – plus their ineptitude in not “seeing” what to do about the wasps – is often redisplayed in their apathy and ineptitude in dealing with humanity’s own sensorially inexplicable dilemmas.

Better than 99% of humanity’s frustrations are occasioned by surprise encounters with the almost completely invisible evolutionary transformation trendings of human ecology and the latter’s environmental transformings. Also invisible and inaudible are the universal evolution’s information generating and distribution systems which if adequately tuned in and integrated could warn mankind of such trendings as may be negative or even lethal to future human existence on Earth.

We may bring thousands of wide-band radio sets into any room in any building anywhere around Earth and tune each one in on different radio programs all of which thousands of simultaneous programs are always invisibly permeating and present everywhere within vast distances of space outward around Earth. However, humanity’s technical discovery and use of some of nature’s invisible communication systems does not mean that he comprehends the universal evolution. Half the messages sent by humanity contradict the other half in respect to transpiring history.

During World War 1 – for the first time in history – industrial man’s ecological transformation processes entered into a comprehensively operating program which went predominantly beyond the sensorially apprehended ranges of human experience, experiments, communications and realizations. In 1914 - 1918, humanity went from wire to wireless communications, from tracked to trackless transportation, from two-dimensional transport to four-dimensional, from visible structuring and mechanical techniques to invisible – atomic and molecular – structuring and mechanics.

As with airplane pilots operating instrumentally in night and fog, so today (1966) do humanity’s myriad of specialized experts subjectively read, or objectively program exquisitely differentiated, sub- or supra-visible electromagnetic functions within the complex of routine or exploratory events of world embracing industrio-economic, ecological revolution. The latter in turn – but altogether inadvertently – gives inexorable birth to a supra-political and supra-geographical identity – that of: World Man.

The essence of all the foregoing is that ninety-nine percent of all important evolutionary trends are invisible. Ninety-nine percent are either unapprehended or uncomprehended by society. The invisible, inexorable evolution will soon convert all nationally and subnationally identified humanity into Worldians, Earthians or just plain, omni-spontaneously, universally coordinate, individual “people”. The inexorable trending to one world citizenship is ignorantly and expeditiously opposed by the sovereign nations’ self-perpetuating proclivities. The sovereign nations own or control the communication systems and preoccupy the systems with disintegrative news of the disintegrative actions taken by the sovereign political entities.

Up to a century ago, 27 years was the average life span of humanity – despite that a few exceptional humans of history lived beyond their “four score years and ten” i.e. 90 years. Up to a half century ago, it was assumed that only one human in one hundred could be economically successful and even then would only survive to an average age of 42 years. Now in the nineteen-sixties, average expectancy of North American industrialized man has reached 70 years, with two out of five men an economic success as well. By 1970, the majority (i.e. more than 50% of all humans around Earth) will be both physically and economically successful – or there won’t be any humanity – save possible a few hapless short-lived survivors of the atomic holocaust.

For only the last decade of all history has total physical and economic success for all humanity been conceded by science to be feasible. Realization of this extraordinary potential is importantly frustrated, however, by several factors.

First it is frustrated by the, as yet, rigid geographical and political partitioning of humanity under divisive and competitive ideological concepts, each purported to cope most effectively, only on a political bias basis, with locally sovereigned groups of yesterday’s on foot to-and-fro-ing humans and their heretofore only but-one-in-one-hundred survival probability. This self-entrapment by man in political straight jackets came about through psychological and physiological events which may be explained as follows.

Biology’s two main branches – Zoology and Botany – disclose two main and clearly differentiated modes of survival – static and mobile – with the giant trees and the world around voyaging whales at the two size extremes.

The biologically static are subjectively advantaged. The environment brings them what they need. The mobiles are objectively advantaged to “go” and get what they need or want.

Design Strategy

After hunting fruits, nuts, herbs, as well as fish and other zoological game, fairly successfully for thousands of millenia, man discovered that he could tame some of the game which spontaneously performed its own regeneration. From this lesson man discovered that he could plant the vegetation’s seeds and thus man started about eight millenia ago to cease his wandering and to remain to guard the territories he found most favorable for his locally regenerative animal husbandry and agriculture.

Because man’s legs are so short and the planet Earth so big and because the few areas around it where he could find immediate vital support in his early days on the planet amounted totally to less than five percent of the Earth’s surface, man has mistakenly iden- tified himself during the last eight millenia with the rooted vegetation rather than with the mobile vertebrates of which type he is a member. Those few humans who found a local “good thing”, “DUG-IN” and the multitude of others hung hopefully and hungrily around the successful few’s exclusive “property” which the economically successful, successfully enacted as a concept into – strong-arm enforced – laws of men.

Physical or “natural” law has no inherent static “property” law – only behavioral properties. Nature’s laws of evolution defy all static patterns. Entropy breaks them up. “Ownership” is not immoral, amoral or ethically unsound. Physical “ownership” is anti- entropic – ergo, eventually unsustainable. Metaphysical conceptualizations now are iden- tifiable with individuals, which, in turn, are unique behavioral integrities. Democritus’ concept of – and sound pattern identification of – the phenomenon “Atom”, are forever identifiable as Democritus – i.e., as his intellect functioning. These individual meta- physical discoveries are not ownership identities. Democritus did not and does not own any Atoms, but he is irrevocably identifiable with their conceptioning and naming.

Ergo: “Ownership” of physical entities by man are untenable in natural law and are inherently obstructive to evolution and realization of the comprehensive emancipation of man – from his ignorance rooted failures, and from his imminently potential physical and economic success. However, unique service behaviors are identifiable with individuals and their respective creative capabilities. Only one’s own “personality” and life are ownable. Only one’s own inherently unique, chromosomically monitored, and experience modified patterning integrity is ownable.

Secondly, the physical, omni-success of all humanity is frustrated by the fact that scientific evolution – by which it could be accomplished – is almost entirely invisible and its integrated significances are too difficult for total and effective comprehension by society.

One reason for the latter frustration is that the language of science has been up to now almost exclusively mathematical – i.e. non-conceptual.

A second reason is that scientists altogether constitute less than one percent of the world population. Their thoughts are popularly unknown.

A third reason is that most scientists operate exclusively on a subjective basis – as “pure” scientists. They also operate non-conceptually. Most of the objective tech- nologists – or “applied” scientists – are specialists and are unaware of the comprehen- sively integrated significance, to society, of the tasks they perform.

A fourth reason is that world society is frustrated by the communication barriers between the many languages of mankind.

For the foregoing reasons, there are only a very few humans whose experience and operative faculties permit and inspire them to inform society regarding the significance of the evolutionary trending and of mankind’s now potential physical and economic success.

What could be done and up to now has been done in a big way – as a consequence of man’s access to the vast energy wealth of universe, discovered by “purely” operating scientists – has not been determined by the technologists, but by their economic masters who see only the immediate profits – in, for instance, the exploitability of the fossil fuels – or “savings account” energy wealth – which can bring the highest profits in the most wholesale manner through national governments’ commitments, most swiftly realizable in anticipation of the emergencies of total war. Science and technology operate economically and socially only as slaves of the most powerfully short-sighted cashiers of humanity’s needs and weaknesses. The latter see less profit in organizing the business of humanity to survive on the energy income of the environment.

Realization of mutual success by all mankind is frustrated also by the now entirely irrelevant and invalid “inferiority” or “failure” complex of world around behaviors of humans, conditioned exclusively by two millions of years of experience with major failures of mankind, as well as with vital inadequacies of vital necessities; plus the ages long, seemingly obvious and seemingly inevitable fact that the vast majority must die at a relatively early age – either through starvation, disease, superstitiously governed human sacrifice, capital punishment, war or duelling – as physical evolution whittled down the numbers surviving – to match the numbers supportable by the ignorantly and only opportunistically exploited – ergo, only short-sightedly and meagerly organized world resources.

The analogy to the wasp’s dilemma occurs in humanity’s long conditioned, reflexively superstitious assumption that man is (with only “divine” exceptions) designed to be a failure. The “normal” human has always been a potential and probable failure. At an early age, the average human acquires a powerful inferiority complex from his exposure to his parents and his childhood community’s deeply inhibited culture of misinformation and misfortune. The deep-seated proclivity of humans to gamble their monies is founded on the working assumption of human consciousness that individuals are inherently programmed for failure and that only cultivated luck can divert the individual from his negative plight.

One reason why humanity in general loves, admires and worships human babies is that all physically normal babies are both unblemished and are designed to be physically successful. They are swiftly blemished by man’s ignorantly served love. If, despite his millenniums-conditioned, failure prone complex, man is to survive on the planet Earth he must be educated to assume a new “norm” for humanity. Because of the facts world society must now assume that: normal man is designed to be a success and the universe designed to support that success – for as we shall presently see, man is essential to the success of universe itself. If humanity on Earth “flunks out” humanity on other planets will probably “carry-on” to perform the uniquely human, anti-entropic functions essential to the total regenerative evolution of universe.

To effect the successful transition of world society to the new “norm” of man as a physical and intellectual success can, and we hope will, be realized on space ship Earth through the idealism of youth, as implemented by the educational process revolution which is beginning to take place around the planet. If so, the reality of the new norm of success will be progressively fortified by the incorruptibility of the cybernated participation of man in evolutionary transformations of human ecology and on a continuous, instead of a short term, expediency basis.

Design Strategy

And it is not a matter of being a little more far-sighted and looking out for one or two more generations of man on Earth. It is a matter of making man on Earth a continuing success – forever.

It may be assumed that scientific and humanistic literacy must and will be popularly developed at the earliest moment in order to spontaneously obtain scientifically generalized comprehension and systematically and conceptually formulated socio-technological answers to any and all moral economic, aesthetic and ethic questions, as well as objective answers regarding the relative harmonic desirability, feasibility and economic practicality of any and all human preoccupations and capability commitments.

We must now ask, “What will emancipate science from her century of unnecessary ’Blind Flying’ exclusively on instruments – as a slave profession – with lethal consequences – and without any sense of long distance economic success objectives for all of posterity?”

We must also ask, “From whence will come the tools of conceptuality which will emancipate science and permit its assumption of the prime, social, direct, conscious, sensorial responsibility?”

What can and will bring world society’s leaders and world society itself to comprehend its economic potential and its essential function in universe and to its successful performance of that function – in time to permit the continuance in universe of the Earthian team of human’s?

It seems to me that our commitment to mutual examination of our respective functioning leads abruptly to these fundamental questions. I assume this to be so. I also assume that neither of us has innate characteristics making us uniquely fitter than others to address these questions. I assume, however, that both of us have come independently to the realization of the tasks to be done by world society and by individual men operating with integrity on their own initiative on behalf of their fellow humans. I assume that both of us has now unique experiences and organized information and accredited effort which provide us with some measurable degree of intellectual, technical, and economic advantage in addressing these prime questions. On my part, I would like to contribute the following thoughts.

First, it seems to me that unless we have experimentally demonstrable and scientifically definable meaning in our words, we cannot communicate effectively with words. Communication is with self, as well as with others. Ergo: we may say – the degree of effectiveness of communication is proportional to the degree of exactness of commonly accepted definition of meanings of the words used. This statement is a corollary of my long held working assumption that:- a problem adequately stated is a problem fundamentally ripe and potential of solution.

In seeking definitive meanings I recognize, of course, that Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminism, forestalls absolute exactness. However, the tolerance of error is reducible. Ergo: we may approach exactitude in progressive degree. Ergo: what I mean by mutual comprehension of meanings is stateable only in terms of approximately exact meanings.

It is also my working assumption that lacking the approximately exact meaning of the most profound generalized concepts there is little meaning and approximately no direct

teleologic effectiveness, in any and all special case, local experience communications. For instance, it is impossible to understand the previous sentence without a fundamental comprehension of the concept teleology. It is also fundamentally impossible for us to make conscious solution of the greatest and prime problems and their secondary technical challenges without use of the phenomenon teleology.

It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitively answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strat- egies.

STRATEGIC QUESTIONS 1. What do we mean by universe? 21. What is subconsciousness? 2. Has man a function in universe? 22. What is teleology? 3. What is thinking? 23. What is automation? 4. What are experiences? 24. What is a tool? 5. What are experiments? 25. What is industry? 6. What is subjective? 26. What is animate? 7. What is objective? 27. What is inanimate? 8. What is apprehension? 28. What are metabolics? 9. What is comprehension? 29. What is wealth? 10. What is positive? Why? 30. What is intuition? 11. What is negative? Why? 31. What are aesthetics? 12. What is physical? 32. What is harmonic? 13. What is metaphysical? 33. What is prosaic? 14. What is synergy? 34. What are the senses? 15. What is energy? 35. What are mathematics? 16. What is brain? 36. What is structure? 17. What is intellect? 37. What is differentiation? 18. What is science? 38. What is integration? 19. What is a system? 39. What is integrity? 20. What is consciousness? 40. What is truth?

If we first accept mutually agreed upon, experimentally based definitions and an- swers to these questions as a priori to our dialogue, we may then also observe the follow- ing to be pertinent and useful to the initiation of our mutual search for the definitive answers to the immediately foregoing set of prime questions.

Design Strategy 21

First, I refer you to my own attempts to make experience founded – ergo scientifically definitive – answers to all 40 of the questions. (see appendix “B”) Most of my attempts have been published in books, essays and lectures. I do not assume that I have found the answers. I do assume that I have addressed the problems on a scientific basis for I have as Eddington put it, “made a sincere attempt to set in order the facts of experience”. I have progressively included and refined the experience basis of those meanings and have progressively refined their verbalization. I have thus discovered – for instance – that there are no nouns for physics has found no things (static, solid phenomena) - Ergo there are only verbs.

Though there are many special concepts which constantly reoccur in my day to day deliberations, I find that there are fourteen which dominate. All of them overlap integratively. Part of the content of one will of necessity often reappear under other concepts due to the synergetic interactions. I will group and discuss all the secondary concepts, unique to my philosophy, under the following main concepts in 14 concept chapters thumb-indexed below.

DOMINANT CONCEPTS

1. UNIVERSE

2. HUMANITY

3. CHILDREN

4. TELEOLOGY

5. REFORM THE ENVIRONMENT

6. GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY

7. INDUSTRIALIZATION

8. DESIGN SCIENCE

9. WORLD SERVICE INDUSTRIES

10. EPHERMERALIZATION AND INVISIBLE COMMONWEALTH

11. PRIME DESIGN INITIATIVE

12. SELF DISCIPLINES

13. COMPREHENSIVE COORDINATION

14. WORLD COMMUNITY AND SUB COMMUNITIES OF WORLD MAN

22 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

Concept One - UNIVERSE

non-instantaneity non-simultaneity physical and metaphysical regeneration irreversibility of evolution irreversibility of metaphysical comprehension of physical

I start with my own definition. Universe is the aggregate of all humanity’s all time, consciously apprehended and communicated experiences. (The communication may be to self or others - it is the apprehending formulation of the information regarding the experiences that constitutes original consciousness).

The physicists’ Law of Conservation of Energy which states that energy may be neither created nor destroyed – ergo is finite – embraces only the physical aspects of experience. It excludes all metaphysical aspects of experience.

I have defined Universe in such a manner that none may present experimental proof of its inadequacy for my definition includes both the objective and subjective: i.e. all voluntary experiences – i.e. experiments – as well as all involuntary experiences – i.e. all happenings.

My definition embraces both the physical and the metaphysical, the latter being all the weightless experiences of thought which includes all the mathematics and the organization of the data regarding all physical experiments, science, both first and last, being metaphysical.

The metaphysical includes the mind extracted, refiningly concentrated and consciously formulated anti-entropic generalizations, in a hierarchy of progressively contracting degree, which most economically describe the workings of the metaphysical subdivision of universe. (See VISION ’65 SUMMARY ADDRESS - pages 79-86).

My definition of universe inherently includes all the ponderable – i.e. weighable, instrumentally detectable, associative and disassociative, material and radiational, energy behaviors of the physical subdivision of universe.

Design Strategy 23

Concept Two - HUMANITY

human function in universe entropy and anti-entropy

Is the human an accidental “theater goer” who happened in on the “Play of Life” – to like it or not: - or does humanity perform an essential function in universe? We find that latter to be true. The discovery develops as follows.

By entropy, I refer to the experimentally demonstrated physical behaviors covered by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the latter’s disclosure of the omni-accelerating- acceleration of the diffusion of physical energy patternings of universe – spoken of by the mathematical physicist as the “Law of Increase of the Random Element”, which may also be called the “Law of the Expanding Universe”. As the stars are all in complex motions, the radiations given off by them are ever more diffusely dispatched.

By anti-entropy, I refer to the omni-accelerating-acceleration of the clarifyingly differentiated and inter-communicated, experience derived, pattern cognitions of the human mind which progressively disclose the orderly complex of omni-interactive, pure, weight- less and apparently eternal principles governing the intellectual design and operation of the – seemingly and “suggestively” only – infinitely self-regenerative universe.

We may call this metaphysical phenomenon – which continually simplifies and con- tracts the generalized description of principles apparently operative in all special case ex- periences – “The Law of Decreasing Confusion”, or the “Law of Intellectual Conservation”; or the “Law of the Contracting Universe”; or the “Law of Diminishing Chaos”; or “The Law of Progressive Order”; or the “Law of Contractively Orderly Generalizations”.

Radiation is physical, entropic, incoherent, propelling, disassociative, pushing. The logical questions arise: - Is gravity metaphysical, anti-entropic coherent and tensive? Are gravity and order wrested and collected intellectually from chaos? Is intellect a priori to both physical and metaphysical universe? Is the tensional integrity of universe exclusively an intellectual integrity phenomenon and a consequence only of intellectual exploration and measurements?

While gravity’s effects are physically measurable, the concept of gravity is in itself unweighable. Likewise the effects of electromagnetism are physically weighable. The physicists have ruled intellectually that all that is imponderable is metaphysical. Clearly it is seen that the metaphysical is to the physical as anti-matter is to matter, i.e. as the electron is to the positron.

Metaphysics and physics are thus seen to co-function, to progressively conserve the self-regeneration of non-simultaneously and overlappingly evolving universe. Man’s func- tion in universe is that of the metaphysical, anti-entropic function. He is essential to the conservation of universe which is in itself an intellectual conception. In 1951 I published my conclusion that man is the anti-entropy of universe. Norbert Weiner published the same statement at the same time. Both of us arrived at our conclusions by different routes and without knowledge of the other’s discovery. I will now expand on the human’s anti-entropic functioning.

In the above statements I am giving precise meaning to the word “metaphysics”. By metaphysical I mean no more nor less than is implicit in my definition of universe. Since magic has never been experimentally demonstrated, my use of the word “metaphysics” does not contain overtones of magic or mysticism.

“Why Universe?” – is at present an unanswerable inquiry into the mystical. Though mystical sounds like a contraction of metaphysical, they are not the same. For this reason, I consider all time spent in speculation regarding the inherently unanswerable to be inherently profitless and a squandering of the opportunity to answer those questions which are answerable by man. It is, however, experienced by us that the unanswerables provoke a sensation in us to which we allude – only intuitively – as “Mysterious”.

By the same reasoning, I discredit all the speculations which suggest or persuade the concept of a “beginning or ending” of universe. The most recent statements of the leading scientists hold that the concept of original chaos is untenable because the physical composition of universe may not be reduced to less than the orderly intertransformability of the neutron and the proton and their respective weak effect leftness and rightness adjuncts the electron, positron; neutrino, anti-neutrino – the positive and negative counterparts including both their negative as well as positive weights, ergo: - the average of all weight of all physical phenomena is zero.

This is to say that the universe, both physical and metaphysical, is resolvable into a set of principles which are ever more accurately (but never exactly) described by the scientists’ weightless intellectual generalizations. And generalized principles which are weightless cognitions of intellect have no inherent beginning or ending (nothing in human experience has ever suggested the beginning or ending of a generalized principle) – ergo the ’beginning’ of universe concepts together with all axioms are experimental or unproven and only superficially obvious fictions. Before the measurements of the speed of radia- tions, all phenomena seemed (erroneously) to be visually “INSTANT”. This gave rise to the superstitiously invented legend of a genie or god creating an instant universe. A physi- cist said to me a few days ago: “I have become bored with the nonsense concept of infinity – with one end closed by a ’beginning’ and the other end open to infinity”.

Universe by definition and its derivative concepts are synergetic. Synergy as you know, means: Unique behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by any behaviors of their component functions taken separately.

Some of ancient Greece’s natural philosophers and geometers took effective advan- tage of Synergy when they recognized that the sum of the angles of a plane triangle is always 180 degrees, or exactly one-half of cyclic unity – with unity taken as 360 degrees – ergo unity equals two triangles. I assumed in 1917 that “unity is plural and at minimum two”.

The stable structural behavior of a whole triangle, which consists of three edges and three individually and independently unstable angles or a total of six components is not predicted by any one or two of its angles or edges taken by themselves. The six edges of the two triangles can and frequently do associate with one another, one as a left helix and the other as a right helix, to form the six-edged tetrahedron which having four triangular faces gives synergetic demonstration of four triangles occurring as the result of associating only two triangles. Incidentally, the right and left helixes formed of the two triangles’ respec- tive sets of three edges each constitute the vectorial modeling in conceptual array of the positive and negative “half spins” or “half quanta” corresponding respectively with the pro- ton set and the neutron set consisting of neutron and neutrino on the left hand and the proton, electron and antineutrino on the right hand. Together these six make one quantum unit – which is identified as the tetrahedron.

Triangles as conceived by the Greeks are synergetic. The Greeks went on to dem- onstrate the corollary of Synergy, to wit: that the known behavior of the whole and the known behavior of some of the components makes possible predictions of the behavior of each and all of the other, previously, unknown components.

Design Strategy 25

The Arabs’ algebraic formulations and all their modern derivatives, including the calculus, are synergetic strategies.

This synergetic strategy of proceeding from the whole to discover discrete local particulars within the whole was demonstrated powerfully once again a century ago in Euler’s Topology which reduced all patterning of universe to lines, intersections of lines – called “vertexes” – and the areas bound by three or more intersecting lines. Euler found a constant mathematical relationship of all these three fundamental aspects of pattern i.e. – V + A = L + 2.

The power of synergy was demonstrated once again by physicists in the modern quantum mechanics – in which latter the assumption of a finite physical energy universe always requires a 100% accountability of all energy transactions. Synergetic accounting of the finite system plays a major part in the success of modern nuclear physics.

Kepler’s Third Law and Newton’s theory of gravity provided synergetic advantage for astronomy.

Willard Gibb’s Phase Rule – akin to Euler’s topological equation of the relative abundance of basic mathematical pattern aspects – provided synergetic advantage in chemistry.

Synergetic behavior is omni-manifest in bio-chemistry and metallurgy. Synergy alone explains, for instance, why the tensile strength of chrome nickel steel if 50% stronger than the sum of all its constituent alloys’ respective tensile strengths. Synergy is the “back bone” of general systems theory.

Despite the powerful capabilities demonstrated historically by Synergetic Strategy today’s primary educational systems, all around the world, start the children’s would-be education only with elementary parts of subdivisions which never explain the wholistic behaviors and thus imply that science and technology may only be successful as a myriad of separate intricate specializations which may never be subject to unified comprehension by one mind.

Specialization – therefrom today’s chain reaction of the self-accelerating fractionation of all thinking into exploding categoritis – resulted from the old master pirates’, pre-World War One’s synergetic strategy by which they required that all the bright lieutenants and experts must confine their labor and inquiry to differentiation, and that each must mind his own business and must eschew all integration which they must concede to be the old ’master" pirates’ exclusive prerogative.

Thus, the elementary educational system which in contrast to synergy starts exclusively with a few parts or elements, leads at best only to differentiated statistical probability based entirely on the separate behaviors of those elementary parts. Probability, the strongest tool of statistics which deal only with parts, at its best is a weak tool. Were probability strong it would predict the stock market behavior with precision and would foretell horse race results with reliability. Contrariwise, Synergy and General Systems Theory are powerful forecasting tools and have been the back bone of modern physics, astronomy and chemistry.

My Fourteen Concepts – taken one by one and considered only in the “separate”, elementary educational, manner might seem too special and too diffuse to be effective. Taken altogether, synergetically, I hope you will find them as promising as I have already found them to be.

If I had not been consciously and deliberately pursuing all fourteen concepts syn- ergetically and teleologically for the last 38 years and if I had not obtained innumerable practical results, I would not be a position now to know you and to be asked to exchange grand strategy information with you.

Within the last 14 years, thousands of my structures have gone to 50 countries around S.S. (space ship) Earth. They were most frequently transported to their sites by air, fully assembled or in systematically coded and tightly packages parts. I have suc- ceeded therefore within only thirty-eight years in demonstrating the validity of my pro- posal – published in 1927 – to commence in twenty-five years – 1952 – the air delivery of high performance environment controls for those of mankind’s activities most advan- tageously performed under scientifically protected and valved conditions. In 1953 the U.S. Marine Corps made the first air delivery of my geodesic dome, fully assembled and skinned, flying it to its site by helicopter at 60 nautical miles per hour. I prophesied this in 25 years. It took 26.

The year in which I first made this proposal – 1927 – was that in which Lindberg made his epochal non-stop New York City to Paris flight in an airplane with cloth-covered wingfoils. International airplane passenger service was not as yet even seriously dis- cussed. Jet propulsion, rocketry, television, fission, transistors, cellophane tape, com- puters, highway cloverleafs, staplers, stainless steel, high strength aluminum, uranium, the Great Crash, The Depression, Hitler, World War Two, juvenile delinquency and atomic bombs were unanticipated, unthought of or held to be only fantastic possibilities realizable, if at all, one thousand years hence. Discussions of rocket trips to the moon were engaged in only by lunatics in mental institutions. Only twenty-three years ago when I attended World War Two meetings in Washington, D.C., I was often greeted by someone saying, “Please don’t ruin this meeting by once again introducing your preposterous, mass-pro- duced, scientifically designed air-deliverable houses.”

As a consequence of my finding both the metaphysical and physical subdivisions of Universe to be finite I have also discovered the finite, arithmetical, geometrical, energet- ical, rationally coordinate comprehensive mensuration system employed by nature to ra- tionally integrate the physical and metaphysical and have thereby also provided a conceptual and definitive bridge of understanding between the humanities and the sciences. I am con- fident that the comprehensiveness of my fourteen concepts rather than being over-ambitious, represent the “minmaxfamfax” (minimum and maximum family of prime variable factors) uniquely governing general system theory.

Such (only intellectually discovered and only intellectually employable) principles are apparently amongst the most powerful thus far to have become available to man. The a priori (and only intellectually conceivable) complex of self-regenerative, intertransform- ative (macro-micro), cosmic ranging scale of generalized principles governing non-simul- taneous universe – thus far discovered by man only in “piecemeal” isolations – is now disclosing a comprehensive inter-relatedness unanticipated by man at the time of the indi- vidual explorations. This total inter-relatedness and its orderliness and mathematical elegance are obviously transcendental to the inventive capabilities of individual man. For these reasons, taken synergetically, there is evidenced to science an a priori, omni-func- tioning intellection greater than that demonstrated or demonstrable by humans.

Are we not most intimate, i.e. closest with those furthest away from us physically, ergo closest metaphysically. No rapport between individuals “sardine packed” in subways

Design Strategy

and buses. Intimacy of those writing to one another halfway around the world. This relative intimacy may be plotted in terms of time, history and geography. All those who influence us daily by love, wisdom, conceptual stimulation and understanding are most often relatively remote both in time and space. Most of the time the powerful influences are the immortal influences, i.e. “most remote”.

The Human Function in Universe and its individually, fleetingly, sensed responsibilities – heeded or unheeded by the individual – occur as the consequence of “built-in” driving forces, the metabolic, physical regeneration drives of hunger and procreation. The most prominent of the metaphysical regeneration drives are human curiosity and the drive to demonstrate competence, i.e. - to employ the abilities to subjectively differentiate and thereafter to objectively integrate in preferred patterns or to organize events in such a manner as to obtain answers to the questions which curiosity asks – metaphysical drives – to understand and be understood.

The dual and regenerative human functioning as successive, high frequency, subjective and objective, (subconscious and conscious) which altogether provide angular range finding and the teleologic irreversibility of human articulations are implemented exclusively by two principles with which humanity modifies his forward experiences in Universe in preferred ways. The two physical principles by which alone man may alter his ever evolving environment are those of angular and frequency modulations. Angular modulation (c.f. ruddering) is erroneously spoken of by man as Spatial modification. Frequency of event modulation is erroneously spoken of by humanity as Time modification. These capabilities of man’s senses, brain and mind, provide the basis for his strategically selective differentiations of experience. The humans’ subjective experiences are teleologically and spontaneously transformed into objective alterations of the evolutionary environment – to most effectively support man’s unique brain and mind functioning in Universe in the anti-entropic role.

It is the intent of my concept No.2 to bring about most effective employment of those built-in drives of individuals in such a manner as to bring about the physical success and happiness of all humanity in the shortest time with the least effort.

It is my intent to employ the built-in capabilities to accomplish all the foregoing without ever advantaging one by deprivation of another.

It is the purpose of my Concept No. 2 to so design or control the angles and frequencies of the evolving environment events that the spontaneous reflexing of society will result in all men enjoying all of Earth – and the progressive reaches of the universe about it – without mutual interference with one another’s degrees of subjective and objective freedoms.

Concept Three - CHILDREN

Focus of human effort on the critical, first 13 years of life – wherein 98% of brain function is progressively and automatically “tuned-on”, “tuned-in”, “tuned-out” or shut-off in direct response to the positives or negatives of the individuals’ environmental experiences and potentials.

Focus on new life. Recognizing that humanity consists of all ages, it is obvious that before any of the objectives of one have become fulfilled many human individuals and particularly the aged will have died. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to set up time and beneficiary priorities within the total scheme.

The behavioral sciences have disclosed the direct effects of the environment on new life. These are so great as to make it clear that the environment (including all the dynamic events and humans operative within the “scenery”) is more than 99% responsible for the lives becoming capable and happy or frustrated and confounded. And the most pro- found effects on human life have been completed within the first 17 years. Ninety-eight percent of the environment’s positive or negative effects have been wrought upon the new life by age 13. Eighty percent have been wrought by age of 8, and fifty percent by age of 4. It is obvious that effective work that can be done in advantaging life through favorable environment transformation can be realized within the first 13 years of human life and particularly in the first 4 years of life.

In order for the individual to be objectively effective as a design scientist in al- tering the environment on behalf of his fellow man, it is necessary for him to organize his efforts so that they may become operative a sufficient number of years ahead of his original initiating to be able to transcend any frustration of his efforts by the momentum of already invested interests. This period has been discovered to be one generation, or 25 years. My work was initiated in 1927 and was designed to become effective in 1952. This proved to be a realistic forecast. In 1952, Ford Motors bought a large geodesic dome.

Combining the concept of the time lags and most effective period for advantaging life, my concept number three came to focus on advantaging the new life – to protect the new life prominently from 1 to 4; secondarily on 4 to 7; thirdly on 7 to 13; and lives of the parents to be advantaged. See Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s book “Stability and Change in Human Characteristics” published by John Wiley and Son.

Design Strategy

Concept Four - TELEOLOGY

The conscious deliberations and decisions of the human mind which reorganize the subconsciously fed-back informations. The philosophic reduction of a plurality of subjectively experienced pattern cognitions into conceptually recognized (imagined) patterns of generalized principles to forwardly control specifically anticipated events by designed modifications of environment patterns. Generalized, comprehensive and anticipatory, design science.

Design Science Event Flow

Subjective (Search Research)

Teleology Intuition Conception Apprehension Comprehension Experiment Feedback

Generalization

Objective Development

Prototyping #1 " " #2 " " #3 Production Design Production Modification Tooling Production Distribution Installation

Reduction to Practice

30 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document:

Concept Four - (Cont.)

Regeneration Maintenance . . . . Service Re-installation Replacement Removal Scrapping Recirculation

The philosophy of my fourteen point strategy derives from my intuition that all experiences may be progressively generalized and that man thus discovers that only a few principles govern all the multirate, non-simultaneous, transformative interstructuring transformations of non-simultaneous universe. It becomes obvious that the subjectively apprehended data and the intellectually recognized data inter-relationships concerning the abstracted principles – governing evolving universe – provides the individual with high potential for the objective realization of advantages for humanity. Teleology means: - “the intuitive conversion by brain and mind of special case, subjective experiences into generalized principles and their subsequent objective employment in special case undertakings.”

The discovered principles governing the inter-transformative structuring of universe permit the subconsciously teleological and conscious design initiating individual to reform the environment in such a manner as to provide ultimately higher advantage for men and in such a manner as to regenerate in other individuals the drive to further transform the environment to even higher advantage for all. The design may increase the degrees of freedom of individuals by reducing environmental interferences or it may decrease freedoms as with traps and prisons.

C.H. Waddington, University of Edinburgh Geneticist, speaks of the Epi-genetic landscape in identifying the powerful effects on human behavior played by environmental factors. Waddington shows how man and other factors alter the environment and how the altered environment alters the human and other biological behaviors and how the whole process becomes regenerative and continually inter-accelerates. He does not show or suggest that the environment alters man’s physical organism nor that the environment adds capabilities to the human’s innate capabilities, but does indicate the way in which arbitrarily favorable changes in the environment may permit a higher percentum of realizations and development of the innate human brain, body and mind capabilities, theretofore inactive – only because frustrated by unfavorable regenerative alterations of the environment. Thus we see that human evolution is not confined to organic life alone, but also consists of reciprocal interactions of all the combined transformations of the environment and all it contains. This combined regenerative evolution has now attained a ’chain reaction rate’ around the surface of the spherical space ship Earth.

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Concept Five - REFORM THE ENVIRONMENT

Don’t attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity’s original, innate capabilities to become successful. Politics and conventionalized education have sought erroneously to mold or reform humanity, i.e. the collective individual. See Universal Requirements Checklist-Volume 3, Design Decade.

Reform the Environment - Not man. Each of my fourteen concepts and their teleologically engendered strategies tend to illuminate the interdependence of all the items; for instance, my item number five is taken in consideration of all the first four but goes on to make the distinct point that my philosophy and strategy confine the design initiative to reforming only the environment in contradistinction to the almost universal attempts of humans to reform and restrain other humans by political actions, laws and codes. This restraining begins with the earliest parental attempts to reform their childrens’ spontaneous behaviors in order to conform them to “accepted” standards and codes. The reforming of others is subsequently manifest in attempts of grown ups to reform other grown ups’ patterns through politically enacted law.

My experience teaches me that all philosophic concepts which are translated only into “bright ideas” as voiced or written suggestions or criticisms are abortions of intellects higher potentials. My experience teaches me that philosophic conclusions which are always teleologically derived may always be reduced to design science changes of the environment which can permit other individuals’ spontaneous realizations of higher destiny, i.e. to behave unconsciously in more effective manner. For instance, a turn in the highway may be banked angularly so that poor drivers or drunken drivers will negotiate even sharp radius turns subconsciously due to the fact that the banked angles and gravity together effect the motor cars steering wheel linkages in such a manner that the cars steer themselves around the turns. In the same way, highway overpasses allow automobilists to subconsciously avoid crossing collisions.

In speaking of reforming the environment of man, I include a surgeon’s operations on the human body for the latter is mobile environment of the brain. I contrast the reform of the integral or deployed physical environment in contradistinction to legal or verbal attempts to reform man’s behavior patterns. I find that there are two ways in which the environment may be altered to effect man, one positive and the other negative - i.e. one may decrease the degrees of freedom of humanity, negatively by prisons, traps and straight jackets and positively by inventing better shoes for men’s feet. The normal speed of universal formulations and transformative events is seven hundred million miles per hour. Man’s thus far attained top speed of physical self transport is fifteen thousand miles per hour. Normal speed is 46,000 times man’s rocket speed. Therefore, man is – relatively speaking – almost as immobile as death. On the other hand his environment facilities may be so ordered by design science as to give him some appreciably large percentage communication advantage by radio which operates normally at seven hundred million miles per hour. Summarizing: - Positive design science reformations of the environment must be undertaken with the intent of permitting man’s innate faculties and facilities to be realized with subconscious coordinations of his organic process. Reform of the environment is undertaken with purpose of de-frustrating man’s innate capabilities whether the frustration be by the inadequacies of the physical environment or by the coordinated reflexes of other humans induced in those humans by the inadequacies of the environmental advantages as, for instance, mothers’ unreasonable punishing of children, not for the children’s direct act, but because of the mother’s ever subconsciously present fear of the future, or of the all history experienced approximately complete poverty which compounded the parents drudge weari-

ness and failure of the physical environment to provide any hope of the parents opportun- ity to protect the new life that has inadvertently been placed in their care.

See “Universal Requirements Check List”, Volume 3, Design Science Decade and Design Initiative, Volumes 2 and 3. Design Science Decade for basic environmental control seive- See also Ideas and Integrities, Prentice Hall Publishing Company.

Design Strategy

Concept Six - GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY

Mind vs. Brain, Generalization as constituting the thinking of mind vs. the information storage and feed-back functioning of the brain. Topology of systems. The topological hierarchy of systems. Triangulated topological - Quantum coordination of generalized systems. Open and closed systems.

Comprehensivity - Theory of General Systems. As with the preceding items, we again find each and all items to induce considerations of their integrated comprehensivity. We find all the non-simultaneous events of universe tending to effect all other events in degrees ranging from powerful to insignificant.

My own generalizations – from the total of my own special case experiences as well as from other scientists and mathematicians – especially my experience on the sea and in the air – brought me to a clear cut discovery of twelve fundamental degrees of freedom governing the external and internal motions and transformations of all independent systems in universe. Six of these freedoms are positive and six are negative; therefore, there are only six sets of fundamental freedoms. These cover all variable inter-relation- ships of universe. They become the controlling facts governing general systems and there- by such supercomplex systems as the design of a nation’s navy. General system’s design science includes the navy’s progressive fabrication and evolutionary replacement, its manning, its operation, establishment of its naval bases; repair, maintenance, evolution- ary modification, support, logistics, ballistics and industrial tools-to-make-tools to make tools. All these functionings are comprehensively and anticipatorily undertaken – under a system of time controls and priorities which in turn are governed by fundamental resource programs and the political mandate for its existence. I have developed a completely work- able, generalized systems approach – starting with the differentiation of universe, includ- ing both the metaphysical and physical – which has not only held up but permitted progres- sive subdivisions in cybernetical “bits” to bring any local pattern of any problem into its identification within the total scheme of generalized systems events. This means that I always start all problem solving with universe and thereafter subdivide progressively to identify a special local problem within the total of problems.

Concept Seven - INDUSTRIALIZATION

Definition in terms of tools. Differentiation of the tools of Industrialization in contradistinction to Craft tools. Industrialization only operates as a world around system. Its inherent economic accountability as energy M (matter) x energy R (radiation) x intellect, I x frequency F of evolutionary design advancements. Industrialization is the externalized complementation of man’s interior metabolic regeneration organism.

I define industrialization as the extra corporeal, organic, metabolic regeneration of humanity. Industrialization consists of tools. All the tools are externalizations of originally integral functions of humans. I divide all tools into two main classes. Craft tools and industrial tools. The craft tools consist of all the tools that can be invented and produced by one man starting and operating alone nakedly in the wilderness. I define the industrial tools as: - all the tools which cannot be produced by one man. The steamship Queen Mary, the giant dynamo, the concrete highway, New York City, or even the lowly but modern forged alloy steel carpenter’s hammer, with electro-insulated plastic handles, whose alloy components and manufacturing operations involve thousands of men and the unique resources of several countries of the Earth.

By my definition, the spoken word which can only be invented by two or more men, was the first industrial tool. This is reminiscent of the biblical account ’In the beginning was the word.’ In my experience appraised concepts the scriptural statement needs to be modified to read ’In the beginning of industrialization was the word.’ Crafts are limited to a single man and involve only very local resources and very limited fragments of Earth and time. Industrialization, through the relayed experience of all men–permitted through the individualization of the spoken and written word–involves all experiences of all men everywhere in history.

The fundamental material resources of industry consist of 92 regenerative chemical elements–91 of which occur randomly around the Earth. They are randomly disposed around the Earth at an average distance of half-way around the Earth from any given resource marshalling point. The processes of industrialization take the resources from where they occur and progressively separate them from their gross ore matrix and forward them half-way around the world for further refinement and distribution. Half-way around the Earth the resources attain maximum separation. Thereafter, they are re-assembled in preferred alloys and in preferred machines and structures. They are also associated and invested in progressively major tool complexes. The vast initial total cost of industrialization has to be amortized by those who need the products. Therefore, the products and services of industrialization must be mass produced and distributed to people all around Earth to widely distribute the capital and overhead costs. The latter thus become almost negligible sums - simply the cost per pound of the product. In order to obtain enough customers to subdivide the cost it is necessary to go all around the Earth which means that the centrally produced machine, mechanics, structures, etc. must now be distributed half-way around the Earth again. The logistics of industrialization therefore involves both inbound and outbound transportation half-way around the world, twice per each unit of industrial accounting. Industrialization is inherently comprehensive and omni-inter-related in respect to all humanity and all of humanity’s ecological environment. This includes the sun and moon and all physical phenomena. Industrialization embraces many alternate systems of technical solutions ranging all the way from electrical to mechanical. All of the systems and their operators which range from private businesses to sovereign nations work inadvertently towards ultimately providing all men with higher standards of living. Although total industrialization’s, often negatively competitive, sub-systems may be motivated locally by short-sighted monetary

Design Strategy

or political profits and ambitions the total inadvertently results, in evolutionarily changing the total environment to ever higher advantage of all men and works toward the ultimate enjoyment of all Earth by all men–all both economically and physically successful, without any mutual self-interferences or deprivations.

Though popularly unrealized – in industry there is a residual, high premium, function of the crafts as basic tool and model makers which permit the original realization of individuals inventive conceptions and their translation into mass advantage gains for society. Crafts are ever less efficiently employed in the production of consumer goods, tools and services.

Having established for our first seven basic concepts it becomes clear that there is a completely separate design science activity which is concerned with the anticipatory scheduling of all the complex interaction of the foregoing general systems events of industrialization. Design science deals in studies of the gestation rates operative in the many different constituent patterns of general world systems. For instance, it has been learned that inventions reach industrial acceptance at very different rates. Inventions in electronics are usually employed industrially within two years after invention. Aeronautical inventions are generally employed (after thorough testing) within five years. There is a lag of 15 years between railroad inventions and general use. There is a forty-two year lag between invention and use in the craft-bogged building arts. There was a fifty year lag between the first blast furnace production of steel for ships and the use of steel in a “sky-scraper”. There was a forty-two year lag between the steel companies’ byproduction of portland cement in their subsidiary companies and the time when a piece of steel fell into the setting cement to disclose accidentally the principle of steel reinforcing of concrete.

The going economics accredits the merger of a dozen economic “failures” to produce a “success”. The American automobile industry was compounded out of many thousands of “failures” whose managements lost their credit authority but whose energy processing real machinery assets had never failed. The accounting and the speculative funding, and promotional shortsightedness and the economic accrediting failed but not the evolving machinery of industrialization. Industrialization is physical evolution and channeled energy transformations which by the law of energy conservation can never fail. Through traffic in interest paying debt increases, present day economics exploits the failure of debt crops to support the increasing numbers of humanity displaced as automatons by automation. We are in for a world economic accounting revision of first magnitude. We will switch from a negative to a positive world economic accounting.

Because energy is wealth, the integrating world industrial networks mean ultimate access of all humanity everywhere to the total operative commonwealth of Earth.

What do we know about wealth stated rigorously and only in the terms of experimental science?

Wealth cannot alter yesterday. It can only alter today and tomorrow.

Multiplication of craft wealth began, as we have noted earlier, when man stepped on the long end of a log lying across another log with its short end under another big log and saw the big log which was too heavy for him to lift with his muscles, lifted easily by gravity pulling his miniscule weight against the high advantage, long arm of the lever. Multiplication of industrial wealth began when man fastened a set of levers radially around the hub of a wheel and put the wheel under a waterfall and connected the wheel with a grind-

ing mill. Thus, he learned to stand aside from the work and, gaining perspective, to use only his brain to rearrange inanimate energy patterns, external to his own integral bodily energies to do more and more fundamental, man advantaging work. He did so by shunting energy patterns to impinge upon his machine levers.

Humans found that the vast associative (gravity, matter) and disassociative (radiation) energy patternings of universe can be harnessed, shunted and valved by them to impinge at preferred time and quality rates upon the long ends of levers to be led through trains of gears and electric generators and conductors and motors to do preferred work for man ad infinitum.

Man is now learning through the repeated lessons of experimental science that wealth is explicitly the organized tool articulated energy capability to sustain his forward hours and days of metabolic regeneration; to physically protect him; to increase his knowledge and degrees of freedom while decreasing his inter-frustrations. Wealth, he finds, is inherently regenerative, but because of comprehensive synergies the rate of regeneration of man’s solo wealth is to his commonwealth regeneration rate only as X is to X. As experimentally demonstrated – wealth is: energy compounded with intellect’s know-how.

Science’s law of conservation of energy states that “energy cannot be created or destroyed.” The first constituent of wealth - energy - is therefore irreducible. Science states that the entire physical universe is ENERGY. E=MCš. Some of the energy is operative in associative patterns - as matter. The associative energy as matter is organized in leverage systems to do work. The other energy patterns disassociatively, as radiation which is transformed into free energy to be directed to impinge on the levers.

Every time man uses the second constituent of wealth - his know-how - this intellectual resource automatically increases. He learns more. Learning is only growthful. It is impossible to “learn less”.

Energy cannot decrease. Know-how can only increase.

It is therefore scientifically clear that: - wealth which combines energy and intellect can only increase, and that wealth can increase only with use and that wealth increases as fast as it is used. The faster-the-more! Those are the facts of science. Those are the facts of life.

Because we have found: (A) that the metaphysical balances the physical; (B) that the metaphysical universe embraces the physical - both being finite, but the metaphysical being always one tetrahedron greater than the physical; © that the metaphysical’s generalized “capture” and identification of the physical is an irreversible condition - e.g. Einstein as intellect (metaphysical) writing the identification of the physical universe E=MCš is irreversible – for the physical which is “disorderly” cannot “think” and make orderly statements. Energy cannot write what Einstein’s intellect is. Therefore, we can say that the metaphysical is greater than and re-concentrates and coheres the physical.

Wealth is, therefore inherently irreversible. Wealth can only gain as in our proposition Q.E.D.

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Concept Eight - DESIGN SCIENCE

Angle and frequency modulation of directions and sequence rates of least resistant event developments. Selections of progressive, one out of twelve, alternately equal, least re- sistant directions. i.e. the twelve fundamental degrees of freedom of inter-transformative transactions in physical un- iverse. See Volumes 2 and 3, Design Science Decade.

My topic eight then isolates the objective and subjective design science activities relating to the total evolutionary events of man in universe, as for instance, when in 1969 the new generation of 700 passenger (or 125 ton cargo) airplanes will be able to fly non- stop across the Pacific Ocean to establish approximate ten-fold the present aeronautical transport capability within two years after their regular operations begin. Such events must be comprehensively integrated with all the other vastly accelerating environment re- lationships transformations. Mining on the moon will by this time become of challenging consideration.

The rental service industry – to be discussed in item 9 – must be compounded with time designing doubling and possibly tripling the environment control capabilities. World-around traveling man greatly accelerates the experience of seasonal changing be- tween winter and summer. The regularity of days and nights will be almost obliterated by the ability to fly around the Earth at the rate of its turning. He will want, however, to sleep for 8 hours every 24 hours, independent of sunlight or shadow. This may often force him to the use of a hotel bedroom one hour after it has been vacated by others. A good standard hotel bedroom and all its equipment should be indistinguishable from “brand new”. Hotel rooms may be occupied successively by two or three different humans each 24 hours, just as the airport gates are progressively occupied by airplanes which receive their re- habilitating services and move on to be immediately replaced by another plane. This con- cept introduces a new concept to man on Earth which is to be spoken about as frequency modulated environment occupancies.

While this frequency modulated use of service industry products by humanity may seem extreme in terms of yesterday’s experiences, the trends clearly indicate this mode of life will soon dominate world-around living pattern and will become the major mode of life within the next 25 years.

Lockheed Aircraft Company has a 10,000 (ten thousand) passenger airplane on the drawing boards. These new large ships, starting with the 700 passenger, can land in un- prepared fields. Length of the 10,000 passenger ships’ fuselage is in the magnitude of the Empire State Building’s height or the Queen Mary’s length. This means that within the next decade, or fifteen years, if man maintains evolutionary schedule, he will be able to fly a whole fleet of – automated-factory produced – skyscrapers into place and up-ended for immediate occupancy. This is analagous to a fleet of ocean liners coming into port and taking on a city-sized passenger population on the same day. Instant city! Static urban planning will be as obsolete and inappropriate in fifteen years as the attempt to build brick ships upon a stormy sea. With the computer storing and retrieving all the latest data on elevator shafting, electrical harnesses, plumbing, manifolds and doing the drawings – architecture and planning as now taught will be obsolete.

38 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document

Concept Nine - WORLD SERVICE INDUSTRIES

To swiftly replace “ownership” with rentals of “new” equipment maintained at constantly renewed higher standard of performance, because more profitable and more satisfying to humanity. Service industries on world-around and year-around, automatically accountable credit card basis.

The Service Industry. As world industrialization and transportation step-up increases, all humanity is gradually trending toward being Worldians – all to enjoy total Earth – the static environment appurtenances of their earlier life will become progressively disused and cumbersome. Therefore, the trend to development of rental services industries will be vastly accelerated. After a half century of owning and operating 55 successive automobiles, I am now switching to rental cars. The general concept was pioneered by the telephone companies service-maintained contact instruments which are only incidental to the service. Service industries have now grown to include automobiles, typewriters, calculating machines and many other tools. There are a myriad of other industrial rental services. Despite the uses of the term “ownership”, only a minor fraction of home and car “owners” actually own these items free of encumbrances. The quasi-owners of yesterday and today make payments on mortgages of great length in which the underwriting funds are provided by banks, labor funds, insurance companies. All are underwritten in one way or another by federal governments. The fact is the telephone in the home, though clearly rented, is as clean and new as if purchased and “owned”. It is swiftly replaced by superior sets because it is owned by the telephone company whose use-frequency pays dividends and use-frequency is predicated on the relative efficiency and its induced desirability of the constant improvement of the machines.

I assume that within another two decades, the exclusively geographic identity of humanity will have given way to a general world citizenship in which it will be practical only to operate on a rental service industry basis.

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Concept Ten - EPHEMERALIZATION AND INVISIBLE COMMONWEALTH

The progressive doing of more with less per each and every rein- vested resource unit of energy M (matter), energy R (radiation) and I (Intellect). Wealth is intellect harnessed in animate energy, tooled anticipatorily to automatically produce the forward meta- bolic regeneration of humanity.

Ephemeralization. A ship of the sea had first of all to float and stay on top of the water. A floating ship could and still can carry vastly larger and heavier cargoes than can be carried by men on their backs or on the backs of animals. Through shipping com- petition there developed swift evolution in ways of doing ever more important tasks with ever less material effort and time. This doing-more-with-less came into high magni- tude of effectiveness in the development of steel steamships. Doing of ever more with ever less I identified in 1927 as ’ephemeralization’. It is the major control objective of design science in respect to development of airplane evolution.

As a total consequence of ephemeralization’s paramount importance to the world’s military efforts on the sea, in the air and in space, men are constantly doing so much more with so much less that within the last century we have witnessed the growth from less than 1% to a benefaction of 40% of humanity with a higher standard of living than had been rea- lized in any previous century by any monarch.

The accelerating-acceleration of doing-more-with-less will, within the next 24 years, bring an even higher standard of living to the remaining 60% of humanity, while gaining the same higher standard for the already advantaged 40% – all to be realized out of the Earth’s physical resources which are continually decreasing per each world man.

Ephemeralization, the comprehensive effect of more with lessing, is scientifically identifiable with anti-entropy. Ephemeralization, a product of the metaphysical conserva- tion being more effective and coherent than physical entropy is the number one economic surprise of world man. Up to ten years ago, all world economists counselled the world political leaders that there never had been and never would be enough vital sustenance to support more than a very few.

The development of ephemeralization has been conducted by design scientists and technologists whose numbers have amounted to a small fraction of 1% of all humanity. And their work has been focused almost exclusively upon the weaponry or defense systems. Political men dealing with the great majority of humanity were utterly surprised ten years ago to discover that their destructive weapons system had inadvertently developed a con- structive by-product. This occurred when the prime and secondary weaponry contractors were displaced by other contractors with superior devices. The socially constructive in- advertancies occurred when the displaced weapons contractors turned to the domestic mar- ket for outlets for their high performances per pound and per unit of time capabilities. So much ephemeralization drifted into the domestic economy between 1900-1966 as to have converted 40% of humanity from “have-nots” to “haves”.

This ephemeralization developed by the technology which preoccupied less than 1% of humanity in weapons development had never been thought of as benefiting society. That is why its conversion of 40% of humanity from “have-nots” to “haves” in two-thirds of a century has come as an utter surprise to humanity. 99.99% of humanity don’t know that this is why automobiles pack every highway and mechanical drudge-savers, iceboxes and a higher standard of living are appearing as a flood all around the Earth.

40 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document

Because ephemeralization is accelerating it will complete the task of providing enough for all of humanity within another 34 years. This will occur despite the political systems which deliberately divide society and set one group against another. World man dis-embarrassed of political systems could accomplish universal success within twenty years. The fourteen-year difference might readily be the fatal difference within which a disgruntled man might touch off the atomic war head retaliatory systems which would destroy humanity on Earth.

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Concept Eleven - PRIME DESIGN INITIATIVE

Strategy for attaining and sustaining the comprehensive design conception and realization initiatives by the indi- vidual in the era of the massive world corporations and massive, sovereign, geographical states which only “seem- ingly” overwhelm the individual with their economic ad- vantages in respect to investment capital, working capital, credit capital and influence.

Economic Strategy of the Individual. Comprehensive ephemeralization involves original thought, invention, scientific calculations, technical drawings, scientific proto- typing, testing production engineering. This brings us to the Economic Strategy of the Individual. I have had all manner of experience in initiating the reduction of inventions to industrial use. I have experienced owning, renting of shops, owning and renting tools, hiring of individuals, and dealing in the great complexes of accounting and maintenance of such high priority technology.

I have had all manner of experience in protecting of the individual initiative and I have learned some important lessons, though frequently just short of bankruptcy. I have been able to learn those lessons without going “broke” and have managed eventually to liq- uidate all indebtedness. I have learned that it is fatal for an invention developing pioneer to own his own shop and tools because it forces him to exploit his non-production tools with “paying” products involving repeat performances bound to vitiate experimental work. It is fatal for an inventor-explorer to build up any large staff dependent on any one economic product or focus.

The unique and superior advantage of the economic explorer maintaining his econo- mic initiative in the face of the massive capital, staff and equipment advantages of the large corporations and great states – who seemingly have top-heavy advantage – is demonstra- ted by the lone individual’s complete freedom of the checks and balances of bureaucracy. Walter Chrysler found that I could produce the full fledged operating prototype of a better, more advanced, automobile than could he and his Chrysler Corporation and that I could do so with 1/3 the time and 1/4 the money. The U.S. Navy wrote a report which showed that I was able, time and again, to produce satisfactorily working structural innovation proto- types in one month with an average of only $5,000 and with the help of 30 university students which were superior in every way to the results obtained by the Navy department when deal- ing exclusively with their prime industrial contractors which averaged them two years and 1/4 million dollars only to discover that such methods failed to produce any satisfactory results.

Quite clearly the individual initiative is at highest advantage with the least staff and property.

I have found it essential to take patents. This was proven as 50 large corporations applied to me to operate under my patents. On approximately all such occasions the attor- ney of the large corporation said to my attorney, “Of course, the first thing my client had me do was to try to get around your patents. The only reason we have come to you is be- cause your patents are so well written”. This was to say that the industrial corporation would have ridden over me “rough shod” if I had not protected my inventions with patents. I would never have been heard of if I had not taken patents. The monetary earnings from the patents have been negligible in proportion to the accreditation of my abilities and my theoretical activities accruing as a consequence of the economic and physical success of

42 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document

my geodesic domes. My accreditation as a pioneer trend navigator and environment transformer always concentrating on environment transformation was confirmed by the geodesic dome success. I have taken a large number of patents in every country in the world in which I am allowed as an American to apply. I find that the world is so integrated that patenting within only one nation provides inadequate protection.

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Concept Twelve - SELF DISCIPLINES

Working assumptions, cautions, encouragements and restraints of intuitive formulations and spontaneous actions. My own rule: “Do not mind if I am not understood as long as I am not mis- understood.”

Personal Self Disciplining. In 1927 I gave up forever the general economic dic- tum of society, i.e. that every individual who wants to survive must earn a living. I sub- stituted, therefore, the finding made in concept one, i.e. the individual’s antientropic responsibility in universe. I sought for the tasks that needed to be done that no one else was doing or attempting to do, which if done would physically and economically advantage society and eliminate pain.

As a consequence, it was necessary for me to discipline my faculties to develop technical and scientific capability to invent the physical innovations and their service in- dustry logistics.

My Recommendations for a Curriculum of Design Science:

1. Synergetics

2. General Systems Theory

3. Theory of Games (Von Neumann)

4. Chemistry and Physics

5. Topology, Projective Geometry

6. Cybernetics

7. Communications

8. Meteorology

9. Geology

10. Biology

11. Sciences of Energy

12. Political Geography

13. Ergonomics

14. Production Engineering

44 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document

Concept Thirteen - COMPREHENSIVE COORDINATION

Effected through discovery of nature’s omni-rational vectorial, quantum arithmetical, geometrical, topological, equilibriously and dynamically coordinate intertransformative system. i.e. Synergetics – Energetic, Synergetic, vectorial and topological geometry.

Self development involved my re-establishing the self disciplining in comprehen- sivity which I originally received at the U.S. Naval Academy, which training countered the almost complete trend to specialization in other universities and colleges. At the Naval Academy, the brightest were selected for the most comprehensive training. At the other colleges and universities the brightest were corralled and shunted into sharp specializa- tion. It was evident to me specialization had been developed by the great, master world pirates as a means of dividing up all the bright ones, who might otherwise aspire to dis- place the great ones, and thus conquering society by keeping all powerful individuals com- partmented by their specialization as the great master pirates reserved for themselves all the integrating of the wealth producing potentials accruing to the specialists’ multitude of special detail accomplishments. I call them the great pirates, for they were the masters of the world commerce which took place on the oceans covering 3/4 of Earth. Three miles off shore, all man-made laws were nil. Only the laws of physical universe were operative. The great masters were, therefore, inherently “Outlaws”.

Only the chief naval officers who maintained the master pirates, high seas, world around fleets needed to have the comprehensive capability to be the master pirates right- hand men.

Foremost of my personal disciplines is that: - I must never attempt to sell one of my ideas to others. I must confine myself entirely to the production and testing of the in- vention. I find that there are always capable people who learn of my activity and ask, “What is it that you are doing?” When people ask me either for an explanation or my services, I give them the best I have. I, therefore, have no promotion and allow no promotion by any associates. I have learned that when you ask people to listen to you, they become defensive. On the other hand, when they ask you to speak to them and especially when they pay a high fee, they are highly receptive.

I have learned that all consideration of my inventions and developments by others have occurred in emergencies. In effect, my work emerges through emergencies. The U.S. Marine Corp, the U.S. Navy, the Air Force, the Department of State, the Ford Motor Corp. have all come to me in emergencies when everything else they had tried had failed. I represented the last and most remotely possible solution to their problem.

Because I have disciplined myself and have put into operation all the strategies listed under my fourteen topics, I have always had something awaiting their emergencies which I knew by experimental work would solve their problems – and do it under the cir- cumstances which had created the dilemma. I have never had agents seeking to sell my ideas or my products. I have no agent seeking to sell my lecturing capability and have no agents trying to sell my patents.

Because I only go where I am asked to go, I am able to use the geographic and fre- quency of travels patterning as a trend indicator. I often gain important previews of com- ing events through study of my own trend patterning. Because I live in the frontiers, what happens to me usually happens to others later on. I have therefore powerful trend prognos- ticating experiences.

Design Strategy

It is part of my personal discipline to continue to try making obsolete all the inventions which I have previously developed by designing ever more effective and efficient devices for solving the complex and comprehensive world problems. I consider my patents of no consequence except for their protection of my initiative.

I do not profess anything. I am not a professional. My own description of my own work with university students is: - the attempt to discipline myself to be an effective explorer in the realm of mastery of principles of comprehensive anticipatory design science.

I assumed in 1917 that nature did not have separate departments for chemistry, mathematics, physics, biology, history, etc. I decided nature had only one department and only one arithmetical, angle and frequency, modulating and coordinating system. I am quite confident that I have discovered an importantly large area of the arithmetical, geometrical, topological, crystalographic and energetically vectorial coordinate system employed by nature itself. It is a triangular and tetrahedral system. It uses 60 degree coordination instead of 90 degree coordination. It permits kindergarten modeling of the 4th and 5th arithmetical powers, i.e. 4th and 5th dimensional aggregations of points and spheres, etc., in an entirely rational coordinate system. I have explored the fundamental logic of the structural mathematics strategies of nature which always employ the six sets of degrees of freedoms and most economical actions.

I have been able to develop structures which are shown by engineering publications and scientific papers to be able to cover very large clear span spaces more economically than by any known rectilinear or other shaped systems as for instance 1000 fold more economically weight-wise than accomplished in the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome and 30 times more efficiently than this is to be accomplished by re-inforced concrete or by its 10 times more complex conventional steel trusses.

Scientists operating in the area of the viruses and many places elsewhere in the area of nature have found nature employing the mathematics and the structural strategems which have come by study from the mathematics which I have discovered most probably to be part of nature’s own coordinate system.

I find that there are only two possible co-variables operative in all design in universe. They are modifications of angle and frequency.

Employing the coordinates employed by nature (which as yet are unemployed in any of the educational institutes of the Earth and are as yet unemployed by any professional engineer or architect other than myself) and employing the contents of my fourteen concepts I find I am able to effect ephermeralization in so important a degree as to make it clear that when and if world society adopts and employs my fourteen strategies, mankind will always have more than adequate of everything with which to effect his physical success and intellectual satisfaction.

46 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

Concept Fourteen - WORLD COMMUNITY AND SUB COMMUNITIES OF WORLD MAN

City today must be world serving unit. The real urbanites of 1966 are world people like Constantinos Doxiadis. The whole of humanity is increasing not only its ecological ranging but also is accelerating its pace. The children of the Doxiadis fam- ily of Greece and the Gin Su family of Hong Kong all attend col- leges and universities in America and all hands circle the world yearly as prototypes of all families of tomorrow. Yesterday only notable humans achieved travel abroad. Today anyone may expect to meet anyone else anywhere around the world (and some anywhere in space) with no more surprise than was caused by meeting one another “downtown” a half century ago. Humans are only hyperconsciously aware of themselves or their own parts – their tongues, eyes and fingers – as constituting separate items when those separate parts get damaged. Otherwise humans are aware only of the totality of being as a coordinate part of their total environment. At such times they “feel great”. When hu- mans first acquired automobiles they were acutely aware of all the autos’ separate parts because they had continually to repair, regulate and replace them. Only muscularily powerful amateur experts could drive early cars. A half century later almost any human can drive an auto, a coordinately whole extension of their integral organism. The outcry about automation in general and its emerging comprehensivity is for the moment only provoking, hyperconsciousness of society. All humans and biological phen- omena have always been automated. There will be a gradual sub- sidence of humanity’s consciousness and specific awareness of the separate tool parts of its complex world around network of indus- trialization which is in reality only the externalized automation of its originally only integrally operating, anatomical automation of its metabolic regeneration functions.

World Community and Its Sub Communities. Because synergy shows experimentally the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of the parts and because the known behavior of the whole and the known behavior of some of the parts (at least three) makes possible discovery of the required behavior of the other parts. I assume that all planning of humanity’s economic, urban and other undertakings must start with world trendings and possible modifications of the total or world environment.

According to my speculative reconstruction, the ecological history of humanity around Earth has two chapters. In chapter one, humanity – whose bodies are better than 90% water – lived in huts on rafts beside the rivers, lakes, bays, and oceans, for fish were the most plentiful food and the raft kept the humans safe from wild animals on the shore. Some of these raft dwellers were blown out to sea and preponderantly eastward around Earth’s surface, three quarters of which is water.

In the second chapter of all history, men learned to sail to windward. Following the sun, to which they intuitively attributed their metabolic regeneration, men worked west- ward fighting into the head wind seas.

In Japan the originally sea-faring people have an annual “Golden Boy Day”. They celebrate by flying fish-shaped kites above the roofs of their homes – one for each of their

Design Strategy

male children. The kites symbolize the salmon, who swims and leaps upstream in order to regenerate. That is the Japanese ideal.

Approximately the whole of the last ten thousand years’ span of recorded history takes place during chapter two’s preponderantly westbound movement of humanity. In the Eurasian continent, where 76% of humanity exists, this westward motion finally funnels into Western Europe. As humanity converged it crossbred. Western Europe represented an amalgam of a myriad of previously isolated “nations”. The “nations” had developed through milleniums of inland, inbred adaptations to unique local subsistence patterns. Along the waterfronts the sailors crossbred.

Crossbreeding Europe, intermingling with the Angles and Jutes, poured into the British Isles to crossbreed even more. West bound Indian Ocean people inhabited Africa in ever further westward, tribally inbreeding, inland isolations. Then crossbreeding Western European humanity jumped westward across the Atlantic to the Americas. For ten successive generations they have settled further westward. As they moved westward they crossbred acceleratingly, not only with their own west bound, chapter two Eurasian stocks but with the Eurasian stock of chapter one, which had drifted eastward to the Amer- ican continents at least ten thousand years earlier. Into the north and South American continents and their islands there also flowed westward, both by slave trade and migration, a swiftly crossbreeding homoginization of the inbred African tribesmen.

In California, at the mid-point of the western shores of America, cross-breeding man has become so genetically integrated as to defy superficial identification with any of the earlier inbred national characteristics of Eurasia.

In California today – 1966 – we find an advanced phase of crossbred world man poised on an epochal springboard about to fly both skyward and into the seas’ depths around the Earth, thus to open chapter three of history.

In logical consequence of this historical trending the United Nations was born on the West Coast of America a score of years ago. Logically the air and space vehicles of man’s acceleration into world and universe citizenship are predominantly produced on the West Coast of North America. Around the world we find nationally named airlines – the Ghana, Japan, and India airlines, etc. – but, the vast majority of their vehicles are Cal- ifornia designed, developed, and produced, as are also a large proportion of the new space and sea penetrating vehicles.

California is in the center of the outermost jump-off pad of humanity’s springboard. From this pad, humanity is taking off – from its flounder, snail, and crablike existence, only around the two dimensional bottom of the skyocean world – into its self-interference free, four dimensional occupancy of universe.

99.999 percent – not only of all the search, research and development, but of all the operating controls of man’s entry into the one-town world and its surrounding skyocean – are conducted exclusively in the ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, which are infra and ultra to humanity’s sensorial apprehending. Only through mind conceived and brain operated instruments does humanity command the operations of its birth and entry into world and universe citizenship. Education is therefore essential and central to man’s suc- cessful transformation.

The fundamental concepts of humanity are transforming overnight from the working assumption of man as a physical and economic failure – as inexorably demonstrated through-

out the whole of past history wherein only one in a thousand lived out his days and only one in one hundred thousand lived out his days in economic success.

For only the last twelve years of all history has it been scientifically acknowledged that all of humanity may now be physically and economically successful. Humanity’s master of vast, inanimate, inexhaustible energy sources and the accelerated doing more with less of sea, air and space technology has proven Malthus to be wrong. Comprehensive physical and economic success for humanity may now be accomplished in one-fourth of a century. For the first time in history it is to be assumed now and henceforth that it is normal for man to be a physical and economical success – as normal as it is for a hydrogen atom to demonstrate the success of its designed inter-atterning potentials. Now and henceforth it is not only normal for man to be a physical and economic success but to be so without endangering the success of any others and without interfering with the degrees of freedom of others. A design science revolution is underway.

In California I find a powerful latent awareness of the significance of this great moment of human transition. I find in this community a spontaneous desire to cease back- ing up into our future and enthusiasm for a general forward facing of society.

Typical of the power of this west coast springboard into the new chapter three rela- tionship to universe is the initiative of San Jose State College in throwing off the semantic yoke of “Engineering”, with all its tradition and professionally starched fabric, to re-iden- tify the general engineering undergraduate major as the “Cybernated Systems Discipline”, open to all undergraduates.

Such semantic reorientation is only the beginning. In my constant travel around the world I witness everywhere the swiftly accelerating birth of world man. Nowhere, in my seventy years, and in my many years of world travel, with oft-repeated visits at 174 world around universities and colleges, have I felt the final leap into universal citizenship from the springboard of local inertia to be as imminent as I intuit it to be in California, North America.

The U.S.A. as the theater of crossbred world man best discloses the patterns com- ing upon all men. In the U.S.A. the population census is taken every ten years. Two cen- suses ago, it was found that the average U.S.A. family moves out of town every five years. In the last census, they are moving out of town every 4 1/2 years. The pace is quickening. At the last (every four year) Presidential election, it was estimated that thirty million were unable to vote because they had not been in their new homes long enough to qualify for voting. Since sixty-five million did vote, those disqualified by the glacial speed reshuffling of society numbered 50% of those who did vote. Since the shift is accelerating, it is clear that within a few more national elections that the majority of American citizens will be unable to vote and democracy will have to find other than a static geographical base for qualifying man to have his voice heard.

What do we know and what can we see of Chapter Three. Nature has devised two main and fundamental organic designs for the systematic solution of life’s metabolic regen- eration requirements – the zoologicals and the botanicals, the vegetation is designed with roots to receive its sustenance at first hand by photosynthesis from the sun and sun-ener- gized hydraulicly and pneumaticly regenerated chemical re-cyclings. The zoologicals are designed with high mobility to go after their sustenance and receive their sun energy in- directly by first feeding upon the vegetation. Some zoologicals feed on other zoologicals which latter first feed on vegetation. Man, though designed zoologically to go after his sustenance found few places where the vegetation gave him the fruits and palatable foods.

Design Strategy

Those who did find favorable vegetation conditions set about to guard that territory and to cultivate the most favorable types of vegetation and others hung hopefully about them. Thus, man with very short legs and a very big Earth came to confuse himself with the botanicals and pretended to himself that he had roots and that he owned the favorable pieces of the Earth. The swift evolutionary changes taking place invisibly are about to uproot him – all concepts of urbanization will become obsolete. Only the Earth and the solar system will be his temporary home.

The swift shift of humanity from an agricultural to an industrial world economy draws men from the agricultural lands into the city. The industrialized tools and indus- trialized planting, cultivating, and harvesting service industries sweep over the cultivated lands.

Urbanization is only temporary as the cities become the launching pads for each human’s blast-off into world shuttling citizenship.

The centers of cities explode outwardly like volcanoes to deploy their super-market services to ever newer mobile traffic centers. The immobilized families and individuals begin to shuttle swiftly between high concentrations and highly diffuse deployments. They converge for the metaphysical exchange – for the brain and mind activities – for cultural and commercial exchange for museums, theaters and university study, for broadcasting which is high velocity publishing. They deploy for their physical activities – for the mus- cular and energetic activities – for mountain and water skiing, for factories and physical archaeological and geological and ecological research.

The whole of the urbanism is a vast oscillating system – a world embracing, en- tropic, volcanic, physical explosion countered at increasingly high frequency with the world embracing, metaphysically contracting and information concentrating system which regenerates by broadcast and publishing its progressively generalized concepts for regen- eration of man’s anti-entropic functioning – that fulfills his universe functioning.

R. Buckminster Fuller June 20, 1966

4 Addendum to Design Strategy

FORM OF ANSWERING INVITATIONS TO UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES - Written by John Dixon, Buckminster Fuller’s assistant in 1956 - with a few updated paranthetical notes by Dale Klaus in 1967.

In answering your inquiry about Dr. Fuller’s possible visit to your University, we would like to review the successive work, problems, and cummulative philosophy and strategy of Dr. Fuller:-the nineteen year Dymaxion phase initiated by him in 1927; the Fuller Research Foundation, incorporated in Delaware in 1946; and the recent ten year series of Fuller Projects at universities and colleges, June from 1946 to 1956.

Dr. Fuller visits universities and colleges only when the invitation to do so orig- inates spontaneously from within the respective institutions. He has never suggested such visits. He requires this spontaneity not only of university invitations, but also of any and all acquirers of his developments, e.g., the Ford Motor Company, the United States Marine Corps, the U. S. Air Force, and others who have sought him out and asked for his help. He in no way sought them.

Dr. Fuller accepts university and college invitations only on the basis that he be allowed to continue on campus his exploratory development of a synergetic-energetic geometry and its applications to industry by a discipline which he invented and named “Comprehensive, Anticipatory Design Science”, all of which continuity he initiated in 1927 and all of which initiative he has since maintained.

He also requires assurance that the university or college will waive all “shop- rights” claims to any inventions which he may disclose or bring into visible develop- ment while fulfilling his engagement. This agreement is necessary in order to protect his interests and prerogatives and to guarantee the integrity of his personal control of his continuing search.

During his visit Dr. Fuller makes formally available for class time his mornings from 9 to 12, or his afternoons from 2 to 5, five days a week Monday through Friday. However, he often meets voluntarily with the students and faculty during other hours of the day, evenings, or weekends. He requires that he be left free in the formulation of his program and the conduct of his classes, within the formal time and calendar schedules elected by the universities as stated above.

He is always willing to give two public lectures to local community audiences on behalf of the university. However, any requests for his appearance on programs out- side of the department of the university where he is lecturing must be referred to him directly as sole arbiter of the acceptance and its terms. His general policy, when he can afford the time or money, is to contribute his effort and exploratory-credit-momen- tum to whatever enhancement it might bring the respective universities’ community, pro- fessional and national prestige.

He reserves all publishing rights (written, tape-recorded, transcribed, photo- graphed, filmed, televised, or in any way recorded) of his public or private lectures, developmental programs and their products.

As a result of his vigorously maintained integrity of control, Dr. Fuller has shown that during his university and college engagements that he and those associated with him can within days demonstrate unique, unprecedented - yet efficient - physical,

working solutions for hitherto stubborn contemporary problems of world around industri- alizing society by conducting a design-science enterprise program and applying thereto his comprehensive and minimum family of Industrial Logistics Principles which includes the disciplines of synergetic-energetic geometry and his Airocean World’s economic geo- graphy, and his energetic environment valving. (See R. B. Fuller’s essay ’Designing a New Industry", 1946.)

Within the short university visits he develops “true” - i.e. operative - general- ized prototype structures, suitable, with only a few special modifications, for advanced industrial mass-reproduction and distribution.

The projects include complete documentation in tape recordings, diary, general systems strategy arguments, drawings, mathematical formulae, and a detailed report which includes actual project cost accounting, purchase specifications and inventories of latest industrial product and service sources. The project’s public relations members have tasks designed to educate the neighboring students, the university in general and the public at large regarding specific, unique facts characterizing the undertaking. Dr. Fuller makes available to them his wide acquaintance and growing credit within the publishing world. (See’Dymaxion Index’- 1927-1956.)

In order that the students may be properly oriented historically, economically, technically and psychologically, Dr. Fuller must give approximately fifty hours of lectures and experimental demonstrations during a four week project (See ’Universal Requirements of a Scientific Dwelling Advantage" by R. B. Fuller, 1927…See ’Ideas and Integrities" Prentice Hall, 1963, ’B. Fuller,"by John McHale, George Braziller Pub- lishing Company, 1960.)

A project resulting in a new, mass needed, desirable and producible prototype for world-around industry is predicated upon much more than lectures (See ’The Comprehen- sive Designer" by R. B. Fuller, 1950.) Dr. Fuller and those working with him each dedi- cate a minimum of fifty to one hundred hours every week throughout an undertaking. The result is a high-speed integration of talent, techniques, and latest developments in nation- wide resources - all brought to focus in a new industrially reproducible prototype of Dr. Fuller’s latest invention disclosure at the respective universities. (See ’Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller" by Robert W. Marks, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959-62.)

As Dr. Fuller’s design decisions are unprecedented they require mathematical calculations, fortifying tests, and highly specialized advice by university and industrial authorities.

Long distance telephoning, telegraphing, and air express are essential tools. For example, at the North Carolina State College Fuller Project, January, 1954, the telephone communication costs bettered 300, but brought industry participation in materials donated and usually air delivered, valued at 6,000 for this one project. Technical representatives of Bakelite Company and Container Corporation of America joined Dr. Fuller’s staff in at- tending the project. Colonel H. C. Lane, Head, Aviation Logistics and Material Branch Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, was official observer for the Department of Defense.

In order that the students of a COMPREHENSIVE, ANTICIPATORY DESIGN- SCIENCE ENTERPRISE may operate as an immediately effective team, Dr. Fuller requires that the students at outset elect from their group a coordinator, and arrange themselves progressively and interchangeably into the following “aircraft industry”

functions:

mathematics drafting purchasing accounting materials handling stress engineering production management expediting sub-assemblies general assembly installations packaging contiguous chemical, stress and methods experiments maintenance of finished assembly project disassembly and storage secretary of the enterprise who make final report treasurer of the enterprise who make cost accounting internal public relations external public relations

See final project reports of university students:

University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Timber Tensegrity Geodesic 3/4 sphere

San Jose State College, San Jose, California. Paperboard Dome. 1966

Michael Ben Eli, Ghana. Octahedron unit geodesic dome. 1964

McGill University, School of Architecture, Canada. Aluminum 28 ft. Hemisphere dome 1957 See Appendix “A”

University of Natal School of Architecture, South Africa. “Indlu” Geodesic Research Project, 1958

Cornell University, College of Architecture Cardboard dome 1964

Washington University, School of Architecture, St. Louis 42 foot 5/8 sphere 1954 See Appendix “A”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fuller Paperboard Project, Field trips 1954

54 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

Tulane University Geodesic hemisphere model, 108 ft. 1954 See Appendix “A”

University of Michigan College of Architecture and Design Two cardboard structures built for Camp Tamarack & U.S. Marine Corps. 1954

Superficial misconception is readily developed in respect to Dr. Fuller’s unprecedented projects. This is born of his effort to give the student the maximum opportunity in direct realistic challenges. It must be remembered that his university project Geodesic domes - sometimes 1200 sq. ft. clearspan floor space, and proof against maximum hostile environment behaviors - are, for instance, manufactured and erected within one week at a university only because Dr. Fuller has an experience- fertilized and a philosophy-gestated thirty-year backlog of hitherto unpublished, pro- gressively evolving, teleologic design inventions in his mental inventory as solutions for a wide family of previously unconquered socio-economic problems. He can therefore make extemporaneous exposure of both his comprehensive and detailed problem statement and design-science solution strategy in respect to his mentally inventoried and as yet unheralded complex inventions as appropriate to the occasion. He always designs his university and other projects comprehensively and thus eliminates any chance of decision- vacillating delays in fulfillment of his tightly designed commitments within the exquisitely short periods available to the solutions - usually one week to six weeks, with two weeks or more preferable.

It is to be noted that in assigning the students their departmentalized aircraft industry functions for the high-speed teleologic realization of a project, that Dr. Fuller very specifically calls to the students’ attention that there is no “design” department, and those who will go to the drawing boards will do so only in order to document both the comprehensive and detailed phases of the complex design invention which Dr. Fuller discloses to the student team. The satisfactory freshness of his design to them lies only in the fact that this particular unique integration of principles and evolving industrial resources has never before been physically visualized and realized.

It is also Dr. Fuller’s invariable practice to include in his briefing of the students an outline history and contemporary review of patent law developments and the unique relationship of the Letters Patent to the effective functioning of the individual within the complexities of world integrating industrial economics. The Letters Patent constitute the only means of balancing the time and experience invested by the individual on his own initiative on behalf of the commonwealth.

Dr. Fuller then informs the students of his personal proprietorship of a number of patents and also of his common law rights and protection in relation to his developing inventions, and in relation to any of his inventions which he may disclose to the students in connection with the solution of the problem which he is about to present and solve for them. He then asks them to affirm to him their intention to respect his rights and to protect him when he makes invention disclosure to them so that he may feel free to admit them to a true industrial frontier prototype birth, gestatively timed to that moment in history. So far the students have always confirmed their willingness to respect and protect his inventions and the whole procedure is usually tape recorded. If they are not willing, Dr. Fuller would have to present a non-invention-containing, and therefore vitiated, problem.

Form Of Answering Invitations to Universities and Colleges

Inasmuch as Dr. Fuller has no interest whatsoever in routinely repetitive cirricula or the customary hypothetical exercises of architectural and engineering schools there would be no problem and he would have to leave the school or return to a program where students are unwilling to operate on Dr. Fuller’s terms consisting only of exploratory lecturing.

It is reasonable to suppose that many of the students might wish to take later professional advantage of the specific technical knowledge they gain while studying with Dr. Fuller, by applying that knowledge to their own special design and production of modified versions of his patented Geodesic structures. Dr. Fuller therefore promises his students that when one of them who has completed one of his seminars in a satisfactory manner, makes specific application to him that he will grant the student - or former student - a special license to produce one Geodesic or other of his patented structures at a time, which license is non-transferable, but is renewable in each specific instance, so long as the work performed under the license by each of the individuals comes up to standards of performance maintained by Dr. Fuller and of which performance adequacy is to be the sole judge.

This license taking may be likened to the process of obtaining a building permit from a building authority. It requires payment to Dr. Fuller of a nominal royalty fee, appropriate to the scale of economic advantage attained by the Geodesic or other patented invention undertakings over conventional methods.

The magnitude of a university undertaking - where a university wishes specifically that Dr. Fuller’s visit shall eventuate in an industrial prototyping - depends upon the amount of time and money which a university decides to commit; otherwise the decision rests entirely with Dr. Fuller and whether he wishes to invest his own funds for that purpose. The record of the past nine years during which Dr. Fuller has been conducting such prototyping at the universities shows that $2,000 per week is the desirable minimum which should be budgeted for communication, overhead, materials, tooling, etc. Projects have been successfully developed on a lower budget, however.

When a university decides to pay the cash expenses of the production prototype, the prototype model itself, but not its reproduction rights, belongs to and remains at the university.

It is a basic condition of his problem disclosures at the universities - to which he calls every participant’s advanced attention - that the reproduction rights always remain the exclusive property of Dr. Fuller.

When Dr. Fuller pays the cash expenses of the prototype, the model as well as the reproduction rights belong exclusively to him and he may move the model or the university may require that he move it from the campus.

In order to demonstrate the evolutionary significance of Dr. Fuller’s work, the following resume is given of the growing acceptance by society of his individual efforts:

In 1927 Dr. Fuller adopted certain self-discovered principles for integrating the effectiveness of high-priority science, technology and industry in solution of the shelter economics of an Airocean World.

After nineteen years of full scale experiments and publication of their results, Dr. Fuller’s principles won tentative academic support in 1946.

This led six years later in 1952 to the initial phases of ultimate full scale acceptance of Dr. Fuller’s principles by industry as represented by the Ford Motor Company for whom - on that company’s spontaneous initiative and invitation - he produced their Rotunda’s clearspan Geodesic dome at Dearborn, Michigan. This dome was produced with 1/29th the structural weight, 1/4th the dollars, and 1/10th the time investment of best previous engineering solutions for equivalent problems.

Though the United States Government as represented by the Air Force manifested interest seven years ago in Dr. Fuller’s principles as applied to structures, when General Grandison Gardner invited Dr. Fuller to install one of his Geodesic domes in the Pentagon Garden in February 1949 (which Dr. Fuller installed in four hours by himself with the partial aid of one passer-by); though the Navy Department manifested interest in his work five years ago in 1951 when they invited him to furnish a proposal for a Geodesic Arctic maintenance hangar; and though a Department of Defense agency four years ago in 1952 asked Dr. Fuller to submit a design for a rigid plastic dome to enclose radar equipment - it was not until the economic validity of these principles has been dramatically demonstrated by Dr. Fuller in the successful completion of the Ford Rotunda Dome in May 1953, that the United States Government and its Department of Defense representatives - despite their earlier ready conceptioning of the Geodesic structures’ logistic potentials - could hope to enlist budgetary procurement of Geodesic structures by the due process of democratic government authority.

In October 1953, Major - now Lt. Colonel - W. L. Woodruff, U. S. Marine Corps, telegraphed and wrote Dr. Fuller at Princeton University asking for an appointment for Colonel H. C. Lane, Head, Logistics and Material Branch, Division of Aviation, Headquarters, U. S. Marine Corps, and in January 1954 Colonel Lane and Major Woodruff sought out Dr. Fuller at Raleigh, North Carolina, and asked him to apply his patented principles and inventions to the solution of Marine Corps problems. (See (1) preliminary “Informal Report on a Study of Requirements and Design of Shelters of Marine Aviation Advanced Bases”, February 1954; (2) interim report “U. S. Marine Corps Light-Weight Shelter Study”, August 1954; and (3) “Final Report: A Study of Shelter Logistics for Marine Corps Aviation”, June 1955.)

As of the summer of 1955, Dr. Fuller and his associates in his two operating companies Geodesics, Inc. and Synergetics, Inc., and his associates of the Fuller Research Foundation, had demonstrated Geodesic structures providing such spectacular advantages that the Marine Corps Final Report on evaluation of Geodesic structures concluded that this “is the first major basic improvement in mobile military shelters in the past 2600 years”. (See enclosed reprint Army-Navy-Air Force JOURNAL, July 2, 1955, and Navy TIMES, July 9, 1955.)

As of the summer of 1956, Dr. Fuller and his companies have realized the following: (1) Geodesic structures as the U. S. Air Force’s controlled environments guarding the physics of our northernmost continental perimeter’s early warning radar system - called the DEW Line; (2) Geodesic structures as the controlled environments of certain of the International Geophysical Year’s South Polar activities; (3) Geodesic structures as the controlled environments guarding the hot-front mechanics of the U. S. Marine Corps Aviation’s half-way-around-the-world “contacts” should a retaliatory

Form Of Answering Invitations to Universities and Colleges 57

offensive be triggered; (4) Geodesic structures as the controlled environments of our “world economic and cultural” frontier outposts in Afghanistan and Turkey as the U. S. Commerce and State Departments’ battle for the spontaneous self-enrollment in democracy of the world’s next two billion customers.

(In 1967 eleven years after this letter was written by John Dixon over 5000 of Dr. Fuller’s geodesic domes had been installed in 50 countries around the world.)

It is the expressed opinion of those versed in industrial and government research and development projects that in order for an industrial corporation or a government agency to achieve results equivalent to any one of those accomplished by Dr. Fuller in his short one week to two month university conducted design-science enterprises, such corporation or government agency would have to budget at minimum two year’s time and $250,000.

Explanation is that the flexibility of initiative in “random element” operations such as those of Dr. Fuller need not pay the price of “cautious responsibility” imposed by the checks and balances of large organizations. This freedom of initiative plus the dedicated work of students accounts for the vast differentials in time and moneys involved.

In 1934, Walter Chrysler pointed out that Fuller, as sole authority in his project, developed what he, Fuller, wished to develop, and not a bureaucratic compromise of the design itself. Walter Chrysler said that what he had wanted to develop was what Fuller succeeded in developing, to wit, the Dymaxion Transport - whereas what Walter Chrysler got from his corporation’s development of the same initial objective as Fuller’s, was the hodge-podge Chrysler 1934 “Airflow”.

Chrysler, after careful survey in 1934 of three of Fuller’s Dymaxion 4-D (Four Dimensional) Transports also stated that they would have cost the Chrysler Corporation of any other large automobile manufacturer, twice as many dollars and three fold the development time.

Colonel Lane said that the rations of cost, time, and technical advantages accru- ing to Dr. Fuller’s individual developments are even more favorable in the case of their comparison to prototype and development work when conducted by government agencies, and also when compared to the work as conducted by large private corporations.

Quite obviously the economic, technical and educational advantages accruing to the Fuller projects at universities are not caused exclusively by the fact that he operates as an individual. As Walter Chrysler pointed out it is clear that as an individual Fuller could develop a fiasco in equally swift order, had he not a unique resource of profitable experience in such undertakings. Prime constituents of the advantages realized to date at Fuller conducted university and college projects as the following:

(1) Dr. Fuller’s third-of-a-century prototyping experience (2) dedicated student hours (3) access to general university facilities (4) rapid access to industrial support within the larger patterns of Dr. Fuller’s personal friends and industrial acquaintances and his working associates outside of any one university

(5) a travelling office comprising unique technical files and special tools (6) maintenance of long distance liaison with other Fuller Research Foundation branches in the USA and other countries (7) maintenance of liaison with other continuing Fuller university projects. For example, four Tulane University students flew from New Orleans, La., to Raleigh, North Carolina, in a special plane for a day’s cross-fertilization with Fuller project students of North Carolina State College concerning polyester fiberglass production methods. (Such information was not available as student experience at any university in the country at that time except in Fuller projects.) (8) maintenance of liaison with swiftly developing technical and scientific resources of Dr. Fuller’s two research and development companies: Geodesics, Inc., which provides modification of off-the-shelf Geodesic and Octet Truss structures for government agencies, and Synergetics, Inc. which provides the same for commercial and private uses.

As a result of experience to date it is evident:

(1) that the time Dr. Fuller puts in at any one university in one month is so concentrated that it is the equivalent in hours to full term course, and therefore the students’ schedules should at year’s outset be arranged to reduce conflicts with his visits. (2) that the aftermath of a project be anticipated and the desire of many of the students to continue study be provided for in the regular curricula.

If any of the students or faculty who participated in one of Dr. Fuller’s university projects wishes to carry on further research in any of the exploratory strategies initiated by Dr. Fuller, such as synergetic-energetic geometry, or experimental Geodesic, Discontinuous Compression Continuous Tension, or Octetruss structures, or Dymaxion topological transformation cartography, or teleologic design process measurement and charting, etc., etc., he, or they, may do so under the auspices of the Fuller Research Foundation which was established for this and other purposes. If the activity is to be carried on by a well qualified individual or group, a branch of the Fuller Research Foundation may be established in his, or their, locality - and possibly at or within the university - by special arrangement with Dr. Fuller. Such branches of the F. R. F. receive basic data files and are periodically informed of any important developments taking place in any other branches, or at Dr. Fuller’s university projects, or within the increasing activities of Geodesics, Inc. and Synergetics, Inc.

Because of constantly changing world around resource conditions and changing scientific and technical relationships, the backlog of Dr. Fuller’s “desirable” developments as matched with the unpredictable spontaneous invitation “opportunities” of Dr. Fuller’s controlled experimentation, it is difficult to determine in advance which specific projects will have priority or development at the respective universities.

Dr. Fuller spends - out of his own pocket - a gross minimum of 35,000 annually, (1946-1956 average), and 150,000 annually, (1957-1967 average) per year in continuing and expanding his search under field conditions. He has been “at home” less than six months in the last four years. The continuation of his work under the increasingly

Form Of Answering Invitations to Universities and Colleges

arduous schedule requires the following gross fees from a university or college (which fees do not include whatever funds the university or college may wish to budget for materials and other project expenses):

1956 1967 one day $ 500. 2,000. one week 1,100. 6,000. two weeks 1,800. 10,000. three weeks 2,500. 12,000. four weeks 3,000. 15,000.

To the above must be added his travel expenses computed at ten cents a mile from New York or last headquarters.

Net of this letter dollar-wise is that Dr. Fuller’s fees are graduated relative to length of visits; the amount a university wishes to invest in a project is optional; and industry participation is unpredictable but tending to increase.

In some instances when Dr. Fuller is invited to speak or to conduct a project, it may be that the financial ability of those asking will not permit payment of his total pro-rated overhead. His acceptance of an invitation under these special circumstances must of economic necessity represent a direct gift from him to the participants of such occasion in the amount of whatever portion of his overhead cost the sponsors are unable to under-write. In these instances we request that the institution make payment in full for his basic cost charge and we then issue Dr. Fuller’s check of donation of the net amount which he is giving, made payable to the institution.

Faithfully yours,

John Dixon Assistant to Buckminster Fuller

Enclosures

60 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

5 Vision 65 Keynote Lecture

R. Buckminster Fuller

Our theme subjects of communications and vision are of immediate interest because today world society is operating almost exclusively in the inaudible and nonvisible area of the physical universe. I think it is safe to say that 99 percent of all the important work now being done by man – relating to our evolutionary advance – is work going on in the areas above and below the tunable range of man’s direct optical or other sensorial participation in the electro-magnetic spectrum. Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on.

You who are convening as participants in the Vision 65 meeting are those rare individuals, only one of whom appears in every one hundred thousand humans. You intuit the necessity, and take the initiative in trying to comprehend the significance of the invisible evolution. Thereafter, you develop ways of alerting society to its newly evolving conditions. It is possible to develop means for society to inter-communicate its new concepts and adjustments thereto at greatly accelerated rates. You are uniquely concerned with finding effective ways for man to visualize, understand, and respond advantageously to what is going on despite approximately total inaudibility and invisibility.

In the very short time which I have to think out loud with you, I want to think about what I know of high potential trends in communication.

Certainly, the accelerating accomplishments in electro-probing of the brain are important. I find that the men who are the physiological probers of the brain are beginning to understand its energy patterns. They have identified many of the storage areas for specific types of information. They have apprehended much of the traffic pattern of the brain’s information processing. I find these men are not prone to be prognosticators but do not shudder or feel me to be over daring when I say in their presence that possibly within the next decade we will have discovered that what we have always spoken of in the past as telepathy is in fact ultra, ultra high frequency electro-magnetic wave propagation. We may find that we are doing a great deal more subconscious communicating with one another than we are accomplishing in the “reality” of the visually tunable ranges of the electro-magnetic spectrum. That is one reason why I do not prepare and read or memorize my lectures. I prefer to think my way along in front of my audience, speaking my thoughts as they occur. I am confident that my spoken thoughts are greatly affected by sub-conscious feedback from my audiences.

I’d like also to prospect a little regarding my Skyocean World Map on the stage’s backdrop behind me (see opposite page). It is an aid in effectively conceiving the totality of world (and universe) events, as we shall presently realize.

With our enormous specialization we have powerful insights in a variety of unique directions, but we have very little integrated comprehension of the significance of the total information. I find that not only does our vision have a narrow electro-magnetic spectrum range but that we also have a very limited apprehending range within the spectrum of motive velocities. For this reason, we see and comprehend very few motions among the vast inventory of unique motions and transformation developments of the universe.

Universe is a non-simultaneous complex of unique motions and transformations. Of course, we don’t “see” and our eyes cannot “stop” the 186,000 miles per second kind of motion. We don’t see the atomic motion. We don’t even see the stars in motion though they move at speeds over one million miles per day. We don’t even see the hands of the clock in motion. We remember where the hands of the clock were when last we looked,

and thus we accredit that motion has occurred. In fact, experiment shows that we see and comprehend very little of the totality of motions.

Therefore society tends to think statically and is always being surprised, often uncomfortably, sometimes fatally. Lacking dynamic apprehension it is difficult for humanity to get out of its static fixations and specifically to see great trends evolving.

We do from time to time take progressive stage photographs of subvisibly changing phenomena, such as plant growth, and accelerate the rate of projection of the successive pictures to make possible man’s seeing the changes take place at a rate that he identifies as “motion”.

To rectify this condition, I have speculated and experimented a great deal on the development of what is called the “Geoscope” or miniature Earth. The particular Geoscope that we think about a great deal is 200 feet in diameter. The reason that we have chosen that 200 foot size – which is about twice the diameter and eightfold the volume of the world globe at the New York World’s Fair – is that if we use the aerial mosaic contact photographs taken by the Air Force at the lowest standard flight level, and put the whole world inventory of contact size photographs together as a continuous spherical surface mosaic picture, they will make a 200 foot diameter globe. In the 200 foot diameter spherical aerial mosaic we can see men’s houses – but we can’t see men. In a sense we can recognize man because we recognize his farm and his house. On a 200 foot globe, pasted up with an aerial photo mosaic, you could see all of humanity’s highways, railways, towns and houses. Any human could identify his home on such a sphere.

This 200 foot sphere could be mounted 200 feet above the water, suspended invisibly from masts arising from the Blackwell Ledges in the East River of New York City, just south of Welfare Island. The weight of the structure would be so light that the cables suspending it from the masts would be invisible. You would have a 200 foot diameter miniature Earth apparently floating out in space one half mile away from the United Nations Building. The miniature Earth’s top would be at about the height of the top of the United Nations Building.

Fourteen years’ development work on the 200 foot Geoscope makes it possible to describe it with accuracy. Ten million electric light bulbs, one for each two square inches, evenly covering the sphere’s entire surface would be hooked up to a computer. The light intensity in each bulb is controllable. We would in effect, have an omni-directional “spherical” television tube which seen from the United Nations Building would have as good resolution as a fine mesh half tone print. This spherical TV like “tube” would accurately picture the whole earth. We wouldn’t need a rigid structural outline of the continents, for the latter would be part of the spherical picture described by the lights. You would be able to look at any part of the earth that you want – because you could have the computer rotate the spherical earth picture on the 200 foot sphere surface in any preferred way.

How would we use this giant Geoscope? We could, for instance, show all the population data for the world for the last three hundred years. We would identify every thousand human beings by a red light located at the geographical centers occupied by each one thousand human beings. You would then be able in one minute to develop the picture of the world’s population growth and geographical spread for 200 years. You would see the glowing red mass spreading northwestward around the globe like a great fire. You would be able to run that data for another second or two which would carry you through three or four more decades of population growth. While the edge of the data would be unreliable, the gravity and momentum centers of population would be quite reliable.

Vision 65 Keynote Address

All the satellites going around Earth make their circuits at about the pace of the minute hand of the clock–roughly one circuit per hour. So we couldn’t see the satellites’ motion around the Earth except by accelerated motion it is easy to introduce into Geoscope. All the cloud cover and weather information around Earth can be shown and accelerated to predict the coming weather everywhere.

The Geoscope is only one of many devices that could provide man with a total informa- tion integrating medium. We’re going to have to have some way for all humanity to see total Earth. Nothing could be more prominent in all the trending of all humanity today than the fact that we are soon to become a world man; yet we are greatly frustrated by all of our local, static organizations of an obsolete yesterday.

I will speak about other technical devices which may develop to facilitate communica- tion. One has been developed in respect to language problems. For instance, there have continued to be great explorations to determine the geographical origins of the Pacific peoples. It has been possible to take all the languages of the Pacific and of all its, as yet, existing tribes and to identify transitional stages in the evolutionary sound pattern develop- ments of the whole range of words. It is possible to identify the earlier and later sound forms in evolutionary sequences. A Southern Illinois University professor was able to identify all these sound patterns and to put them into the computer to find the lines pointing toward origins. The computer showed that the languages of the Pacific clearly came from the region of New Britain just East of New Guinea.

The same kind of evolutionary working with word sounds shows that it is going to be quite possible for the computer to find the most commonly recognizable and speakable sound and meaning relationships common to all world people. Indications are that the computers will probably develop some kind of phonetic acceleration leading toward a common world language. I don’t think we need to talk about too many more of such trends, but many will be realized.

Men must have been in critical life sustaining crises to have invented words. When we have something vital to say we can usually develop the means of communication. Today with our great vocabulary inheritance we squander meanings on unworthy causes and communicate little that needs to be said.

I will now talk about what it seems to me needs to be communicated by man today. Up to the time of Thomas Malthus at the opening of the 19th century we had had many great world empires–but all the pre-sixteenth century great world empires such as those of Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great, the Ottomans and Rome, were all what I call “Flat Empires”, that is, they were all part of the same pre-sixteenth century cosmology of man which conceived of the Earth as being flat–a great island, apparently surrounded horizon- tally to infinity by the sea. All the great empires were flat postage-stamp empires inside of the great infinity. All our ancient world maps show that flat concept with civilization centered around the Mediterranean Sea, which word means sea in the middle of the land.

And the people, in the times of Alexander the Great or of Caesar or of Saladin, all thought in that flat way. That is why “simple, elementary, plane geometry” is used and taught to beginners and “solid” is considered more difficult and “spherical trig” even more advanced and more difficult.

When you think about the real consequences of that psychologically, philosophically and mathematically, it is devastating. It means that “inside” the empire, we have some- thing we call civilization while “outside” the empire begins the unknown wilderness with

pretty rough people and outside of that live dragons and beyond the dragons, flat infinity. What we have in flat land is an only local finiteness, and all outward around us extends the flat infinity. This meant then that the Greeks in attempting to communicate their mathema- tical conceptioning defined the circle as “an area bound by a closed line of equal radius from one point,” or a triangle as “an area bound by a closed line of three angles, three edges and three vertexes.” The Greeks talked only about the area that was “bound” as having validity, finiteness and identity while outside, on the other side of the bounding line there exists only treacherous terrain leading outwardly to infinity and therefore boundless. This has a tremendous feedback effect and explains the ingrained fundamental biases in our present thinking. We tend to think only of one side of a line as definable, organized, and valid. “Our side is natural, right and God’s country” and vice-versa. All humanity has been conditioned to accredit only its own local area of experience as being natural, and the logical prototype of all that is good and acceptable with all else remote, hostile, treacherous and infinite. Infinite systems may contain an infinity of variables. The ancient world was imaginatively controlled by an infinity of Gods.

The British Empire was so called because the great business venturers – the great outlaws – the world men – who ruled the world’s ocean found the British Isles to be their most easily defendable ship building bases which coincidentally and conveniently also com- manded the whole waterfront of all the European customers for the venturers’ Oriental booty. The venturers “Shanghaied” their crews out of the British pubs and because there were so many ships with so many British sailors aboard the world came to identify the most suc- cessful world outlaw organization as the British Empire. This was the first empire of man to occur after we knew that the Earth was a sphere. A sphere is a mathematically finite or closed system. It is an omni-symmetrical closed system. A sphere is finite unity.

Thomas Malthus, the professor of political economics of the East India Company was the first economist ever to receive all the vital statistics and economic data from a closed system world. Once the world conceived of as a sphere and finite, there are no longer an infinite number of varying possibilities identifiable uniquely as whims of Gods.

Because Earth had been discovered by its high-seas masters to be a closed and finite system, the great pirates who controlled the seas took their scientists around the world to discover and disclose to them its exploitable resources. Only because the Earth constituted a closed system could the scientists inspect, in effect, all the species and only thus was Darwin able to develop the closed system theory of “evolution of species.” Such a theory could not have existed before that. It would have had to include dragons and sea-serpents. All the people in all the previous open-edged Empires lived in a system, within whose bordering infinity anything could happen. Paganism (or peasantism) wasn’t illogical. Geo- metrically speaking, the pagans could have any number of gods because any kind might occur in infinity. There were an infinite number of chances of upsetting the local pattern which was a most satisfying idea if it happened that the individual didn’t like the prevailing local pattern.

It seems strange that we were not taught about the historical, philosophical and economic significance of the foregoing transition from an open to a closed world system. However, the omission can be explained by realizing that a closed system would exclude any variables supposedly operating external to the system. This automatically would exclude any super-natural phenomena such as the theologies of the organized religions. And because the churches were strong and the great pirates wished to obscure both their monopoly of the riches of the closed infinite system and their grand world ocean strategy for its control, significance of the concept of a closed world system was popularly unreal- ized.

Vision 65 Keynote Address

Once a closed system is recognized as exclusively valid, the list of variables and the degrees of freedom are closed and limited to six positive and six negative alternatives of action for each local transformation event in universe.

In view of Thomas Malthus discovery that the world’s people multiplied themselves much more rapidly than they were able to produce goods to support themselves, what could prayers do to alter those hard facts? For approximately a century the world mastering venturers “classified” Malthus’ books as secret information, belonging exclusively to the East India Company. Once “classified” that kind of information leaked out only amongst the pirates and the scholars. Marx, as a great scholar, studying in England encountered the Malthusian data. It was equally clear to Marx that there was not enough to go around. Marx said, "Since there is not enough to go around for all and not enough even for ’many’–certainly those few who are arbitrarily favored by the prevailing system and thereby enabled to survive their allotted span of “four score years and ten” ought to be the ones who are most “worthy” and those who do the work “obviously” – to Marx – were the most “worthy”.

That is logical thinking.

Those who opposed him said that head work and daring enterprise which alone conceived of the great value to be realized by society could also increase the abundance and support more people and that the enterprisers should be conceded to be the exclusive few who could and should survive. Others said it should be the bright ones – who by their superior intellectual fitness alone could increase the numbers who could be supported. The choice of “who” should survive has always underlain all class warfare. Should it be the brightest, the toughest, the bravest – or who should it be?

Certainly, the corollary to Darwin’s theory of evolution which expounded “Survival only of the fittest,” seemed to fit neatly with Malthus who observed that only a few were surviving their full span of years. It was assumed to be obvious by those in power that a scientific law supported and vindicated their position. Despite the great pirate’s satisfaction, the question persisted amongst the “outs” as to “who were the fittest?” Would it prove in the end to be the workers, or would it be some military class or would it be some intellectual class?

Just before I went to Harvard University in 1913, before the start of World War One, an “uncle” gave me some counsel. He was a very rich “uncle”. My father had died when I was quite young. My “uncle” said, "Young man, I think I must tell you some things that won’t make you very happy. I know that you are impressed with your grandmother’s Golden Rule: ’Do unto others, as you would they should do unto you.’ But my uncle went on to tell me about the discoveries of Thomas Malthus. He spoke about the pre-Malthusian times when there could reasonably have been any number of Gods. He made it clear that in the early empires, the concept of the golden rule was highly plausible. There seemingly were an infinity of chances that it could work. "But, my uncle said, “a few of us now know from the closed system experts that the golden rule doesn’t work. Those few of us who are rich and who really have the figures know that it is worse than one chance in one hundred that you can survive your alloted days in any comfort. It is not you or the other fellow; it is you or one hundred others. And if you are going to survive– and have a family of five and wish to prosper–you’re going to have to do it at the expense of five hundred others. So, do it as neatly and cleanly and politely as you know how and as your conscience will allow. At any rate, that’s what you’re up against.” He went on to say, “I’m not going to try to educate your grandmother because she’s quite happy in thinking her own golden rule way, and – of course unknown by her–I have taken care of her one hundred alternates.” My uncle said, "There are few even today who really know this is so. There are those all around the world

who have their gods. They keep dying off, short of their potential years, but they keep them- selves happy by having their hopes and infinite possibilities. So we don’t tell them about it."

That “you or me” pattern began to emerge in the sailor’s jargon around the time of World War One. In the time of the 1929 to 1941 depression, Americans began to learn about Malthus. But, I also found Malthus unknown as I interrogated educated audiences, for in- stance, the University audience in the city of Stockholm in 1961. The people of Sweden think deeply in economics. I asked how many of them had known of Malthus, and found that they had never heard of him. I asked the question around the world and found that Malthus is hardly known outside of the United States and England. So, the Malthus concept–“know- ing what it was all about”–was not disseminated by the economically successful few to the rest of the world.

At the present moment in history, we find ourselves in a fundamentally different economic position. When, a decade ago, Eisenhower went to meet with Khrushchev in Geneva, both had been informed by their military and scientists regarding the magnitude of the de- structive capability of the atomic bomb. And Eisenhower said, as he went to that confer- ence, “There is no alternative to peace.” I’m sure Khrushchev, with the same realization must have felt the powerful responsibility of that moment. Both being political realists and hard fact men, knew that they would not be able to make any important peace agreements as conceived solely by themselves. Their proposals and agreements, if any, would have to be backed by their respective political parties, and their parties were always in mortal contest at home with their chief opposition parties which waited upon altruistic moves of the “ins” as opportunities to impeach them for treachery to their respective sovereign power’s ideo- logical premises. Any soft headed step on the part of the leader would throw the party out, while Eisenhower and Khrushchev couldn’t yield an inch politically, then ideologically and militarily both of them brought along their atomic scientists and allowed them to talk to each other in a limited manner regarding any at all possible peaceful uses of the atom.

Only one decade ago, at the meeting in Geneva and its companion meeting of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations it came so clearly into scientific view that the leading world politicians could acknowledge it to be true that–as reported unequivo- cally by Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American–for the first time in the history of man, it was in evidence that there could be enough of the fundamental metabolic and me- chanical energy sustenance for everybody to survive at high standards of living–and further- more, there could be enough of everything to take care of the increasing population while also always improving the comprehensive standards of living. Granted the proper integra- tion of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide for all man to enjoy all Earth at a higher standard of living than all yesterday’s kings, with- out self interferences and with no one being advantaged at the expense of another.

But clearly both political leaders and their respective states were frustrated by all the political checks and balances each side has set up to protect and advantage only their own and their allies side in view of yesterdays dictum that there was only enough of what it takes to support one in a hundred. So, all the ages-long fears; all the bad habits, all the short- sighted expedients that have developed in custom and law frustrated whatever might be done to realize the new potential. But the fact to remember is that it was only one decade ago that man had this completely surprise news that Malthus was indeed wrong and there now could be enough to go around–handsomely.

Inasmuch as I have found that the majority of people around the world had never heard of Malthus–coupled with our observation that not more than 1% of humanity read what Piel said and thereby understood what had occurred at Geneva a decade ago; and at present not

Vision 65 Keynote Address 67

more than 1/1000th of one percent of humanity as yet recall and as yet accredit the scientists’ realization at Geneva that Utopia was now, for the first time feasible; it is easy to understand that what I am saying to you now must be jolting.

World society’s confusions regarding what we are reviewing here are great. The fact is, however, that the foregoing economic facts are mankind’s now most important considerations. We are faced with the necessity of developing effective ways to educate all humanity as rapidly as possible regarding this completely new and vital economic situation.

To start with, here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations and careful study shows that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

However, if we leave the industrial countries with their present industrial machinery and their energy distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political party workers and send them off by rocket ship to forever orbit the sun – the result will be that as many world people as now will keep right on eating, possibly getting on a little better than before. This will remove all barriers to completely free world intercourse and thereby permit realization of enough for all.

The fact is that now – for the first time in the history of man – and only for the last ten years, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions are completely obsolete – in any other than secondary housekeeping functions –. The primacy of political ideologies are obsolete because they were all developed on the basis of the exclusive survival only of your party or my party – simply because there was not enough for both.

The whole realization that mankind now can and may be comprehensively and mutually successful is so startling that we must have it – as both the whole and as the essence of the theme of our forward undertakings. But, to have enough to go around for all requires a design revolution, for as now designed the world’s metals are invested in machinery and structures which are so inefficient that they can only take care of 44 percent of humanity. Engineers and scientists agree that the technical knowledge to correct this now exists. So it is also part of the great message to humanity of those who have the power to communicate that the world’s problems cannot be solved by politics and can only be solved by a physical invention and design revolution.

In pursuance of this theme and under auspices to be announced later, we are going to undertake at Southern Illinois University in the next five years, a very extraordinary computerized program to be known as “How to Make the World Work.” It is based on general systems theory, combined with Von Neuman’s game theory as “played” by the national defense and joint chiefs of staff in the development of computerized world war games and the theory of world economic warfaring.

We find that humanity is developing an increasing confidence in the way in which computers are resolving heretofore vexing and seemingly unsolvable problems. Lest one defective computer may lead mankind seriously astray, he is learning to check results in several computers. We, herewith, review typical ways in which society has gained confidence in the computers’ ability to solve, heretofore unsolvable, problems.

After World War II, when enormous new magnitudes of energy mastering tools had been developed, America, despite the astronomical costs of World War II, found itself many fold wealthier than it ever had been before. This was because vast improvements of the means of production, more than of the special end products, won the war. Enormous quantities of energy were now flowing to the ends of levers to produce wealth. American labor began to realize that it could ask for a great deal more participation in the advantages accruing to further regeneration of this vast wealth.

The problem of sustaining post war economic and technical growth in our country was one which involved centrally coordinated scientific, technical, industrial and economic organization, while also developing the profitable growth of the nation’s prime contractors. This was accomplished by inducing a regenerative self amplification of the monies which would flow irrigationally through the whole economic system in ten recyclings per year which could convert fifty billion in war orders into a 500 billion gross national product that would yield a fifty-five billion tax extraction for reintroduction of next years fifty billion cold war orders to the prime contractors. To implement this economic irrigation system, Congress extended the President’s World War II emergency powers to implement his ’anticipation’ of the next war – which realized anticipation we speak of as the cold war. In this way, the economy could and has attained omni-profitable probing for the new economically capitalizable industrial advantage augmentations inherent in the scientific and technical invention evolution of each new military program’s development of greater production power of greater hitting power with ever less effort per each function.

The total grand strategy of cold warring introduced an immediate preview of the astronomical complexity of its accounting problems both anticipatory, current and retrospective.

World War I and World War II had demonstrated that human beings were inherently inadequate, as “directors” of the war production complexities. I’ll just point out to you quickly that a single family house has about 500 types of parts, a fighter plane has 25,000 types of parts, while a big corporation, e.g., International Harvester, has to keep a live inventory of 135,000 types of service parts – and these are the figures of just one corporation. When we begin to talk about all the corporations and all the evolution anticipating undertakings and all the stockpiling for ten, fifteen, and twenty years ahead – of the whole national economy – in getting ready for the next war – the myriad millions of types of parts and functions and raw materials and tools to produce and handle them rocketed beyond the thinking capabilities of any individuals. The obvious economic complexity of the cold warring made the swift development of the computers mandatory to the U. S. military leaders. Production of the modern computers had been found to be theoretically feasible in the nineteen thirties in the course of development of the great electrical power distribution systems’ “network analyzers”. There were computers in the invention and laboratory development stage and a few minor prototypes of both the analogue and digital computers. It was only a question of allotting enough money to the big universities to pay for the major development research programs. Computers which worked with electronic tubes were developed but were swiftly improved by the invention of transistors.

After the universities had developed the prototype computers, they were given to the big corporation to reproduce. The skilled machinists of the U.S.A.’s labor force had to produce, assemble and tune up the production computers. Though it cannot be confirmed by any published document, I – as a card carrying “journeyman machinist” of the International Association of Machinists, one of the U.S.A.’s oldest labor unions, – am confident that Walter Reuther put into the computers the problem of: “Which would pay General Motors the greatest profit: to grant or not to grant the United Auto Workers not only shorter hours and more pay, but also vacations, retirement and complete life benefits?” The computer

Vision 65 Keynote Address 69

said, “General Motors will make much more money by granting.” Boards of directors having been elected by the stockholders have always heretofore been mandated to secure all the profits of their corporations for the shareholders and therefore not to yield an inch to labor. However, with the introduction of computers, General Motors’ board of directors yielded without a battle to Reuther’s unprecedented demands. Therefore, General Motors’ Board of Directors also must have put the problem into the computer because they acquiesced so quickly. Within three years after granting, General Motors became the first corporation in history to make a billion dollars net after paying all taxes. This is how well it paid off to allow a percentage of accrued profits to fund labor’s wider buying power. They made money because mass production cannot exist without mass consumption and the wider and more persistent the distribution of wealth as buying power the greater and more persistent the sales and profits to all. General Motors’ decision to heed the computers insured their profits.

The wealth which we as industrialized society are now dealing in is the tooled and tuned capability to shunt the free flowing inexhaustible energies of universe on to the ends of levers to do the work for us. The tooled capability to satisfy tomorrow’s metabolic regeneration of each man is what underlies our wealth today. Though this is not yet officially recognized by either business or by U. S. Government, wealth is our tool-organized capability to deal with the forward metabolic regeneration of humanity in terms of forward man-days of increasing degrees of mutual enjoyment of the whole of the Earth without interferences and without the gains of one to be realized only by the loss of another.

Very recently another extraordinary computer decision occurred. As you know, in America the greatest opposition to centralization of economic power in government authority has been that of the organized private electricity generating industry. The means of electrical power generation and distribution was one of the last great holdings of the old pirates who came off the sea and onto the dry land with their railways to own the mines and control energy as power. They built many electric-power and light generating companies within the U. S.A. and in foreign countries. These “utilities” were adamant against any public control. After the 1929 crash came the New Deal and the government underwriting and control of the banking system, and the public entry into the electrical generating industry – along with flood control – as for instance in the Tennessee Valley. Next came the U.S.A. Government’s rural electrification and many other governmental developments and ownership of public power services.

As Eisenhower became president, he found himself in the middle of a battle waged between the “private” and the “public” sectors of the electricity producers for control of the fabulously grown energy resources. The private sector progeny of the old pirates hoped not only to win, but in so doing to take over atomic energy despite that its development had cost the government unprecedented billions to develop. This battle was joined in 1952 when the old pirates’ progeny, led by a Wall Street Admiral made a skilled and powerful attempt to reverse their catastrophic loss in 1929 of control of the world’s overall economic intercourse and its monetary systems as well as of the prime initiative in guiding the world’s capital reinvestment evolution; as well as their loss by default to democratic government of their position as the ultimate creditor, forecloser and underwriting dictator of the comprehensive economic recovery system and its grand domestic and international strategy formulations. Ensconced only in their privately owned security trading houses, divorced entirely from access to bank deposit funds, and possessing only their privately operated public utilities and their privately owned mines whose profitable operation had been bedevilled by the vast and unexpected magnitude of recovery and recirculation of World War I and subsequent industrial evolution’s scrapped metals, the private sector of the 1952 battle had only the momentum of wide public affluence of World War II’s vast productivity gains and the McCarthy stilled voices of democratic dissent to support their campaign of “righteous indignation”

of a long suffering private enterprise to be restored to supreme power. An intuitively alerted democracy frustrated their coup.

In the last four years metals coming back as scrap into the world’s metal markets, with government stockpiling ended, having threatened comprehensive deflation of metals prices and impoverishment of the mines and metals cartels. With the scrap of World War II about to reappear in 1966, we will have a flood of metals. Combining this flood with the weapons industry’s continual accomplishment of more power with less resources per each function, it is seen that the metals market will go way down unless a new major use for them develops. This “use” may be in weapons and ammunition. But other forces are at play.

The major interests in metals who are also by heritage close to the major interests in private power began about 1960 to look for new outlets for the major metals, iron, copper, etc., other than for war. One of the ways in which the metals could be employed was very appropriately in the electrical transmission systems – and that requires some explaining.

There is no way in which we can get energy from here to there as fast as by wire. Energy by wire is many fold faster than its delivery over the pipelines, or by ships full of oil. When you want to send electricity great distances, you have to get very high voltages and the higher the voltages the wider apart and higher the apparatus must be to avoid short circuiting and overloading by lightning strokes. Distance in electrical distribution has been limited during the last forty years to about 350 miles. That was the capacity of electrical generating and transmission apparatus as then designed. In the 1920’s the power and metals controlling pirates had built apparatus with as large a voltage capacity as was feasible in view of the quantity of metals then to be made available without elevating the metals prices beyond negotiability. And the top distances of that 138,000 to 230,000 volt system was 350 miles. It was discovered, however, in 1960 that with the glut of metals coming into avail- ability as scrap from World War II, there would be sufficient metals to build a new national network of greatly increased dimensions permitting elevation of long distance transmission from 230,000 volts, up to 500,000 and 1,000,000 volts. With the new high voltage, we could transmit up to 1,500 miles. The metals flood made this new overall voltage magnitude a very practical matter. No part of this story seems to have reached the newspapers or mag- azines until this year. But, starting about three years ago, the private sector of the elect- rical apparatus designing industry began to put the feasibility and quantation problem of a designed reworking and integration of the national electricity networks into the computer. The problem was to discover in which way the private power interests would make the most money – by or by not upping the voltage and integrating the national distribution networks? With the ultra high voltage it was possible to reach great distances and integrate remote networks systems as we have not been able to do previously even at a top 230,000 volts cap- acity, between the different time zones of the United States. Every electrical generating company has the problem of maintaining the experience proven minimum surplus margin of standby-power to take care of unexpectedly compounding big electrical power loads – the unpredictable peak loads. And all standby-power that is not used is completely wasted. If used, it could be pure profit. Network integration smooths out the power loss peaks and increases profits.

It became evident that if the networks of different time zones of the U.S.A. were interconnected by the ultra high voltage, long distance transmitters, that the peaks and valleys of adjacent systems would fit together very efficiently. The computers indicated that with ultra high voltage it would be possible to integrate the whole United States and all four of its time zones. It was discovered by the design researchers, however, that such nationwide integration also involved merging of both the public and private networks which

Vision 65 Keynote Address 71

integration heretofore had been theoretically opposed by the private interests as an unwanted reconciliation with their “enemy”.

The computers however showed both the public and private sectors that ultra high voltage integration would result in both sides making a 33% additional profit. Of course both sides signed up and the long battle between private and public power was ended. There was nothing about the merger in the newspapers. If the public had known what had happened, they would have known that Johnson was going to be elected. That was the end of private power’s financial underwriting of the Republican party. Because it was the private power interests who most opposed government centralization, this economic point of contention is removed. A new Republican party if it arises will have to find some other kind of economic base. To find an adequate one will mean joining forces with the forces of change and that will mean a liberal Republican party or none at all. The residual old line reactionaries are too few to have significance.

What I am pointing out mostly is that the computer was able to solve this public vs. private power problem which it had been thought could never be solved. So, I assert that we are a society that is going to be developing an increasing confidence in the competently programmed computer to provide clear unbiased answers to questions heretofore held to be unsolvable, particularly those questions which provide answers which can show which way powerful segments of world society will mutually and most copiously profit, in both short and long terms. This will bring about a large series of surprising mergers of heretofore opposed interests.

For instance, it is now visible that after integrating the network across the United States, the new 1,500 miles transmission reach will bring connection to Alaska. This will bring in also the enormous water generated electrical power of the Canadian Rockies. From Alaska we cannot only go right into the Aleutian Islands, but we can go under the Bering Straits and hook up with the great Russian networks in Eastern Siberia. This will provide an intercontinental powerhead immediately adjacent to and ready to flow into China. China’s leaders have promised their people physical success through industrialization. The essence of successful industrialization is energy available as unlimited power by wire anywhere. This integrated powerhead will make possible China’s achievement of full industrialization decades earlier than expected. The Americans, the Russians and the Chinese will put the problem into the computer to find which is most profitable to each and all – to integrate or not integrate. All hands will be informed by their respective computers that network integration will bring large mutual advantages. The Chinese and Russians will have to choose between the political advantages of deliberate, but unnecessary, prolongation of a class struggle between the haves and have-nots and letting the controlled energy flow into their systems to altogether eliminate havenotness everywhere and thereby to eliminate all basis of class struggle. The political leaders forced by their engineers and science educated public will be forced to choose to integrate and the ideological differences will vanish. Thus, all unexpectedly almost all obstacles to man’s comprehensive physical success will be removed.

On Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus we are going to set up a great computer program. We are going to introduce the many variables now known to be operative in world around industrial economics. We will store all the basic data in the machines memory bank; where and how much of each class of the physical resources; where are the people, what are the trendings and important needs of world man?

Next, we are going to set up a computer feeding game, called “How to Make the World Work.” We will start playing relatively soon. We will bring people from all over

the world to play it. There will be competitive teams from all around Earth to test their theories on how to make the world work. If a team resorts to political pressures to accel- erate their advantages and is not able to wait for the going gestation rates to validate their theory, they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics, you are very liable to get into war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. If war develops, the side inducing it loses the game. (See WORLD GAME–How To Make the World Work, page 87).

Essence of “success in making the world work” will be to make every man able to become a world citizen and able to enjoy the whole Earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forward days without any interference with any other man and never at the cost of another man’s equal freedom and advantage.

I think that communication task of reporting on the computerized playing of the game – “How to Make the World Work” will become extremely popular all around the Earth. Be- cause we’re going to be playing that game so soon at Southern Illinois University and because there is such a fabulous acceleration in the rate of world events, I felt that we could no longer wait and am therefore announcing it to you now at this “Vision 65” Congress.

I am deeply interested in the play of our intuitions. I am inclined to think that our integrated organic capability is much more powerful than any of us tend to accredit. I have learned how much we can apprehend in just the flash of an eye. In one ten thousandth of a second, a strobe light can get a beautifully detailed photograph. I am quite certain that humans can enter a room and tell instantly what the real situation is. But, they don’t usually trust their own high capabilities so they spend hours trying to find out whether their first flash impression was right or wrong. As I travel around the world today, I see in a flash that the eyes of youth see that the world could be made to work for all humanity. And I see that they will settle for nothing less. And I see that they are impatient. And I see above all that they can and will soon make it so.

6 Vision 65 Summary Lecture

R. Buckminster Fuller

I have never been in a large conference at which I’ve felt as intuitively intense as I feel right now at this one. My intuitions tell me this has been an extraordinary meeting of human beings. I speak with the experience of many meetings–of human beings brought together because of their eminence in all manner of unique performance patterns. Their strength and variety gave hope that they would be able to contribute importantly to the answering of great questions.

The meetings of the last few years have been organized to address great questions, particularly on the forward implications of the impact of technology on world society. However, few, if any, answers of importance have developed.

At this Vision 65 Conference at Southern Illinois University, the whole set of circumstances seems to be extremely propitious for the formulation of some important realizations. Southern Illinois University was almost unheard of until about nine years ago. It wasn’t even a university until Adlai Stevenson as Governor of Illinois converted it from college to university status. It has, however, been in existence for almost a century as a very small teachers’ college, going back to within a few years of Abraham Lincoln’s day in southern Illinois. Stevenson anticipated the flooding need for higher education facilities, so he created several universities, in the north, east, west and south of the state.

Southern Illinois had become a completely forgotten part of America. It dropped out of sight when the great north-and-south river traffic that plied on the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois rivers–all finally merged into one at the lower extremity of southern Illinois–was suddenly replaced a little over a century ago by the new era’s east-west railroad, which crossed Illinois, from Chicago to St. Louis, well over a hundred miles north of Carbondale. So this very remote place in the heart of America was almost entirely forgotten except for its mine labor riots at Herrin, a half century ago.

Now southern Illinois comes into world prominence again as the place where it is the working assumption of a classless democracy that all of humanity should have the opportunity of an advanced university education. As S.I.U.’s President Delyte Morris has pointed out: it is the assumption here that “dropouts” indicate inadequacy of the educational system and not of the human individual.

I am certain that none of the world’s problems–which we are all perforce thinking about today–which are also central to this conference–have any hope of solution except through society’s being thoroughly and comprehensively educated, and thereby able to identify and communicate the vital problems of world society, and thereafter to sort and put those problems into order of importance in respect to the most fundamental principles governing man’s survival and enjoyment of life on earth.

My intuitions are vigorous regarding the present alertness and almost apprehensive awareness of the particular human beings who have come here to this Vision 65 S.I.U. meeting from all around the earth. I have met many of the participants in other parts of the world; I know that the group of people assembled here is unique. They are of the one-in-one-hundred-thousand type of thinker who is realistically earnest in trying to find ways of making humanity successful. They have learned how to take the initiative. They don’t need or want to be told what to do. My intuitions tell me, therefore, that this meeting is an unusually successful harvest of capably responsible human beings. I think it interesting that we have avoided negatives and that much that is useful and promising has been said

First published in “The American Scholar”, Volume 35, Number 2, Spring, 1966.

about the functions and functioning of communication.

I often play a mental game, which I started a great many years ago. I patterned it after the physical discipline, with which all humans are familiar, of lifting progressively heavier weights on successive days, thus gradually to become more physically powerful. When I started playing my mental game, my scheme was to ask myself a little larger and more difficult question each day. I also gave myself a basic playing rule, that I must always answer the questions from my own direct experience. I have been playing that game for a long time. Finally I came to the question: What do you mean by the word “universe”? And I said to myself, if you can’t answer that question, you must give up the use of the word universe, because you are being deceitful to yourself and others by suggesting that it has a meaning. Following my own rules, I gave myself the answer: Universe is the aggregate of all humans’ consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) experiences. Because I had answered in terms of experience, my definition has withstood all subsequent testing by myself and others. I haven’t been able to find any thinkable aspect of universe that has been overlooked. We have experiences of dreaming, falsification, multiplication of the numbers of words in the dictionary, and so on. I don’t find any experiences that are not included in the definition. So, for the time being, I go along with that definition. It has been fruitful.

Playing the same kind of game and starting with universe as defined, I found that the universe definition included metaphysics because metaphysics deals with thoughts which are weightless. The physicist defining the physical universe (Einstein’s famous definition) had deliberately excluded metaphysics because they are imponderable. So I found it interesting that I had a definition that also included the metaphysical universe–of mathematics, thoughts and dreams as realistic experiences. And because all of my experiences had beginnings and endings, they were finite. I said, therefore, that the aggregate of finites must also be finite. Therefore, the universe, including both physics and mathematics, is finite.

In playing that kind of game I now had the advantage of being able to start not only with total finiteness but logically–as men, lacking a definition of the whole universe, had not been able to start logically before. This gave me many advantages, for the whole system was finite. I thus came logically to some mathematical discoveries regarding the thought processes. I would like to give you a simple way of looking at things, which I found appropriate once one starts with a definition of the finite whole.

I also found this process of working with finite logic from the whole to the particular to be a very effective kind of strategy in trying, for instance, to think our way through to understanding what our human function in the universe might be. I found that, when I was confronted with a vast question and an enormous amount of material and experience, one of the first things I always tried to do was to make a basic division of the universe and thereafter to subdivide the relevant parts into progressively smaller halves, always, successively, selecting the half most clearly containing–and therefore relevant to–the problem until I reached an understandable and very local level in universe. In developing the solution to complex problems in modern information theory, which governs the design of computers, this same principle of progressive subdivision and selection of the relevant half is used and each progressive subdivision is called a “bit” and the number of subdivisions totally required are known as “so many bits.”

I found it is quite possible to subdivide the universe instantly by developing the concept of a “system.” A system is a local phenomenon in the universe that is geometrically definable because it returns or closes upon itself in all directions. Systems may be symmetrical or asymmetrical. I found that systems are the first subdivision of universe for they subdivide the universe into all the universe that is inside and all the universe that is

outside the system. This divided the universe into the macrocosm and the microcosm. Then came the extraordinarily surprising and sudden discovery that this system concept led to an important understanding of–what we do when we think.

I am quite certain that thoughts are not bright ideas mysteriously inserted into a vacuum chamber in the head. I’m quite confident that what we do when we think is to be- have as follows:

We dismiss the irrelevancies. I find that our brain is filled with constant reports and notices in which we’re being told about various events around us. All of us have experiences saying to one another, “What’s that friend’s name? You know, the man we both know. We were with him for three years.” And neither of us can remember his name right away. But we all experience suddenly recalling the name possibly five minutes later, possibly the next morning.

The main point is that there is a definite lag in the search to memory storage and its feedback and that there is a great variety in the rates of lag between some recalls and others that we have stored deeply. Because we do get such feedbacks, we are always receiving a great deal of feedback from questions we had even forgotten that we had even asked. On my way here today I looked at a tree and I said, “What kind of a tree is that?” And I asked many other questions as I went along. I am asking myself questions all the time; and because the lags are very different for the different kinds of memories, I find that when I am lying down in my bed and trying to go to sleep, I get report after report coming back telling me about things that I had asked questions about and forgotten that I asked them. At all times we are in almost chaotic focus of brain-dispatched messengers trying to come into our conscious thought pattern to give us the answer to questions we or others in our presence have asked. Therefore, I have discovered that what I do when thinking is to say,“keep those messengers outside for a moment. That’s very interesting. I am glad they’re there, but please keep them outside because all I want to think about right now is this glass of water.”

I discover, then, that thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies. That decision immediately gives you one of those enormous opportunities further to divide the residual definition into two. This is possible because irrelevancies fall into two main classes: all the events that are irrelevant because they are too big to have any possible kind of bearing on the particular focus of our thought, and all the irrelevancies that are too small are dismissed inwardly of the thought about local systems and, therefore, dismissed into the microcosm because they can’t catch up to the magnitude zone of the wave length and magnitude that we are working on; and the irrelevancies that are irrelevant because they are too big to have any effect on our considered focal system of consideration, are dismissed outside the system, that is into the macrocosm.

I find that there are also a number of temptingly almost relevant, which I might bring into our consideration, which might persuade you to be interested in what I am trying to communicate to you. Thus I learn that there is a Twilight Zone of Tantalizingly Almost Relevants. There are two such twilight zones–the macro and the micro–tantalizingly almost relevant. Between them there is always a set of extraordinarily lucid items of relevance. And when I pay attention to those lucid relevances I find that the minimum set that that may form a system to divide universe into micro and macro cosms is a set of four items of consideration. I see next that between four stars that form the vertexes of the tetrahedron, which is the simplest system in universe, there are six edges that constitute all the possible relationships between those four stars. When we have found all the relationships between the number of items of our consideration we have what we speak of as "under-

standing". The word consider derives from the Latin words for together and stars. When we understand, we have all the fundamental connections between the star events of our con- sideration. When N stands for the humber of stars or items of consideration, the number of connections necessary to understanding is always Nš N. 2

When I was invited to come up and meet with you now, I felt that I would like above all things not to allow myself to be affected by any conditioned reflexes that would make me say anything I had ever said before. I would like to think out loud as freshly as possible about the significance of this meeting. Our experience with Bob Osborn’s cartoons gave us a good inventory of negatives. This doesn’t bother me at all, because I am thoroughly aware of the experimental work done by nuclear physicists. One of their most important experi- mental findings shows that every physical component of the atom has its opposite, for example, the electron which is “negative” has its positron. Every positive has its negative and vice versa. The negatives of all those having positive weights have negative weights. This means that the average of all the weights of all the fundamental components of universe is zero. Although dealing with a universe of average zero weight, we find by experiment that we are (almost) always dealing with the positive or the negative which is our reality. We are dealing in a complex of pure principles that include a variety of time lags and thus cre- ate time and life as experience. This is an intellectual experience. Everything we cere- brate has to do with the principles such as lag, angle and frequency. I am never concerned when some people concentrate on enumerating negatives, because I know that each has its positive.

As noted, I must always go back to my own experiences for answers and my own experience inventory is short. It is only seventy years. But in that seventy years, I have experienced some extraordinary changes. The life insurance companies’ mathematicians, dealing with all of mankind’s vital statistics, are able to determine the probable “number of years that people born in a given year will live.” This life-span is known by the insurance companies as the expectancy of individuals born in the given year. Expectancy for females usually is greater than for their contemporary males. My expectancy at birth was forty-two years. That was all that an 1895-born male was supposed to live. But conditions governing man’s health and welfare improved rapidly, and expectancy began to advance at an histori- cally unprecedented rate, so I have not yet caught up with expectancy.

The average distance that human beings could travel on their feet or in vehicles in their respective separate lifetimes up to and including my father’s time was an average of thirty thousand miles. In my lifetime I have already swept out three million miles, which is one-hundred-fold the distance of all our forefathers. Now I am one of a class of several million men who have experienced three million miles around our earth. Our ecological pattern has clearly changed, and changed abruptly, from all the generations before us. Now the aviators and air hostesses make much more mileage than I do and each of the two Gemini astronauts knocked off my three million miles in one week of orbiting. Quite clearly man is moving into some very new relationship to his physical universe on a pure physical assess- ment basis. I recall my first pre-World War I jobs and working with men admirable for their strength and physical courage. I found I could win their friendship, but I was appalled at their mental inferiority complexes. Very few of them had gone to school for more than a few years, almost none had gone to high school, let alone finished. Very rarely did I meet anybody who had gone through college. My fellow workman was intellectually timid to a fault. He was a slave; he knew he had very little chance of happy and healthy survival. He was afraid of his words and his mind. He communicated his feelings by the way in which he chewed tobacco, spat and blasphemed, using a total vocabulary of no more than about fifty words.

Vision 65 Summary Address

This was the everyday experience of all times for ninety-nine percent of humanity. Shakespeare and the historians write only about the doing of the one percent. The history of the ninety-nine percent is the same as the history of cats and dogs, who usually fared better than men. Yesterday this southern Illinois town of Carbondale was just a strip-mining coal town, where tobacco was chewed and spat, accompanied by the fifty-word vocabulary. These conditions have all changed in an extraordinarily short moment–in less than my lifetime. Here at Southern Illinois University are twenty-one thousand young people–probably very greatly affected by the radio and television in their childhood environments–to whom a good vocabulary is obviously and happily desirable. You have come to us from all around the world, speaking and organizing your thoughts with great integrity and without intellectual fear of your fellowman. But in my memory humans, of the same origins as those of any S.I.U. student, who dared to speak a well-formed sentence were whistled at and treated as being some kind of sexual deviates. I know by personal experience that the world has changed and is changing at an ever faster rate.

When I was young going from a little town seven miles outside of Boston into Boston through Dorchester, or Roxbury, I saw that all the children in the streets were in rags. No exceptions. People on the trolley really stank. Women of twenty-six years were hags with half their yellow teeth out. There was no dentistry for them. It is my own direct experience that life has changed very much for the better.

Clearly, and sum totally, something very important is happening to man on this planet. Fred Hoyle, the great astronomer, dealing with the regularities found by astrophysicists in the heavens, has been able to say in all seriousness that he now assumes from the observed regularities that there are at least hundreds of millions of stars with planets that could maintain human life. He finds it logical to assume human life to be present in this universe on at least one hundred million planets. This particular big figure he uses is obviously intended to infer astronomical numbers of humans present in universe.

Dr. Hoyle–who is the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University in England–finds the case of humans on this particular planet to be precarious. He says humans have found atomic energy just in time to overlap the exhaustion of the fossil fuel supplies. Humanity will have to make other vitally important moves in a hurry.

I remember asking myself in my game of big questions whether there is anything in our experience that could tell us whether man might have an essential function to perform in universe. Was he needed in the universe? Or was he–as he seemed to feel himself–just a chance observer, a theatergoer watching a great play called life. I said the only way we can judge whether he has a function or not is to go to our experimental data, and the way it came out is as follows.

With the development of steam, which could propel their ships when there was no wind, the great pirates, who mastered world commerce, saw that science could greatly advance their power, so they put up great amounts of money to back further scientific inquiry. The scientists developed the laws of thermodynamics and showed that energy continually and always escaped from local systems. Systems were always running down. This inherent energy dissipation was called entropy. The mathematicians described entropy as the Law of Increase of the Random Element. This concept is manifest by Sir Isaac Newton, when he said in his first Law of Motion, A body persists in a state of rest–or in a line of motion (clearly a secondary thought)–except as affected by other bodies.

“At rest” was the great norm. All the scientists went along with the second law in

assuming that energy is leached out of the universe and that in due course the universe must run down and become motionless and dead. Life was abnormal and death was the normal state.

I entered Harvard University in 1913 just before World War I began. The Harvard community, and, in fact, Boston’s large community of intellectuals, all assumed a universe that would ultimately run down, and that the earth had been spun off from the sun and would finally stop spinning. It is a very short time since people were thinking in that way. But in this century the scientists experimenting with entropy began to discover that when energy left one system it could only do so by joining another system. It did not go out of the universe. They found that energies were always one hundred percent accountable. This forced them into a completely new law, the Law of Conservation of Energy, which says: energy cannot be created and energy cannot be lost. Energy is finite. This eventually brought about Einstein’s finite physical universe.

Einstein found himself confronted with this new way of looking at energy and also with the extraordinary experiments that disclosed the speed of light–experiments made not only in relation to visible light but to invisible radio signals, that showed that energy re- leased in vacuo was moving at 186,000 miles a second.

Einstein felt forced to think about the universe in a different way from Newton. He said that inasmuch as no energy could be lost; then the universe could not “run down,” and “at rest” was not normal. He then assumed a universe of continual transformation and its acceleration normal. He further assumed that normal velocity is the speed of radiation un- fettered in a vacuum–186,000 miles a second. While that is very fast, he pointed out that it is not instantaneous. Einstein then pointed out that the universe is a complex of nonsimul- taneous events, and because there is no inherent composite “picture” of unsimultaneous and nonidentical events, there can be no possible unit and static conceptual picture of universe. “What is outside the outer-most stars?” is a meaningless question. Thus Newton’s simul- taneous, all interlinked mechanical universe became invalid and obsolete.

One of the brightest stars we use in our navigation is Rigil Kentaurus. And Rigil Kentaurus is four and one half light years away and is of a brightness magnitude character- istic of the stars that burn out in a million years. Probably many a starry event hasn’t been “there” in the sky for millions of years. We only have evidence about man being on Earth for about two million years. In seeing many of the celestial bright spots we are looking at live shows taking place millions of years before man came on Earth. In looking at stars in the heavens we are not looking at simultaneous events. There is no outside to what is not there. Our thinking gets an entirely new breakthrough with Einstein. In the philosophy of relativity Einstein postulates an all transforming universe, constantly transforming at various rates. He next hypothesized that although energy was traveling normally at 186,000 miles per second, it could be going around locally in knots and that it could be so local as to be confined to atomic patterning dimensions and that the tighter the heavier, and this resulted in his famous equation E=mcš which fission a quarter century later proved valid as accounting for the amount of energy in any given mass.

There is now a very large inventory of ways in which man has been teaching, think- ing and accounting events and values which have no experimentally demonstrated validity. There is no experimental proof of such phenomena as straight lines, solids and planes. There is no instantaneous phenomenon. The word is meaningless. The senses and brains of approx- imately all our scientists are disconnected from their theories. Scientists see the sun “going down” when they have known theoretically for five hundred years that it isn’t “going down”. Although our senses are not geared with our advanced knowledge, man has been getting along in a gradually more favorable way. His communication is no longer confined to the mode of his spitting.

Vision 65 Summary Address

Man is born utterly helpless and remains utterly helpless for a longer period than the newborn of any other living species. That’s quite an invention – an extraordinary complex like man born utterly helpless. It is valid only under the assumption that he will be taken care of. Although the helpless child often has drunken parents, fortunately gravity holds him in his bed, and fortunately some cow ate some grass and made milk and somebody got it out of the cow and through a series of pourings by many people, it got into a bottle leading into the baby’s gullet. It didn’t come out of the mother’s breast. In many ways, mankind is utterly helpless, vain and ignorant.

Human beings often say, “I wonder what it would be like to be on a spaceship.” The answer is, “What does it feel like–you are and always have been on a very small spaceship, eight thousand miles in diameter.” The nearest star “Sun” is ninety-two million miles away and the next brightest is five million times further away. You are very much alone in your spaceship. And this spaceship is designed so superbly, all its passengers so skillfully provided for, that they have been on board playing the game of self-production for two million years without even realizing that they are on board a spaceship.

We see that all life has been able to succeed owing to the anticipatory design of a regenerative ecological energy exchange. The mammals give off the gases that are necessary to the survival of the vegetation, while vegetation gives off the gases that are essential to the survival of the mammals. None of them knows that he is contributing gratuitously to vital support of the other. I find that the earthworm is quite as irresponsibly, yet essentially, involved here, as is the bee. All of life is inadvertently and unconsciously involved. All of life has designed subconscious drives. Earthworms do the twist. But none of them realize the vital tasks they are doing for the others.

So I find all life interconnectedly successful and almost completely unwitting of the total ecological balance, which men sometimes speak of as “nature.” The little bumblebee goes after his honey and his little fuzzy tail inadvertently knocks off and dusts pollen, which fertilizes vegetation. I think that is exactly the kind of pattern with which approximately all of humanity is preoccupied. I don’t know any man who can stand up and say to us, “I am a success by virtue of having consciously designed, fabricated and operated myself, the biosphere, the sun, earth and all the intercomplementing ecology. I can tell you what I am doing with my lunch. I am sending off certain of this food to this gland and that gland, and I am going to use these differentiated energies in such and such ways.”

We know humanity can’t say that. Humans can’t even tell you why they have hair. They certainly can’t tell you that they are consciously pushing each hair out through their heads in special shapes and colors for special purposes.

We don’t know anyone who knows much about what he is doing and why. Yet, one of the prominent, built-in behaviors of the occupational game-playing is the ego claimed credit for its inadvertent successes.

There are many indications, however, that man is just about to begin to participate consciously and somewhat more knowingly and responsibly in his own evolutionary transformation. I include evolution of the environment as a major part of the evolution of humanity. In his unconscious participation in the past he has carelessly ruptured his earth, polluted his air and water, corrupted his children in order to sell any kind of toy guns, dope, smut and anything that would make money, and has made all money-making sacrosanct. But if we discover that man is necessary to the invention of universe, we can understand somewhat better what he is inadvertently doing.

Some years ago, I asked myself whether man had a function in universe and if so,

what it might be. My experience-informed answer went as follows:

The astronomers have given us their observation of the “red shift”, which indicated that vast and remote star groups are probably receding from us in all directions because the light coming from them is redder than that from nearer groups, which in turn indicated an expanding universe. The expanding universe is also called for by the law of entropy or increase of the random elements which must ever fill more space. So I thought, we have also learned experimentally that unique behaviors are usually countered by somewhat opposite behaviors; therefore, an expanding universe would probably infer a concurrently contracting universe. So I said, “What experience do we have that may demonstrate such a contracting universe, even though none has been observed or mentioned by the astronomers?”

I saw that around our own planet we have high and low atmospheric “pressures,” which might better be called expanding and contracting atmospheric patterns. I discovered clues to the operation of a contracting universe to be operative as our own planet. Our planet Earth is not radiant. It is not sending off energy in any important degree. As compared with a star it is “dead”. Earth is receiving energy from the sun but is not losing it at the same rate. For instance, we have learned from the Geophysical Year that we are receiving about one hundred thousand tons of stardust daily. Our physical imports from the universe are as yet much greater than exports. Therefore, we are a collecting or concentrating center, possibly one amongst myriads in universe. All planets in universe may be collecting points as focuses of the contracting phase of universe. At the surface of the earth, in the top soil, the ecological balance becomes operative. The vegetation’s chlorophyll inhibits the sun’s radiation instead of allowing it to be reflectively rebroadcast to universe. The sun-inhibited energy impounded in the vegetation is further inhibited by insects, worms and mammals, and both botanicals and zoologicals are gradually pressured into the growing earth crust and finally are concentrated into coal and oil rather than being broadcast off to universe in all direction. By dissipating these energy concentrations, man may well be upsetting the expansion-contraction balance of universe.

The ecological balance is fascinating when viewed chemically. We find all biological systems continually sorting and rearranging atoms in methodical molecular structures. To ensure performance each species is genetically and environmentally programmed. Each sorts and reassociates atoms as its genes cope with and alter environment, which in turn alters the species behaviors.

Thus we see that all the stardust, cosmic rays and other radiation randomly dispersed into universe by all stars are being methodically converted by the biological activity around Earth’s whole surface–in the sea and on the land–into progressively more orderly “organic” chemical structures. Thus biological life on Earth is anti-entropic. Earth is acting as an anti-entropic center as may all planets in universe.

Of all the anti-entropic sorters and rearrangers on Earth, none compare with brain-driven man. We find man continually differentiating and sorting out his experiences in his thoughts. As a consequence we find him continually rearranging his environment so that he may eat, be clean, move about and communicate in more orderly and swifter ways.

Dr. Wilder Penfield is the head of the Neurological Institute of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is one of the world’s leading electrode probers of the brain. The brain probers have now identified, for instance, the location of various memory banks. Dr. Penfield says, “It is much easier to explain all the data we have regarding the brain if we assume an additional phenomenon ’mind’ than it is to explain all the data if we assume only the existence of the brain.” Why? Because they have found, so to speak, the telephone sets of the brain, they have found the wires connecting the telephone sets, they have found the automatic message-answering service and the storage systems; but a great deal goes on in the conversations over

Vision 65 Summary Address

the wires that is not explicable by the physical brain’s feedback. I have submitted what I am saying to you to leading neurologists and they have not found fault with it. A good scientist doesn’t applaud you publicly or right away, even though he is favorably impressed with your theory. But he does let you know whether he objects to what you are saying and what his objections are. And so far there have been no objections and there seems to be some affirmation of what I am about to say to you.

We have a phenomenon that we speak about as a generalization. In science, a generalization is very different from a literary generalization. Generalization in a literary sense means that you are trying to cover too much territory with some statement. The scientific meaning is precise; it means “the discovery and statement of a principle that holds true without exceptions.” I will give you an example. I am going to talk about a special piece of rope. I could have in my hands a foot length of three-quarter inch manila rope. But I can also say to you, “I am going to take an imaginary piece of rope,” and I, not mentioning whether of nylon or manila, immediately generalize a rope concept from our mutual experiences. I am going to pull on that piece of rope and as I pull on it very hard it contracts in its girth. As it gets tauter, it gets tighter. This means that it goes into compression in its girth in planes at ninety degrees to the axis of the pull. I have found a great many human beings who think that tension is something independent of compression. I find experimentally, however, that tension can be only operative when compression is also present. A cigar-shaped vertical compression member that is loaded on its neutral axis tries to “squash”. This means that its girth tries to get bigger. Which means also that its girth expands and is tensed. So I find that compression is never innocent of tension, but that they are cooperative in axes arranged at ninety degrees to one another. Sometimes I find tension, at what we call “high tide”, or a highly visible aspect, and compression at “low tide” or at almost invisible aspect, and vice versa. We have here a generalization. We have found by experiment that “tension and compression only coexist.” That is quite an advance over the first generalization just saying, “I take a piece of rope and pull it,” which was a second degree generalization. And it is a third degree generalization when I say, “tension and compression only coexist.”

A system subdivides universe into all of the universe that is outside the system and all of the universe inside the system. Every system, as viewed from inside, is concave and, as viewed from outside, convex. Concave and convex only coexist. Concave and convex are very different from one another. Convex diffuses energies by increasing wave lengths and widening angles. Concave concentrates energies by decreasing wave lengths and reducing angles. Although not the same and not exactly opposite, concave and convex only coexist.

In addition to tension and compression and convex and concave, I can give you a number of other such coexistences. This brings us then to another and further degree of generalization wherein we say that, “There is a plurality of coexistent behaviors in nature which are the complementary behaviors.” That caused the mathematicians to generalize further. They developed the word “functions.” “Functions” cannot exist by themselves. Functions only coexist with other functions. They are sometimes covariables. When I say, “Functions only coexist,” I have gone a little further than the special cases of concave and convex or of tension and compression which were themselves highly generalized. Then I’ll go further still and say, “Unity is plural and at minimum two.” Which is the generalization that greatly advantaged quantum physics. We may go a little further in generalization, as did Einstein when he gave us his “Relativity.” You can’t have relativity without a plurality of cofunctions.

Now, I will give you another progression of events. You have seen a dog tugging at one end of a belt. He tenses it as he grips with it compressionally–with the concave and convex surfaces of his teeth. I am sure that you will agree that the little dog will never say,

82 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

“Tension and compression only coexist,” even though his brain coordinated them. The dog will not say, “Concave and convex, tension and compression are similar cases of coexistence of functions.”

I think the neurologists go along with me in saying that, “What we mean by mind–in contradistinction to the brain of the animal or of man–is man’s ability to generalize.”

The ability to generalize–in its incipient phases–seems to me to be also a tendency to moralize. For instance, to say that, ’If a man does so-and-so, he will get into trouble.’ I feel that in religious scriptures we come time and again to semigeneralizations showing how some men get into trouble and how you and your children may avoid such trouble.

We have seen how an enormous amount of special case experiences finally led to a progression of generalizations. There are about six degrees of progressive generalization. As we went from the one case to another and to higher degrees, it was accomplished with fewer and fewer words. We finally came to just one word, “Relativity.”

Now this orderly simplification happens to be exactly the opposite of the mathematician’s law of increase of the random element. It is the decrease of the random element. Generalization is the law of progressive orderliness.

I found myself in 1951 having to write in a book, which I was about to publish, that the mind of man seemed to be the most advanced phase of antientropy witnessable in universe. And if there is an expanding universe there is logically a contracting universe. Possibly man’s mind and his generalizations, which weigh nothing, operate at the most exquisite stage of universe contraction. Metaphysics balances physics. The physical portion of universe expands entropically. The metaphysical contracts anti-entropically.

It is interesting that within a few months after my publication of the hypothesis someone told me that Norbert Wiener had just published the concept also that “Man is the ultimate anti-entropy.” I talked with Norbert Wiener about this and we found that we had both written this at approximately the same time–starting quite differently but coming to the same conclusion.

So now we have found a function for man in universe, which was our objective. Man seems essential to the complementary functioning of universe. Therefore the probability of humanity annihilating itself and thus eliminating the anti-entropic function from universe is approximately zero.

This does not, however, mean that man on Earth may not eliminate himself. It suggests that there are–as the Cambridge University astronomer, Hoyle, suggests–hundreds of millions of other planets in universe with men living on them.

This brings us to the observation also that to keep her ecological balance intact, when nature finds the conditions are becoming unfavorable for any of the “cog wheel” species necessary for the system, she introduces many more starts of that species. She makes enormous numbers of babies, enormous numbers of seeds of this and that tree when she sees that such trees are not going to prosper. The seeds multiply in number, float off in the wind, randomly distributed in order to increase the probability of an adequate survival number to keep the system in balance.

I also go along with Hoyle in his concept of the possibility of the enormous numbers of human beings on an enormous number of planets simply because not all of them are going to make a success of life on their respective planets.

Vision 65 Summary Address

Man is beginning to transform from being utterly helpless and only subconsciously coordinate with important evolutionary events. We have gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble, but at the critical transformation stage we are getting to a point where we are beginning to make some measurements–beginning to know a little something. We are probably coming to the first period of direct consciously assumed responsibility of man in universe.

I spoke to you on my first day here about the great challenge of our day. I showed that it was no longer true, as had seemed true throughout all history, that man was born purposefully to be a failure in all but one case in a thousand–with the latter semisuccess occurring only as an “exception that proved the rule.” Throughout ages it was probable that the average human would die before reaching the average human’s twenty-seven years–despite scriptural accounts of great longevity. There just was not enough known sustenance for humanity. At the beginning of this century there was not enough for more than one in a hundred to survive comfortably and “live out his days,” meaning “four score and ten”–ninety years. Expectancy for males when I was born was forty-two. Half potential age. Under those conditions, dying slowly is not pleasant, so why not fight. Why not have a good quick battle with everything to win and nothing to lose–better than rotting in the slum. As I said in my opening address, we will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around Earth.

Every day, when it is available, each human consumes an average of two pounds of dry food, six pounds of water and inhibits the amazing figure of sixty pounds of air out of which he consumes six pounds of oxygen.

Food has often been very scarce, and often men have fought to the death for it. Water has sometimes been scarce and has been fought for. Air has rarely been scarce. Nobody has ever thought of putting a meter on the air for human consumption. But, we have had some terrible panics in theaters when there was a fire. Suddenly human beings–completely unused to competing for air–lose all reason, go mad and trample their fellowmen to death.

So I would simply say that there is nothing in our total experience that shows that when there is not enough to go around, it is illogical for men to fight to the death, because they are going to die anyway. There is also nothing illogical in the concept that when there is enough to go around men will not even think of fighting.

We now know scientifically that for the first time in history there can be enough to support continually all of expanding humanity at previously undreamed of and ever advancing standards of living and intellectual satisfaction in effective participation in the evolutionary processes. But we are frustrated from realizing our success by our different political systems and laws, which have all been devised to protect the few who have or have not adopted the system that promised the most in a bad bargain, or the most just system such as that which would provide for those whose labor produced the little that there was to go round.

I have made measurements in terms of work that can be done by human beings, measured by army engineers, in elevating foot-pounds per hours, days and years. From these studies I developed what I call an “energy slave” or the energy equivalent of the work a healthy human youth could do. The energy slaves in operation were determined by the amount of energies we were consuming from nature as waterpower, fossil fuels, wind, foods. Because up to now the distance that electrical energy could be delivered economically was only three hundred and fifty miles, industrial prosperity has been temporarily localized and has expanded only gradually. Therefore I took the total annual energy consumption of, for instance, the United States (of North America) for 1940 and reduced it by ninety-six percent because the machinery and processes used by man are of so overall low-grade design that he is only able to realize four percent of the consumed energy in potential effectiveness in

the work accomplished. Despite this necessary reduction, I found that a very large number of energy slaves are working for humanity in our U.S.A. industrial economy. On the Eastern Seaboard of the United States in 1940 we had a hundred and thirty-five energy slaves working for each man, woman and child. And they were able to work continuously in extremes of heat and cold in which humans would swiftly perish. The inanimate slaves work with extraordinary percision at tolerances millionths finer than permitted by human sight.

I found, however, that an enormous proportion of all energy slaves’ capabilities were going only into the development and production of weapons. Putting aside all the energy going into weaponry and retaining only that necessary to keep the people themselves going at a healthily high standard of living, I found that a family of five could be maintained at the high standard of living level with only one hundred energy slaves working for them in their economy–very few of the slaves work actually inside the house–they are employed in building the highways and keeping their telephone system in operation, et cetera. And this standard of living for a family of five produced by one hundred energy slaves was so high that it had not been known by any national sovereign before the twentieth century.

I found that in 1900 less than one percent of humanity were industrial “haves,” but that changed very abruptly in and after World War I.

World War I witnessed intense mechanization of the world. In the year 1917, man took out of the ground, refined and put to work more copper than he had taken out of the ground in the whole cumulative history of man’s copper mining and refining. He did so because copper is essential to energy distribution. He developed such intense mechanization in World War I that the percentage of the total world population that were industrial “haves” rose by 1919 to the figure of six percent. That was a very abrupt change in history suddenly to have six percent of humanity surviving at a high standard of living. By the time of World War II twenty percent of all humanity had become industrial “haves” despite that the population was ever increasing. At the present moment the proportion of “haves” is at forty percent of humanity.

Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, eighty percent of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work. And all those metals are now occupied in structures and machinery which operating at full capacity can take care of only forty-four percent of humanity; that is, they can take care of four percent more than are now being taken care of. During this twentieth century the combined amounts of scrap and newly mined metals per each world man has been continually decreasing because population is increasing faster than discovery of new ore bodies.

For man to go from less than one percent to forty percent, living at high standard–despite decreasing resources–cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more with less.

We find doing more with less has come about entirely through the unique technology of the less than one percent of humanity that cast its lot with life on the ocean to master the great commerce routes of the earth. They developed a technology that could float in contradistinction to the dry-land custom of protecting oneself with great stone walls–of which the greater the thickness and height, the greater the popularly-assumed security.

On the sea one couldn’t use stone–one would sink. On the sea men took fragile materials such as wood that would float naturally and, by scientific designs, produced extraordinary and powerful ships with which they battled the seas and one another, seeking to control the great sealanes of world commerce, seeking to be the greatest power. They

Vision 65 Summary Address

developed more and more speed, hitting power and cargo space with ever less of invested resources in time, material and energy per each and every function of the ship and its equipment and that brought them to steam and the steamship, brought them to steelmaking, to make the great ship. Half a century later they began to have enough steel left over from shipmaking to put some into buildings on the land. From the battleship to the land came electric dynamos, refrigeration, radio, desalination, et al.

To control the world even more effectively with the airplane forced an international race to do even more with less. In doing more with less we have recently gone, for instance, from the latest seventy-five thousand ton trans-Atlantic cable of copper wires to Telstar, which provides more communication more effectively with less than a ton of materials. We have not been thinking correctly of this technological-do-more-with-less revolution as being only a by-product of our scientific preoccupation with weapons. But it is now obvious on study that this is what has changed man’s condition on earth. It takes, on average, twenty-two years for the “dynamo to come off the battleship” into our domestic use. If we have to wait for twenty-two years to bring the curve of “haves” to one hundred percent, this may be fatally slow.

If humanity understood that the real world problem is that of upping the performances per pound of the world’s metals and other resources, we might attempt to solve that problem deliberately, directly and efficiently. It might be a world around university students’ elective research undertaking.

But I find that approximately no one realizes what is going on. That is why we have been leaving it to the politician to make the world work. There is nothing political that the politician can do to make fewer resources do sixty percent more.

Just what our communication problem is now becomes obvious. Man long ago invented communications because he had something to communicate. He was terribly hungry; and he only used communication when he had a vital need. He develops effective communication capability only when he has both an enormous need and a clear idea of what his problem consists. To keep aware of the progressively most critical problems of humanity one must keep an eye on a complex of economic and technical development curves. As I told you the other day, when Eisenhower was confronted by his atomic advisors regarding the enormity of the hydrogen bomb, he said, “There is no alternative to peace.”

I will give you figures that will bring you to last week’s U.S.A. inventory of destruction. For each one of us, in the U.S.A., there are now ten tons of steel and twenty tons of concrete and one hundred pounds of copper in use. But, for every human being on the face of the earth today, we have now twenty-eight thousand pounds (T.N.T. equivalent) of explosives–that’s fourteen tons per capita, which is to say that for every pound of human flesh there are two hundred pounds of self-annihilating explosives. We must move swiftly to convert that energy from negative to positive advantage before an Oswald puts his finger on the trigger of the omni-inter-retaliatory atomic bombing systems. If we have to wait twenty-two years for high standard living to develop secondhandedly from weapons development, the probability is high that the Oswald finger will trigger human annihilation.

In addition to Eisenhower’s “no alternative to peace,” I go along with two other statements. A physicist of Chicago University, John R. Platt, surveying general world trends and basic data, says, “The world is now too dangerous for anything but Utopia.”

Unfortunately, we now view Utopia as unfeasible. Our attitude is derived from the fact that all attempts to establish Utopias occurred when there wasn’t enough to support more than one percent of humanity, whereas it is fundamental to Utopia that there must be

enough for all. . For the last ten years the by-product more-with-lessing of prime weapons development has made it visible that there can be enough to go around–handsomely.

I also go along with the statement of Jerome Wiesner, who was the White House Advisor to Kennedy and to Johnson during his first term. Wiesner is now back at M.I.T., where he is head of the department of nuclear physics. Wiesner says, “The armaments race is an accelerating downward-spiral to Oblivion.”

So I’ll say to you that man on earth is now clearly faced with the choice of Utopia or Oblivion. If he chooses the latter he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If, however, he chooses Utopia, he must get busy very fast.

For this reason I am excited over the earnestness of this meeting. Our intuitions are powerful in bringing our reasoning to bear. So, here we are, suddenly discovering what the real world problems are: So long as there is not enough for all of humanity to survive and enjoy total earth, there will be war.

We now know that Malthus is wrong and that there can be enough to go around if we up the performance per pound of the world’s resources from the present overall mechanical efficiency of world societies’ mechanics to a highly feasible overall efficiency of only twelve percent.

This can only be realized through a design science revolution of spontaneously co-ordinate university-aged youth. This revolution is trying to articulate itself everywhere. It gets bogged down by political exploiters of all varieties.

Making the world resources adequate can’t be accomplished through political system competition. All politics are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers. Politics are only adequate for secondary housekeeping tasks. Mankind must take the universal initiative in effecting the design revolution.

You, of this world conference, Vision 65, at Southern Illinois University, are experts on how to communicate. This is the message that you must communicate to the world society in time to accomplish Utopia before Oblivion occurs.

7 The World Game — How to Make the World Work

R. Buckminster Fuller

To start with, here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations and I can tell you that within six months two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

The fact is that now–for the first time in the history of man for the last ten years, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions – in any other than secondary roles as housekeeping organizations – are completely obsolete. All of them were developed on the you-or-me basis. This whole realization that mankind can and may be comprehensively successful is startling.

In pursuance of this theme and under auspices to be announced later we are going to undertake at Southern Illinois University in the next five years, a very extraordinary computerized program to be known as “How to Make the World Work.”

Here on Southern Illinois’ campus we are going to set up a great computer program. We are going to introduce the many variables now known to be operative in economics. We will store all the basic data in the machine’s memory bank; where and how much of each class of the physical resources; where are the people, what are the trendings – all kinds of trendings of world man?

Next we are going to set up a computer feeding game, called “How Do We Make the World Work?” We will start playing relatively soon. We will bring people from all over the world to play it. There will be competitive teams from all around Earth to test their theories on how to make the world work. If a team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages and is not able to wait for the going gestation rates to validate their theory they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics you are very liable to get into war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. If war develops the side inducing it loses the game.

Essence of the world’s working will be to make every man able to become a world citizen and able to enjoy the whole earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forward days without any interference with any other man and never at the cost of another man’s equal freedom and advantage. I think that the communication problem – of “How to Make the World Work” – will become extremely popular the world around.

The game will be played by competing individuals and teams. The comprehensive logistical information upon which it is based is our Southern Illinois University supported Inventory of World Resources Human Trends and Needs. It is also based upon the data and grand world strategies already evolved in the Design Science Decade being conducted, under our leadership here at Southern Illinois University, by world-around university students who, forsaking the political expedient of attempting to reform man, are committed to reforming the environment in such a manner as to “up” the performance per each unit of invested world

resources until so much more is accomplished with so much less that an even higher standard of living will be effected for 100% of humanity than is now realized by the 40% of humanity who may now be classified as economically and physically successful.

“The Game” will be hooked up with the now swiftly increasing major universities information network. This network’s information bank will soon be augmented by the world-around satellite scanned live inventorying of vital data. Spy satellites are now inadvertently telephoting the whereabouts and number of beef cattle around the surface of the entire earth. The exact condition of all the world’s crops is now simultaneously and totally scanned and inventoried. The inter-relationship of the comprehensively scanned weather and the growing food supply of the entire earth are becoming manifest.

In playing “The Game” the computer will remember all the plays made by previous players and will be able to remind each successive player of the ill fate of any poor move he might contemplate making. But the ever changing inventory might make possible today that which would not work yesterday. Therefore the successful stratagems of the live game will vary from day to day. The game will not become stereotyped.

If a player resorts to political means for the realization of his strategy, he may be forced ultimately to use the war-waging equipment with which all national political systems maintain their sovereign power. If a player fires a gun - that is, if he resorts to warfare, large or small, he loses and must fall out of the game.

The general systems theory controls of the game will be predicated upon employing within a closed system the world’s continually updated total resource information in closely specified network complexes designed to facilitate attainment, at the earliest possible date, by every human being of complete enjoyment of the total planet Earth, through the individual’s optional traveling, tarrying or dwelling here and there. This world-around freedom of living, work, study and enjoyment must be accomplished without any one individual interfering with another and without any individual being physically or economically advantaged at the cost of another.

Whichever player or team first attains total success for humanity wins the first round of the gaming. There are alternate ways of attaining success. The one that attains it in the shortest time wins the second round. Those who better the record at a later date win rounds 3, 4, and so on.

All the foregoing objectives must be accomplished not only for those who now live but for all coming generations of humanity. How to make humanity a continuing success at the earliest possible moment will be the objective. The game will also be dynamic. The players will be forced to improve the program – failure to improve also results in retrogression of conditions. Conditions cannot be pegged to accomplishment. They must also grow either worse or better. This puts time at a premium in playing the game.

Major world individuals and teams will be asked to play the game. The game cannot help but become major world news. As it will be played from a high balcony overlooking a football field-sized Dymaxion Airocean World Map with electrically illumined data transformations, the game will be visibly developed and may be live-televised the world over by a multi-Telstar relay system.

The world’s increasing confidence in electronic instrumentation in general – due to the demonstrated reliability of its gyro-compasses, and its ’blind’ instrument landings of airplanes at night in thick fog, and confidence in opinion-proof computers in particular, will make the “world game” playing of fundamental and spontaneous interest to all of humanity.

World Game

Ultimately its most successful winning techniques will become well known around the world and as the game’s solutions gain world favor they will be spontaneously resorted to as political emergencies accelerate.

Nothing in the game can solve the problem of two men falling in love with the same girl, or falling in love with the same shade under one specific tree. Some are going to have to take the shade of another equally inviting tree. Some may end up bachelors. Some may punch each other’s noses. For every problem solved a plurality of new problems arise to take their place. But the problems need not be those of physical and economic survival. They can be perplexing and absorbing in entirely metaphysical directions such as those which confront the philosophers, the artists, poets, and scientists.

The game must, however, find ways in which to provide many beautiful shade trees for each – that is to say a physical, and economic abundance adequate for all. There will, of course, have to be matchings of times and desires, requiring many initial wait-listings. As time goes on, however, and world-around information becomes available, the peaks and valleys of men’s total time can be ever improvedly smoothed out. Comprehensive coordination of bookings, resource and accommodation information will soon bring about a 24-hour, world-around viewpoint of society which will operate and think transcendentally to local “seasons” and weathers of rooted botanical life. Humanity will become emancipated from its mental fixation on the seven-day week frame of reference. I myself now have many winters and summers per year as I cross the equator from northern to southern hemisphere and back several times annually. I have now circled the earth so many times that I think of it and literally sense it in my sight as a sphere. I often jump in eight and nine hour time zone air strides. As a consequence my metabolic coordination has become independent of local time fixations.

It is my intention to initiate on several occasions in a number of places anticipatory discussion of the necessary and desirable parameters to establish for playing the world game. I intend to nominate as participants both in these preliminary discussions and in formal play only those who are outstandingly capable of discussing these parameters. The participants must also be those well known for their lack of bias as well as for their forward looking competence and practical experience.

APPENDIX “A”

Appendix “A”

REPORT ON EXPERIMENTAL GEODESIC DOME September, 1957 McGill University School of Architecture STUDENT SEMINAR WITH MR. R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Compiled by: J. Hirayama J. Miller C. H. Rubenstein

Drawings by: E. Steciuk

LOOKING TOWARDS THE FUTURE

Today Canada is witnessing a great industrial expansion. Along with this expansion there are ever growing problems of mass housing. Much of this expansion is taking place in the outlying districts of Canada and to some extent, in the far Northern regions. In addition to the normal problems of mass housing, particularly for large industry, this type of housing presents further problems of transportation of materials and machinery as well as of accessibility.

It would appear thus far from observation and experimentation with the dome that it may possess a specialized affinity for use in these outlying districts. This is due to the fact that such a dome is low in cost relative to conventional structures. The materials of construction are extremely light and small in bulk and can therefore be very easily transported. Even inaccessible districts in the far North could be serviced by air. Another factor is the dome’s adaptability to a variety of purposes. Also, the fact that once built the dome can easily be moved is a further advantage.

This experimental dome is 28 feet in diameter and 18 feet in height at its highest point and weighs less than 1,000 pounds. It is constructed of hollow units of thin sheet aluminum and kraft paperboard which already have been found to have very good insulating properties. If the voids of these units were to be filled with a material such as rock-wool the insulating properties of the dome would be somewhat increased. The lightness of these units, each weighing less then ten pounds, allows for a rapid and simple erection which would not require any trained labour. Inherent in the shape of the dome is the fact that it retains its heat quite well and can be heated at low cost. Furthermore, during the summer such domes, with a vent at the top, have been found to produce a self-air-conditioning effect. Visually the dome has a simple and pleasant exterior and the interior is quite pleasing.

BEGINNING OF SEMINAR AND LECTURES

Mr. Fuller arrived in Montreal on Friday evening, September 14th. Student leaders met with him that night and all of the following day. During this time the facilities available at the School of Architecture and the workshop at the Montreal Building Trades Training Centre were shown to Mr. Fuller. It was then agreed that the School of Architecture would serve as the overall headquarters and as lecture room space for the group while the Trades Centre would serve as the workshop and place of construction. Before his arrival, Mr. Fuller had

already done preliminary mathematical calculations on the proposed experimental structure, but the bulk of the mathematical calculation was still to be done by the students.

On Sunday September 16th at 10 a.m. the first meeting of the seminar was called. For the next two days Mr. Fuller lectured to the group on his philosophy and general manner of thinking. Much discussion took place. It was basically a period of give and take between him and the students in which a close rapport was established.

The bond which developed in these first few days was extremely important because without it the students would not have been able to withstand the stress and strain which the seminar generated. One must realize that in the short period of ten days an experimental structure was completely calculated, all materials purchased, components fabricated, and then fitted together to produce the dome. Since this particular structure is a prototype no previous methods or patterns existed to aid in its fabrication and erection. The students were required at all times to work as a closely knit group in order to solve efficiently the many problems which developed.

On Tuesday morning September 18th, the group met in order to begin work on the dome. The group was organized on the basis of industrial procedures for prototyping. This meant dividing the students into the following groups:

Coordinator, first assistant, second assistant Purchasing Expediting Mathematical Department and Structural Analysis Research Photography Secretary Drafting Production Installation Public Relations

The job of the three coordinators was to relate the work of all the groups concerned and act as a liaison between Mr. Fuller and the separate departments. Purchasing and Expediting Groups bought and ensured delivery of materials.

The Research Department obtained data on these materials and tested them in order to determine both their properties and suitability. Simultaneously, the Mathematical Group was busy around the clock making the necessary calculations for the components of the dome which were then quickly delivered to the Drafting Department. The information was then transferred to drawings which were in turn used for fabrication. Once the materials and the necessary calculations were avail- able the production group began the fabrication of the component parts.

The Installation Group was in charge of erecting the dome. Graphic and pic- torial records were handled by the Secretary and Photographers respectively.

It was the Public Relations Department’s job to act as a liaison between interested public and the project.

After each man had been assigned his task, work on the construction of the dome began in earnest. At the end of seven days from this point the dome was sub-

Appendix “A”

stantially completed. In order to facilitate the understanding of this report the chronological treatment will now be temporarily abandoned in lieu of a detailed description of the dome.

DESCRIPTION OF THE DOME

The geodesic dome, a structure based on the geometry of the sphere enclosing a maximum of space for a minimum of effort and materials, is in essence a hemisphere.

The dome as built appears as an aluminum hemisphere whose exterior surface is patterned by a diamond-like grid of olive green tape. It has five hexagonal windows approximately half way down from the pole of the sphere along with five doors evenly spaced around the perimeter of the dome. The dome consists of about 100 diamond-shaped box structures made out of paperboard and covered on the outside with a diamond-shaped aluminum skin. Each component has two planes on the interior surface which are triangular in shape and whose common side is the long diagonal of the diamond. Because of the slope of the two triangular planes from the common long diagonal of the diamond there is a pleasant pattern of shade and light on the interior surface of the dome. The dome spans 28 feet and is 18 feet at its highest point; it weighs approximately 1,000 pounds.

DESCRIPTION OF COMPONENTS

There are two basic components, diamond number one and diamond number two which differ in size but not in form. Each component is made out of a flat sheet of paperboard folded into a box-like structure. These components have a diamond shape in plan

96 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

PLANPAPERBOARD DIAMOND NO.1 A SCALE ¡“=1’-0”

ALUMINUM DIAMOND NO.1 B

BULKHEAD NO.1 C

DIAMOND BOX PARTIALLY FOLDED

DIAMOND BOX PARTIALLY FOLDED WITH BULKHEADS

DIAMOND BOX COMPLETELY FOLDED

DIAMOND BOX COMPLETELY FOLDED WITH BRIDGE

DIAMOND BOX COMPLETELY FOLDED. (LOOKING AT BOTTOM)

COMPLETED DIAMOND BOX WITH ALUMINUM TOP.

TWO NO.1 DIAMONDS GOING TOGETHER A

SIDE ELEVATION A

END ELEVATION A

SECTION B

SECTION B

TWO NO.1 DIAMONDS JOINED TOGETHER WITH SELF-TAPPING SCREWS & JOINT COVERED WITH TAPE. B

Appendix “A”

measuring about 5 feet by 3 1/2 feet on the long and short diagonals respectively. This structure has a 6 inch depth inside which are placed two reinforcing paperboard bulkheads which force the diamond box to assume a two planar surface on the interior. This duality of planes on each component introduces the shade and light pattern on the interior of the dome.

Diamond number one has four equal sides while diamond number two has two short sides and two long sides. The angle to the vertical of the 6 inch side of the diamond box on the number one and number two boxes coupled with the fact that there are two different shaped structures, permits the curvature of the dome to form as these pieces are put together. Each component is covered on the flat surface (external one) with a thin aluminum sheet having a shape corresponding to the surface to which it is applied. The aluminum sheet has 3 inch flap extensions on two opposite sides of the diamond for assembling purposes.

DESCRIPTION OF MATERIALS

The aluminum came in sheets 36 inches by 144 inches, .014 inches in thickness. It has a high corrosive resistance and a fairly high tensile strength.

The paperboard is a corrugated paper built up by two layers of paper fibres, (liners) between which there is a layer of corrugated paper. The fibres of the outside layers and the corrugations are perpendicular to each other. This affords a maximum of strength. One of the more important attributes of the paperboard is its high wet strength.

An adhesive was used to glue aluminum to paperboard and paperboard to paperboard. This adhesive has a high shear strength, and is water resistant, has good weathering and aging characteristics and is easily applied.

The transparent covering of windows and doors is a poly-vinyl chloride acetate which stands up well through a wide range of temperatures. It also has a high tensile strength. The grid on the exterior of the dome is an adhesive tape used to weatherproof the joints between diamond shaped components. This tape has been used with success on some of Mr. Fuller’s earlier structures. It is a tape which has a maximum “quick-stick” for ease of application and a “high-hold” value for lasting adhesion.

START OF OPERATIONS

We should now like to return to the point where the construction of the dome began. It was at this point that the students began working under the various departmental headings mentioned previously. Of course, the object of the organization was the fabrication of the component parts and hence the erection of the dome. When the various departments were settled, arrangements were made to use the Trade Centre facilities, particularly the carpentry, electrical and metal shops. The School of Architecture became the headquarters and housed the following departments:

Mathematical and Structural Analysis Research Branch of Installations (model making and mock-ups) Drafting Purchasing and Expediting Public Relations

The Mathematical, Purchasing and Expediting, and Research Departments were the first groups to begin work simultaneously while other groups were briefed by Mr. Fuller in preparation for the work to come. The project now assumed a unity of operations - a unity in the sense that each department became interdependent and a snag or hitch was sufficient to seriously interrupt operations.

The Mathematical Department was primarily concerned with determing the diameter of the dome and then the dimensions of its component parts. This group worked in close association with the mock-up division of the Installations Department who translated the calculated results into full-size models. The Drafting Department worked in conjunction with the Installation Department here. These models were then tested by the Research Department and the necessary adjustments noted. The Mathematical Department then corrected their original calculations on the basis of this new data. The Mathematics group calculated the dimensions of numbers 1 and 2 diamonds. The model making group then started making a few small-scale models of the component parts. It was found that upon joining these components together a misfit occurred because no account had been taken of the thickness of the paperboard. This is a typical example of the disparity between theoretical calculations and practical applications. In the translation from theory to practice the procedure evolved was very similar to basic industrial patterns.

Meanwhile the Purchasing and Expediting Departments were busy running down the list of materials required by Mr. Fuller. Foremost in their task was locating these materials. Each material had a group of specifications which had to be closely followed. Tremendous cooperation was given by industry which was due in part to the enthusiasm of the students and also to the experimental nature of the project. Through careful and persistent searching out some materials with better than hoped for features were discovered and consequently purchased. In some cases, donations, and in others, substantial discounts were given to us. Once the materials had been purchased it was the job of the Expediting group to see that these materials arrived at the designated place at the proper time.

Before materials were purchased samples of each one were sent to the Research Department for testing. The Research Department studied the literature accompanying the products and gathered the necessary data. The qualities of each material were considered and tested with regard to their specific functions. The necessary tests were performed and once the material was found suitable, Mr. Fuller was consulted and upon his approval the Purchasing Department was free to act and arrange for immediate delivery.

Among other groups active at this time was the Installations Group which looked over the proposed site and obtained the tools and materials needed for erection. Needless to say the Secretary and the Photographers were busy recording all operations.

ASSEMBLY OF PARTS

The parts were now ready for component assembly. The assembly consisted of several operations performed by crews whose main objective was to maintain a steady flow of parts from one crew to the other until the component emerged completed - basically, an assembly line operation. There was a minimum of four crews in operation. The first two crews were concerned solely with applying glue to the necessary areas. The third crew was responsible for moving completed parts from one crew to the other and for the storage of completed components. The fourth crew, consisting of four men, worked on the jig to assemble the diamond box structure. In addition, they glued the aluminum cover to the paperboard box.

Appendix “A”

Until a set and efficient pattern was evolved (a production-engineering problem) the process was slow and erratic. It must be noted here that the students involved never before had any contact with actual prototyping nor any experience with setting up such a production schedule. Yet, within a very short period of time and under the extreme stress and strain of lack of sleep (students often worked for thirty to thirty-five hours continuously) a smooth assembly-line operation was developed.

Originally it was thought that in the gluing process the glued surfaces would have to be temporarily held together while the glue dried. Consequently, heavy-duty staplers and staples were purchased for this purpose. However, Research and Purchasing Departments discovered a glue providing great strength in shear which eliminated the use of staplers and staples. This glue is applied to the two surfaces which are to be glued together. The glue is allowed to dry on each surface independently for about ten minutes, and then upon contact of the two surfaces, almost the full strength of the bond is immediately established. This bond is so strong that in tests the material would fail in shear before the glue.

The procedure of assembly of all the component parts was as follows:

1. Two gluing masters were prepared for paperboard diamonds numbers 1 and 2. These gluing masters showed the specific areas on the paperboard sheets which were to be glued.

2. A crew of two men applied glue with brushes to the specific areas on paperboard sheets. These were then allowed to dry for ten minutes. At the same time 3 inch wide aluminum strips were glued into proper place on the paperboard.

3. At the same time another gluing crew was applying glue to the necessary surfaces of the bulkheads and the bridges.

4. After ten minutes the paperboard sheet was brought to the jig and placed in it. Each man of the four man crew took a position at one of the four apexes of the diamond shaped box. Then, by carefully manipulating the glued surfaces into their correct position with the aid of blank paper (to keep the glued surfaces from touching) all apexes were brought into the correct relationship - the paper removed and upon contact the surfaces were glued. Now the sides of the box were in position.

5. Glued bulkheads and one bridge were now brought to the jig and placed in position in the box. This positioning determines the “open V” shape that the box assumes. The four remaining flaps of the paperboard sheet were then folded over and glued down over the top of the bulkheads. The bridge which was then glued in place covered the void between the flaps and completed the diamond box structure.

6. The box was then taken out of the jig and glue applied to the area where the aluminum diamond would be placed. Simultaneously, the aluminum diamond was given a coat of glue.

7. After ten minutes it was replaced in the jig. The aluminum sheet was then placed over the paperboard box and carefully positioned, again with the use of blank paper to keep the glued surfaces from touching. The blank paper was then carefully slipped out while the aluminum was pressed down in place. Because of the shape of the box the aluminum assumed a very slight convex curvature.

8. The finished component was now removed from the jig and stored.

9. All component parts were then carefully marked for quick identification with coloured crayon.

100 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

ERECTION OF THE DOME

The necessary tools for the erection were electric drills, scaffolding, electric extensions (up to 300 feet in length), screw drivers, lights, ropes, ladders and tarpaulins. These were obtained from the McGill University Department of Buildings and Grounds, and the Trades Centre. At this time the necessary self-tapping metal screws were purchased. A small model of the dome had already been constructed by the Installations Group. As a result of this model it was discovered that an error could easily be made in positioning the number 2 diamonds. Therefore it was necessary to heed this warning in the actual erection. The model also helped to familiarize the students with the shape of the dome and its openings. This was particularly important in this type of project where the individual working in his special department tends to lose sight of the overall concept. It should be noted that at this point of operations a few departments such as Purchasing and Expediting, Mathematical, Production, and Research, had completed the bulk of their work and were ready to join the Installations Group in erecting the dome. Eventually the Installations Group absorbed all of the students in the project.

Before all the components had been completed a small installation crew with Mr. Fuller had already begun to assemble the first five number 1 diamonds which would form the top part of the dome. Many of the problems arising out of errors in making the components here presented themselves. They were eventually resolved but only after a long all night struggle. But the pattern was now set and much time would be saved. The Installation Group had now decided to build the dome from the top down. This presented problems of lifting the structure up as students added components. At first scaffolding was used which forced the dome to rest on four points. However, this was found to be antagonistic to the basic shape which the dome tried to assume due to gravity and the shape of components. Therefore, after a few components had been added the supporting scaffolding was removed and a central post-support was substituted. A few ropes prevented the structure from swaying.

Appendix “A” 101

The procedure of erection was as follows:

1. The five point star previously constructed was set into position on scaffolding. 2. Various diamond components were placed into their proper positions with the 3 inch flap overlapping its neighbour. 3. Two men then drilled holes in the flap to accommodate the self-tapping screws. 4. Two other men put in the self-tapping screws. Five screws were placed in each flap. 5. Rings of components were added - the dome gradually took shape with the inclusion of its windows and doors.

2. As the structure went up component by component it was discovered that the erection procedure could be accelerated by assembling separately groups of four components and then fitting this unit onto the existing structure. As a result, crews were spontaneously formed and the construction was accelerated. 7. At the equator (base) of the dome diamonds numbers 1 and 2 had to be specially cut - according to the Mathematical Department’s calculations - so that the dome would rest on a flat base. (This is actually the truncation of the sphere at its equator).

The original design intended for components to be glued to each other by means of the aluminum flaps. However, since a degree of demountability was desirable this procedure was abandoned in favour of self-tapping screws. This necessarily weakens the structure as tension is transmitted through screws instead of through the whole surface area of the flap - about 146 square inches of flap as opposed to about 5 square inches of effective transmission with screws.

The dome structure was substantially complete after two days.

102 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

FINISHING OF THE DOME

Finishing of the dome entailed the following:

1. Addition of screws to strengthen flap connections. 2. Taping of all external joints at flaps - weatherproofing. 3. Glazing of doors and windows with clear vinyl. 4. Base finishing and anchoring of dome. 5. Inside finishing - painting and taping over joints.

2. Additional screws were added in each flap to increase the area of transmission of stresses from one component to another and effectively increase the strength of the dome. 2. All external joints on the dome (where flaps of one component overlapped its neighbour) were covered with a weatherproofing tape. This tape is known as “Permacel” tape - an olive-coloured cotton cloth tape waterproofed with a plastic coating. Before application the aluminum surface to be covered was cleaned with varsol to remove the oil film and dirt. (This tape had been previously tested by the Research Department and found to meet all our requirements). This tape was carefully trimmed once in place, which afforded a very neat pattern expressing the structure of the dome. 3. All windows and doors were glazed with a clear vinyl. This vinyl was applied with the Permacel tape, and a heavier gauge was used on the outside. This resulted in double glazed openings with a six inch insulating air space between the sheets of vinyl. One of the five sets of doors is finished so that it buttons on and permits entry or exit.

Appendix “A” 103

4. The dome was moved to its permanent site a few hundred feet away from its place of erection. This was done before the glazing was completed. An 8 inch concrete block ring foundation was prepared on the permanent site. A plywood ring was placed on top of the blocks to receive the dome. The transfer of the dome was an exciting moment. It was easily carried by twenty-five students and set down on its permanent foundation. Before setting the dome down a heavy nylon fiberthin material was draped over the plywood ring and then glued up on to the dome inside and out. This acts as a waterproof membrane for the base of the dome. This fiberthin was then covered with Permacel tape to produce a more finished appearance. For anchorage, steel rods 5 feet in length were driven in scissors-like fashion into the ground. Aluminum straps were then screwed to the out- side of the dome at its base and connected by means of a bolt and high strength airplane cable to the two eyes of the steel rods. Three such an- chors were placed around the dome with a fourth anchored to an existing concrete pier.

5. The interior joints of the dome were then taped with a paper tape. All interior surfaces were then sprayed with a white paint. Once the dome was painted white the effect inside was extremely interesting as each com- ponent had a play of light and shadow on it.

The dome was now complete.

A great deal of energy was expended by the students on this project. It was not un- common for groups of students to work some thirty to thirty-five hours continuously around the clock. This manner of schedule was necessitated by the fact that the project only began two weeks before the beginning of the fall term and that Mr. Fuller could be with the group for just the two weeks. In such a project as this one it was difficult to assess the space of time that it would take. All concerned felt that two weeks would be sufficient. However, at the time of this report it is quite obvious that a month could have been easily filled. As a result of this intensive schedule errors occurred which under normal working conditions would have been avoided. Perhaps it is extraordinary that even though these inaccuracies occurred the components of the dome went together quite well. It is also interesting to note that Mr. Fuller has suggested that without the unique conditions of this seminar, namely the students’ initiative and drive, and industrial cooperation, normally such a research pro- ject would have cost more than 100,000 and would have taken at least six months to develop. The actual fabrication and erection time of this dome from inception took ten days and cost approximately 4,500.

Appendix “A”

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE GEODESIC EXPERIMENT December 1954

A CHRONICLE OF THE PROJECT

On November 30, 1954 (Tuesday) Mr. Fuller began lecturing to the Washington University School of Architecture. His lectures, introductory to the project, were carried through December 7 (Tuesday). The aim of the project was stated to be the design and fabrication of a geodesic dome structure. At the end of the day a Coordinator and his assistant for the project were elected.

December 8 (Wednesday): Following a discussion led by Mr. Fuller on organization, the members divided into eight committees:

Research Documentary Mathematics Treasury Production Engineering Purchasing Public Relations Drafting

Each committee then chose its chairman and assistant, and the members familiarized themselves with their functions.

December 9 (Thursday): The TREASURY opened an account with Mr. Fuller who was underwriting the project. RESEARCH completed two models to determine the orientation of the dome’s base, while the MATHEMATICS committee calculated length and size of the various structural members. The DRAFTING committee assigned work schedules and began drafting connector details for the joints. The PURCHASING committee contacted local lumber companies for prices of lumber. A visit to Monsanto Chemical Company yielded 25 pounds of a new waterproofing wood glue scheduled to be shipped from their Massachusetts plant and arrive on December 14. The PRODUCTION committee began gathering data for sizes and quantity of materials. Study on a suitable joint connection was begun. PUBLIC RELATIONS contacted the Washington University News Bureau to discuss a publicity program. It was decided to wait until the completion of the dome to make any news releases. The DOCUMENTARY committee began compilation of the reports and the transcription from tape recording of Mr. Fuller’s lectures.

A meeting at 4 p.m. with Mr. Fuller to review the project’s first 24 hours of operation produced a change in structural plans due to the excessive weight of the dome brought about by the use of wood as a prototype in the construction. The triangular type construction of the tetrahedron tensile members would be employed in place of the original design to preclude this excessive weight.

December 10 (Friday): RESEARCH consulted the Dean of the Engineering School to determine suitable tensile materials. Piano wire and plastic coated nylon were recommended. MATHEMATICS calculated the theoretical dimensions of the tension and compression members and the angles necessary for construction. Linear footage of lumber and cable was roughly estimated. PURCHASING inquired about lumber prices and arrangements were made to purchase

1600 linear feet of Western Cedar (11/16" x 3 5/8" S3S) at 14 cents per linear foot. PRODUCTION continued on joint design and a full scale model of the strut was constructed. PUBLIC RELATIONS compiled a progress chart for display. A photography studio was set up to take still shots of models and so forth. DOCUMENTARY established procedure and assignments to insure complete coverage.

December 13 (Monday): RESEARCH neared completion of a balsa wood model of the dome. A Nico Press tool was borrowed from Ozark Air Lines. MATHEMATICS calculated tensile and compressive stresses in units, and tests were made to determine the stress and elongation of the cable to be used as tensile members. PURCHASING bought the wood, which was to be picked up at 4:30 p.m., December 14. Cadmium-plated bolts were purchased at 7 cents each. PRODUCTION arrived at a suitable joint solution. There remained a problem to pre-determine jig sizes for strut members due to a change in the dome size.

It was determined that Francis Field (WU football field) would be the experimental building site, with final erection near Givens Hall. The size of the dome was changed from a 36’ diameter to 42’ to enlarge entrance openings. Mr. Fuller estimated that the first assembly of the dome would begin Friday, December 17 and take about one day; second assembly, 1/2 day; third assembly, 3 hours.

December 14 (Tuesday): RESEARCH completed model of the dome. MATHEMATICS recalculated member lengths due to change of dome size. PURCHASING made pick-up of the wood. A steel disc would be ready the following morning; 1/2" steel bolts, 18" long, were purchased. PRODUCTION reported a change in joint design from metal disc with wooden mast to wooden disc with metal mast; strut ends would be symmetrical. Final jig assembly was begun.

December 15 (Wednesday): Arrival date of Monsanto glue was moved up to December 16. Broderick Bascom donated 400 feet of aircraft cable. MATHEMATICS made the final report on the length of tension and compression members and determined dimensions of the joints and connectors. DRAFTING began working drawings and templates for design. PURCHASING received donation of steel washers from Mississippi Valley Steel. PRODUCTION continued jig assembly. A sample strut was fabricated and tested. Operations were set up for welding, drilling and cable fabrication. Methods and manpower for production line were determined. PUBLIC RELATIONS reported that a 15-minute color film of the project would be produced by KETC, St. Louis’ educational television station. Costs were to be assumed by the University. Arrangements were made for the News Bureau to provide news releases on Monday, December 20.

December 16 (Thursday): RESEARCH procured tension strapping equipment and found that Weldwood glue would have to be purchased and used until the arrival of Monsanto’s glue. MATHEMATICS re-checked calculations for jig dimensions. A full-size test model of the tetrahedron unit was made. DRAFTING drew and cut templates for nailing operations. PURCHASING procured tools for construction. PRODUCTION continued set-up of jigs and sample strut testing. Parts were being cut and readied for assembly. PUBLIC RELATIONS sent out letters of appreciation and invitations to the assembly to numerous firms and persons. A new committee, INSTALLATION, was initiated, responsible for the erection of the dome.

December 17 (Friday): The entire project personnel began to concentrate on the Production and Installation activities. In PRODUCTION, the struts were in the final construction stages: sanding and finishing procedures were started, cables cut and fabricated. PUBLIC RELATIONS turned over a complete press release to the News Bureau. DOCUMENTARY completed the transcription of Mr. Fuller’s lectures. INSTALLATION started to lay out procedure for the erection of the dome.

Appendix “A”

December 18 (Saturday): Work of all committees except PRODUCTION and INSTALLATION ceased, in preparation for the erection. PRODUCTION completed construction of struts, joint hardware and cable. All tools and material required for the erection were assembled.

December 19 (Sunday) & December 20 (Monday): Actual erection of the dome just east of Givens Hall completed. (See Erection Procedure - page 89).

December 21 (Tuesday): The TREASURY balanced the books and gave Mr. Fuller a preliminary financial report. The DOCUMENTARY committee began to assemble a finished report on the entire project to include a condensation of Mr. Fuller’s lectures. All material, written and drawn, was assembled as a complete file on the project. The DRAFTING committee started to make plans to prepare drawings for the final report.

ORGANIZATION

Representatives from the following groups met daily to review progress and discuss proposed procedure.

CO-ORDINATORS: As general managers, responsible for the smooth functioning of the organizational system of the project. To -solve organizational problems by working for better procedures -schedule completion dates for various phases of the project -co-ordinate work of various committees toward common goal -plan most effective use of man power

TREASURY: Control project finances. -authorize all monetary transactions -pay bills, keep record of all sales and receipts -counsel on all issues of budget -receive project expense money from Mr. Fuller, prepare and maintain balance sheet

MATHEMATICS: Responsible for all dimensions and calculations required for the design; production and erection of the dome. -calculate all structural members, all angles involved in connections -calculate and convert theoretical to actual dimension for all stages

RESEARCH: Perform necessary basic research into any phase of the project. -investigate types and sizes of domes most applicable to the present problem -build preliminary models of various dome schemes -investigate, with purchasing committee, best and most economic materials -investigate performance of proposed assemblies and materials as related to job requirements

DRAFTING: Provide drawings necessary for the successful completion of the project. -provide quick sketches, as required, for meetings and discussions -execute working drawings of the structure and templates for construction, from calculations of the mathematics committee

PURCHASING: Procure all material necessary for completion of the project, by purchase or donation. -procure materials for experiments and models -obtain all material requested by committees -procure materials necessary for construction of the dome

PRODUCTION ENGINEERING: Produce efficiently, and on schedule, all parts needed for erection of the dome. -prepare working models of parts developed by the research committee and determine their feasibility according to materials used -design jigs and assemblies required to mass produce parts -undertake mass-production of dome members and sub-assemblies necessary for final erection

PUBLIC RELATIONS: Keep general public and all participants well informed of the project’s intent, progress, completion. -post daily progress of each committee and set up material and method displays -provide publicity through newspapers (campus, city, trade), television, radio and posters -keep a complete photographic record of project -handle all correspondence

ERECTION: Plan and supervise the erection. -procure all equipment necessary for erection -determine procedure of, prepare site for, and oversee entire erection

DOCUMENTARY: Document and present all activities -secure daily reports from all committees -keep file of all data, information and photographs -transcribe Mr. Fuller’s lectures -provide a complete file for the School of Architecture -publish a comprehensive report on the project and Mr. Fuller’s lectures

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

To begin the design of the struts and joints Mr. Fuller presented the following situation. The dome was to be 5/8 of a sphere composed of 90 identical length struts approximately 7 feet in length. The basic unit, a tetrahedron, would be composed of 3 such struts connected at a compression joint. To make this tetrahedron unit rigid, 3 peripheral tension members and 3 non-spherical tension members which connect a mast in the compression joint to the outer ends of the 3 struts were included. Five of these tetrahedron units comprise a star unit. The dome is composed of 6 stars. It was now possible to proceed with structural analysis.

The first question that arose was which to design first; strut or joint, because either would restrict the pattern the other was to assume. However, the conditioning of the strut to various joints was a matter of end treatment, and the general strut was preliminarily assumed leaving the end design to evolve from the joint design.

STRUT: Wood as the strut material was decided upon for reasons of economy and workability. The mathematics for compressive stresses was not developed but realizing that the member was essentially columnar, the strut was designed to support the weight of an average person, beamwise.

The first strut was made of two 1/2" x 3" clear grade fir, furnished with internal blocking:

Appendix “A”

A tetrahedron was then assembled using a pin type joint with a 1" wood dowel mast 1’ high:

Strength tests were not attempted to any degree of precision as obvious weaknesses were realized in the pin; however, it was found that the tetrahedron was a rigid, controllable unit when the tension members were strung. It was also noted that it would support the weight of a person.

Western Cedar Hickory Fir Extreme fiber in bending 1450 3100 2300 compression 240 720 400 compression 1050 2200 1600 Horizontal shear 130 225 145 Modulus of elasticity 10 x 10 18 x 10 15 x 10 Weight 27 63 36

Max. strut strength (Western Cedar) 1050 x 3 3150#

Beam Strength (based on 2 x 4 spanning 8’) 297 x 1/1.625 183# (tested approx. 200#)

Cedar then, due to its economy of section to strength developed, was selected for the final strut design, which was determined after 8 joint studies.

JOINT: Two problems were to be solved: transference of the compressive stresses and hingability. Information from Mr. Fuller ruled out certain designs because they lacked sufficient resistance to rotary movement about the joint. The severity of this problem was not realized to its full extent until after the erection operation commenced.

110 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

To organize the effectiveness of each of our joint proposals the major function of the joints had to be determined. This was the transference of the compressive stresses, with the following prerequisites: rotary motion check, a mast seat, provision for 90ř resistance check, and equalized strut lengths. The second function, hingability, was abandoned.

18g metal 3ij" 3" Joint #2

Joint #2 proved difficult because it involved too many accurate ’bends’ in the plates.

Following are the joint types #3 through #8:

strut end eccentric lock notch Joint #3

concentric #4

1¡" wood mast 6"x¿" plywood " wire hinger thin wall conduit bearing pivot #5

4" washers #6

keying notch 1¡" wood bearing dowel #7

¡" bolt ů 18" long #8

Appendix “A” 111

Joint #6 was judged the best structurally, requiring only one part. A later inspection however revealed that it did not permit equal strut lengths which was the very theme of the triangulation method adapted to the sphere.

Joint #7 was then developed which could satisfy the condition that the struts be of equal lengths, because it replaced direct strut contact with a compression cylinder. One apparent difficulty here was that rotary motion was checked by the rigidity of the tetrahedron unit only.

The final solution, joint #8, came about after further consultation with Mr. Fuller. The compressive stresses were shifted to the plywood disc by removal of the cylinder of joint #7. The joint now fulfilled the primary prerequisites: a good mast seat, a 90ř check against rotary action, and equal length struts.

ERECTI0N

The preliminary plan of procedure was as follows: six teams of 5 members and a captain were established; each was to control one of the ’star’ units. The plan involved the assembly of stars 1, 2 and 4 on the ground. Then rotating this smaller structure in such a manner as to have it form 2 sides and the top of the dome, the last 3 stars (3, 5 and 6) could then be raised into position and all remaining joints made firm. This method provided 2 advantages: reduction of manpower to 30 men, and elimination of an accurate ground survey.

On Sunday morning, December 19, a briefing was given at 9:30 a.m. Difficulty in obtaining entrance into Francis Field and adverse weather conditions (the night before a light snow had covered the ground) forced the decision to erect the dome at the final site, as shown in the following plan.

stock pile final site GIVENS HALL BIXBY HALL 5 4 1 6 3 2 North

At 10:30 erection began. Team One picked up materials and equipment and proceeded to designated area, followed by teams Two, Three, etc., assembling the five “tets”. As the ’tets’ were assembled by each team, the captains directed the assembly of the individual stars and attached all remaining tension cables. Except for tangling difficulties, caused by loose packaging, progress up to this point was smooth.

After lunch teams 1, 2 and 4 moved together. Each raised its star to form the small structure. With ladders and strapping tools all joints were connected and held firm. Joint connections proved difficult, because the three stars were not at proper elevations and angles. It was now realized that a proper site survey would have proven invaluable.

At 4:30 p.m., a meeting was held to discuss the progress and the problems that had arisen. The students recognized that there was time for only one erection. Several alter- nate methods of finishing were suggested. It was decided that the dome would be finished by adding each of the remaining “tets” singly. Mr. Fuller was notified of the day’s work, pro- gress, problems and decisions.

On Monday morning, December 20, a telephone conversation was held with Mr. Fuller. He suggested that we continue as planned and if the process was not smooth try an alternate method.

Sash cord was attached to one of the upper joints of the small structure which was then rotated on its two legs or bearing points (2 of 5) by means of the lifting rope and two teams lifting on the opposite side. Then team 6 (see plan) moved its star into position. Again joint- ing difficulties were present. When the stars were in correct position with respect to angle and elevation, the joints were made fast with little or no difficulty. When the four stars were positioned, a temporary center mast was put into place to help support the top star correctly and safely. All connections were made firm and the dome was allowed to rest on three of its bearing points. Star 3 was then added in similar manner.

Because of an account already published in the local papers, stating that the erection of the dome was to begin at 1:30 that day, placement of the last star was postponed until that time. Little, if any, trouble was encountered in completing the dome. The time of com- pletion was about 3:15 p.m.

The center mast was removed and the area was cleared for moving the dome 100’ to its final site. For demonstration purposes and for safety 10 men easily picked up the dome (2 men per leg or bearing point) and walked it to its final site. It was the opinion of those who lifted the dome that it could have been moved by 5 men.

After relocation, the dome was again raised and the bases and fastenings attached and lowered. Three 18" bolts were driven into the ground through each of the base plates to anchor the dome securely.

The base diameter of the dome is approximately 40’, the great circle diameter, 42’; weight approximately 750 pounds and the height at center approximately 24’.

FINANCES

Expenses:

Equipment 12.43 Overhead 57.13 Materials Dome models 4.10 Joint models .91 Other experiments 7.58 Erection experiments .40 Finishing dome 450.98 463.87 463.87 Total expenses of project - 533.53

Appendix “A” 113

Cost breakdown:

Lumber 293.47 Hardware 135.59 Sheet metal 1.50 Paint and brushes 23.34 Glue 11.73 Equipment 12.62 Model material 4.35 Gas mileage (715 mi) 35.75 Public Relations 9.55 Documentary 5.63 ______ 533.53

We were reminded by John Dixon (in sympathy with Mr. Fuller’s philosophy) that we were building at Washington University not a “thing” but a process. In reflection, we know that this was so.

“Bucky”, in his last meeting with us, remarked that he was pleased with the final package as well as with the erection. In commending the student group, his comments were, as they had been throughout his visit, chiefly about this process, the “how” and “why” and the organization, not the thing–the dome.

Dean Pickens, in reviewing the 3-week experiment, recognized its educational value, remarking that the school’s flexibility had surely been tested. It is difficult to report accurately public reaction to the finished product. What St. Louis architects, the University and the students observed is just beginning to be noted. Several participants had opinions on and solutions for the functioning of a large group, on the individual, team and organizational levels. Mr. Fuller’s statement, “The behavior of the whole cannot be predicted by the behavior of its parts”, was realized by many.

Appendix “A” 115

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER PROJECT

Fifth Year Architecture Class

Tulane University

New Orleans, Louisiana

February 2 - 27, 1954

SELECTION OF PROJECT

Mr. Fuller came to Tulane University February 2, 1954. At this time we expressed our desire to him as a group to engage in some type of prototyping activity. He then presented to us the possibility of building an 18-foot model of a geodesic hemisphere 108 feet in diameter for use as a Marine alert aircraft hanger. He explained to us that the Marine Corps feels a very definite need for highly mobile shelters to serve as barracks and hangers. They have decided that geodesic structures will serve this need most effectively and have requested that Mr. Fuller design such structures for them. The requirements for such mobile structures he explained to us as follows:

1. Must be extremely light. 2. Must be rapidly assembled by a crew inexperienced in construction. 3. Must be compactly packaged for transportation purposes. 4. Must be inexpensively mass produced. 5. Must be some material not easily picked up by radar beams. 6. Must withstand high wind, cold, snow, and other natural elements.

With a knowledge of the requirements for this structure we decided as a group to undertake the project. Mr. Fuller then discussed with us the selection of materials and method of construction for our dome which we have listed here in outline form.

I. Structural Material

A. Polyestered Cardboard

1. Advantages (a) Light (b) Strong © Inexpensive (d) Non-priority material (e) Will not be easily picked up by radar beams

II. Structural Units

A. Description

1. Eight frequency polyestered cardboard triangles of triangular section

116 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

B. Manufacturing Process

1. Folding a flat piece of cardboard into a length of triangular section and stapling in place

2. Folding an integral length of section into a triangle stapled at the joint

3. Polyestering the folded stapled triangle

C. Advantages

1. Polyester combines with the cardboard fiber to produce great strength in the cardboard

2. Polyestering the cardboard renders it impervious to moisture

3. Light weight section provides large surface area

III. Fastening Device

A. Industrial Filament Tape

1. Advantages (a) Strength (b) Available by mass production © Compact for shipping purposes (d) Universal fastener (e) Weight negligible (f) Simplicity of application

IV. Method of Assembly

A. Placing of continuous cardboard wedges between the sides of adjacent triangles (Figure 2)

With the structural units selected, wedges are necessary to maintain the angular openings between triangles which produce the spherical form of the dome. (Figure 3)

117

V. Assembly Units

A. Small diamonds, each consisting of two identical triangles (one positive and one negative)

B. Parallelograms, each consisting of eight small diamonds

C. Dome itself, consisting of thirty parallelograms

ORGANIZATION

In order to most effectively carry out the project, Mr. Fuller suggested that our group be organized on an industrial basis. Each person was thus to be responsible for a certain phase of the work, yet anyone could help with any other phase if he so desired.

Our industrial setup was as follows:

1. Coordinator Two Assistant Coordinators

Kept the whole project smoothly and efficiently in progress, being sure that each job was done effectively and on schedule.

2. Mathematics Chairman Three Mathematics Assistants

Performed all the mathematics required for the construction of the dome.

3. Drafting Chairman Drafting Assistant

Made all drawings necessary to construction of dome, die patterns, etc.; also assisted in making sketches for report.

118 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

4. Purchasing Agent Assistant Purchasing Agent

Purchased all necessary materials and equipment.

5. Treasurer Assistant Treasurer

Paid all bills, kept and balanced books for expenditures.

6. Secretary

Kept records of data and compiled report of project.

7. Expediter

Duties were to assure prompt delivery of out-of-town supplies. Since most of the materials were available locally, the expediter was able to devote his time to making a photographic record of the project.

8. Production Chairman Production Assistant

Made all dies and tools for production and produced the completed polyestered cardboard triangles.

9. Installation Chairman Installation Assistant

Assembled the completed triangles into assembly units and finally into the geodesic dome.

10. Packing Chairman Packing Assistant

Prepared the dome for shipment to Quantico, Virginia.

11. Public Relations

Released information to newspapers; arranged all public relations on and off the Tulane campus.

12. Experiment Chairman Experiment Assistant

Carried on continual experimentation with regard to production and assembly of dome.

Appendix “A” 119

With our industrial forces now set up, we made a tentative work schedule for our four weeks with Mr. Fuller as follows:

First Week Lectures by Mr. Fuller Second Week Tooling Third Week Production Fourth Week Assembly

This time table proved to be very effective and was followed successfully with each week’s work completed on schedule.

TOOLING

With the completion of the mathematical calculations, the production crew began making the dies. Sheets of one-half inch plywood, twelve inches wide, were used as a base for each die. For making the fold lines one-half inch plastic furring lath angles were fastened to the plywood with one-half inch wood screws.

The cardboard (200# test, 1/8" doublefaced corrugated) was ordered from the factory in pieces twelve inches wide and six feet long with the lengthwise fold lines already stamped. The dies were, therefore, made up to stamp on only the fold lines and cut lines of the angular folds (Figure 17).

When the cardboard arrived from the factory, it was discovered that the lengthwise fold lines were not stamped sharply enough to provide a good clean fold. Since the dies for each triangle had already been completed, however, it was decided to make a separate die for the lengthwise fold lines.

120 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

STAMPING

A total of 488 triangles were needed for construction of the dome of which 120 were Triangle 1’s; 90 Positive Triangle 2’s; 90 Negative Triangle 2’s; 60 Positive Triangle 3’s; 60 Negative Triangle 3’s; 30 Positive Triangle 4’s; 30 Negative Triangle 4’s; 8 Positive Triangle 1-A’s; and 8 Negative Triangle 1-A’s. In order to allow for possible error, 10 per cent over the required number were run off in each group.

The die for the lengthwise fold line was first placed in a track on the floor with the top of the track level with the top of the angles. A piece of cardboard was placed on top of the die and a 60-gallon tennis court roller was then rolled over the cardboard, stamping in the fold lines. This process was repeated until 536 pieces had been stamped.

The lengthwise fold die was then removed and the Triangle 1 die set in its place in the track. The cardboard with lengthwise folds stamped on was inserted and stamped by the same roller process.

When the sufficient number of Triangle 1’s had been stamped, the procedure was repeated with the other dies until the required number of each triangle had been stamped.

CUTTING

The excess cardboard in the folds was then cut out with a cutawl in order that the triangle might fold with smoother tighter corners. The ends were also cut at this time; an end flap being found desirable in strengthening the joint when the triangle was folded into shape.

Appendix “A”

121

NUMBERING

After the cutting process, the triangles were ready for numbering. The numbers were applied with a rubber hand-stamp and indelible ink.

A vertical numbering system was employed.

FOLDING

After being numbered the triangles were folded into triangular sections and stapled with a Bostitch self-locking stapler.

Each length of triangular section was then folded to form a basic triangle unit and stapled at the joint.

122 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

PRODUCTION LINE

The processes of stamping, cutting, folding and stapling described were carried on simultaneously on an assembly line basis. The roller for stamping the fold lines was operated by one man with two men inserting and removing the cardboard.

The cutawl was operated by one man who was able to cut four thicknesses of cardboard at one time. The hand numbering was done by one man with a rubber stamp. Two men were required for the section folding and two more men for the stapling into the final form.

Thus, nine men could be working on production simultaneously, converting the raw cardboard into finished triangles ready for polyestering.

POLYESTERING PROCESS

The completed triangles were now ready to be polyestered. Four students flew to North Carolina State College in order to learn from that group the method which they had developed for polyestering cardboard triangles.

The materials necessary for polyestering - Polylite, thinner, accelerator (Cobalt) and catalyst (DDM) - were brought back in the necessary amounts from North Carolina. The following items were purchased locally:

2 100 cc graduated cylinders 1 1000 cc graduated cylinder 2 porcelain, one-gallon buckets 2 porcelain flat pans 6 pairs of surgical gloves (proved unsatisfactory) 6 pairs of industrial rubber gloves 2 spatulas 18 inexpensive 2 1/2-inch wide paint brushes 1 gallon of acetone

The proportions used in our polyester batches were as follows (all percentages by volume):

Polylite 100 per cent Thinner 12 per cent Cobalt 1 per cent-(Cobalt and DDM should never be mixed together when in concentrated form as an explosion will occur. DDM 1 per cent

Batch 1, consisting of 800 cc of Polylite plus 1 per cent Cobalt, was mixed in one bucket while Batch 2, consisting of 800 cc of Polylite plus 1 per cent of DDM, was mixed in a second bucket. No chemical reaction took place. When the two batches were combined, however, and thinner added, the chemical changes occurred, allowing us approximately 20 minutes for application before the mixture hardened.

Two to four persons were engaged in painting the triangles, with one man mixing the polyester and another removing the triangles to the drying racks which had been improvised from 12-foot lengths of 2" x 4" resting at each end on ordinary drafting stools.

Appendix “A” 123

The process of painting and drying took place in the same room which was kept at a temperature of about 70 degrees. It was found that although the polyester gelled in 20 minutes in the mixing pan that the same polyester took two hours to dry when applied to cardboard triangles. It was also noted that cool night air was injurious to polyester during the gelling process.

ASSEMBLY OF DOME

The basic unit adopted for assembly was a diamond made up of two identical triangles, one plus and one minus. The idea of using a continuous cardboard wedge running the full length of each side of the triangle was abandoned; small cardboard pieces were inserted instead.

Industrial filament tape was then applied circumferentially at each wedge point to hold the triangles together in the diamond shape.

After all of the small diamonds had been completed, they were assembled in the same manner into parallelograms of sixteen triangles each.

Two such parallelograms form the large basic diamond. These parallelograms were then assembled into the dome itself. The dome was assembled indoors for the first time. Small red rubber balls two inches in diameter were inserted into the vertices of the triangles to promote rigidness and to form contact points for the vinyl covering at the vertices in order to allow the covering to naturally assume an involuted flutterproof form. It was found that the small cardboard pieces used for wedges were unsatisfactory. It was decided to disassemble

the dome in large diamonds (our basic diamond of 32 triangles each) and to reassemble the dome the next day out of doors using these large diamonds as the assembly units. It was also decided that when the dome was reassembled, that small wooden wedges should be substituted for the cardboard wedges. For ease of reassembly, the diamonds were marked with colored tape at each of the four corners.

The equator line was formed by placing the four half-diamonds ninety degrees on cen- ter with a full diamond filling in between each half-diamond to complete the equator line. The remaining nine diamonds were then added to complete the dome.

REMARKS CONCERNING DISPOSITION OF DOME

After its assembly out of doors, the dome was allowed to remain in position several hours in order that photographs might be taken. It was then disassembled for the second time and taken back into the architecture building where it was reassembled in its original position. Mr. Fuller’s time at Tulane had now expired; he was scheduled to leave for Virginia the fol- lowing day. It was agreed that the dome should remain here at Tulane for the present time in order that the students might, after his departure, work out the additional details nec- essary, such as the design and operation of the door, the attachment of wheels, etc. After several weeks when these details were completed, the Marines returned to Tulane for the dome, which was then packaged and transported to Quantico, Virginia.

It seems appropriate to include in our report that work which was done while Mr. Fuller was with us at Tulane, the actual building of the geodesic hemisphere.

CONCLUSION

In building our geodesic hemisphere, we have profited by all of the research and work which has gone before us; yet, our project is unique in itself. There has been no structure before it nor shall there be one after it that is its duplicate. Our dome has incorporated the advantages of those before it and attempted to avoid the disadvantages. In the same way, fu- ture structures will wish to incorporate our advantage without assuming our disadvantages also. For this reason we have noted here the following information.

Advantages of the Cardboard Construction Used

(1) Economy of cardboard. (2) Speed of mass production of cardboard sections. (3) Classification of both cardboard and polyester as non-priority materials. (4) Lightness of such construction; the weight of our eighteen-foot dome was 400# or 1.6#/ft.š.

Appendix “A”

(5) Compactness of packaging for transportational pur- poses; the structural members necessary for one eighteen -foot dome are contained in a package 1’ x 5’ x 6’.

(6) Simplicity of system, such that unskilled labor can repair or replace parts.

Disadvantages of the Cardboard Construction Used

(1) The stapling of the section required excessive time and labor.

(2) The unsymmetrical section used required twice the number of basic triangles.

(3) The industrial filament tape as utilized did not prove as satisfactory as anticipated; it was difficult to obtain a good tight connection resulting in an undesirable loose- ness of the triangles.

Through the constant evolution that is taking place, we can see the correction of our disadvantages in a stronger self-locking symmetrical section which utilizes dowels for rapid assembly.

125

APPENDIX “B”

127

Appendix “B” 129

BOOKS ABOUT BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Marks, Robert W., Ph.D. Dr. Sc.: Author: The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. S.I.U. Press, Carbondale, Ill. $10. Very thoroughly illustrated. Comprehensive review of Fuller’s discoveries. (Reinhold, 1959) S.I.U. Press, 1966.

McHale, John, Author: Buckminster Fuller. George Braziller, Inc., (215 Park Avenue S., New York). $4.95. c1962. Well illustrated. Fuller’s design science strategies and disciplines, his philosophic tenets and operationally derived mathematical axioms.

BOOKS BY BUCKMINSTER FULLER, ALREADY PUBLISHED

Education Automation: Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Ill. C1963. $1.95. Comprehensive inventory of suggested planning for new educational system - “Greatest Industry in History”, a 20-year world forecast of techno-industrial revolution, paperback.

No More Second Hand God, Southern Ill. Univ. Press, Arcturus Books Div., Carbondale, Illinois. c1963. 4. Paperback, 2.25. A collection of poems and essays. Contains much of B. F.’s fundamental philosophy and mathematical speculation including some original mathematical discoveries. Calculations indicate finiteness of both metaphysical and physi- cal universe.

Ideas and Integrities, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., c1963. $7.95. Autobiographical compendium of B.F.’s half-century thought development. Popularly readable.

The Unfinished Epic of Industrialization, Jargon Press of Johnathon Williams’ Nantahala Foundation, c1963. $3.50. Obtain from World Resources Inventory Office, P.O. Box 909, Carbondale, Illinois. Paperback, 300-page epic poem, written 1940 before World War Two.

Nine Chains to the Moon, Southern Ill. Univ. Press, Arcturus Books Div., Carbondale, Ill. c1963. 2.45. Paperback, plus few hard covers in first printing. Original printing in 1938 was 5,000. Original copies now sell in the "Collectors" range at 25 to $35.

Design Science Decade, four volumes, 5 each or bound in one at 20, plus postage. Sold by World Resources Inventory Office, P.O. Box 909, Carbondale, Ill. Library discount 30% student discount 65%. (Vol. I: “Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs”, by R.B. Fuller; Vol. II: “The Design Initiative”, by R.B. Fuller; Vol. III: “Comprehensive Thinking”, by R.B. Fuller; Vol. IV: “The Ten Year Program”, by John McHale).

BOOKS BY FULLER SOON TO BE PUBLISHED

Charles Eliot Norton 1961-62 Lectures at Harvard University. Harvard Univ. Press publ. date 19??. B. Fuller’s lectures as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Prof. of Poetry in alter- nating co-professorship with Felix Candela of Mexico and Dr. Luigi Nervi, Italy. Fuller traces historical, soci-economic design initiatives.

Synergetics (formerly En/Syn Geom.) by McMillian, New York. Comprehensive, mathema- tical, rational coordinate system apparently employed by nature. Now in completed manu- script, worked on by B.F. for a quarter of a century. Co-editors: Peter Pearce, Editor, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Illustrator; Professor Arthur L. Loeb, Math-Physicist; Shoji Sadao, Architect and Co-Illustrator; Brooke Maxwell, Mathematician Editor.

What I Have Learned. Epic poem published by Saturday Review Publishing Company. November 12, 1966 in short condensed version. Long version McGraw Hill - 19??.

Naga to Eden, 50,000 B.C. to 10,000 B.C. (Publisher?) A new theoretical maritime reconstruction of pre-history. The origins of mathematics, the origins of major myths. Calvin Tomkins co-author with B.F.

The Great Pirates, Eden to Crash, 10,000 B.C. to 1929 A.D., past masters of world economic patterns. (Publisher?) The evolution of human ecology, comprehensive vs. specialization. Origins of general systems theory. Calvin Tomkins co-author with B.F.

Design Science. (Publisher ?) By means of which democratic man will become a total economic success on Earth.

OUT OF PRINT BOOKS BY BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Off-set or Xerox copies available from World Inventory Office - Box 909, Carbondale, Illinois 62901 - U.S.A.

4D, a re-publication of Fuller’s 1927 privately published (200 registered copies only) comprehensive essay on man’s evolutionary functioning in universe and its recognition and conscious support by a prime Design Science. Copies of the original now in Rare Books Division of New York Public Library and in the Rare Book Division of Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library. 200 pgs. $25. Off-set copies, including illustra- tions and critiques by pre-crash contemporaries.

Shelter Magazine, 1930-33 inclusive. Contains the intimate picture of U.S.A. at depth of Depression and at major crossroads of history. Bound copies published by B. Fuller - under the pen-name of “4D”, including signed series titled “Universal Architecture” and all unsigned editorial matter, captioning, etc. Shelter Magazine named, financed and managed by B. Fuller. A few original bound sets - 100. Xerox - 50.

Plan for Industrialization of Brazil - Book by B. Fuller, published by U.S.A. Foreign Economic Administration 1944, as a consequence of President Vaga of Brazil requesting President Roosevelt for Inventory of Experiences of all U.S. engineers who took part in installation in Russia of new prototype industrial process factories, blast furnaces, re- fineries, et al, during successive 5-year plan acquisitions primarily from U.S.A. between 1928-38. Publication includes comments and suggestions of leading engineers and officers of 25 U.S.A. corporations who took part in Russian program. Book constitutes the funda- mental basis for theory of industrialization – several of its uniquely disclosed strategies have been adopted – by Brazil, but not enough to bring about economic success. Off-set or Xerox copies - $25.

World Housing. Written by B. Fuller, published by U.S.A. Foreign Economic Administra- tion, 1944. Survey of U.S.A. and World-industrialized Prefabrication and Mobil Home Activity. In potential support of U.S.A. Post-war efforts to alleviate world’s critical housing shortages. Detailed"state-of-the-art" and explicit performance per units of invested resources, time and effort of building industry capabilities. Logistical details. Xerox copies - $25.

B. Fuller’s Extended Autobiographical Sketch. Published by Buckminster Fuller Inst.-1965.

Appendix “B” 131

N.B.: All of the books listed and already published may be obtained from the Gotham Book Mart, 41 W. 47th Street, New York City, New York. If any of these are temporarily or permanently out of print, Gotham Book Mart makes a practice of advertising for second-hand copies and can usually obtain them at reasonable premiums.

LECTURES BY BUCKMINSTER FULLER

B. Fuller never makes special preparation and pre-writing of his lectures. He assumes our whole lives are fundamental preparation. He has learned to “think outloud” with large and small audiences regarding his explorations, experiments, experiences and deduced generalized theories even as we will converse intimately with one or a few beings. His discourse is frequently tape recorded and transcribed to typescript. Because aural syntax is so unlike the visual syntax, his transcripts require an average of seven re-typed re-workings. He speaks at a rate of seven thousand words per hour which requires three written words for each spoken word. This means that a two-hour lecture requires a full book-length 42,000 written words to convey the “outloud thinking” in print. This means a considerable delay in publishing and a great deal of work and expense occurs after his major discourses. Often their completion occurs after the deadline for publication by his original host.

“Prospects for Humanity” - delivered to joint session of U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Conference in the Fourth “Dartmouth Conference” at Leningrad - U.S.S.R., July 1964.

Published serially in Saturday Review - August, September, October, 1964.

** “World Baby”: The inexorable birth, adolescence and maturity of World Man. Known to society in the 1960-1965 years as the “Disturbing Impingement of Technology upon Society”. The discovery that all biological development and human organisms were and are always automated and that industrialization is the externalization of the integral, anatomic automation of humanity’s metabolic regeneration processes and constitutes the world-around network of automated metabolic regeneration evolving to insure the physical success of all humanity. A lecture delivered by B. Fuller to economists and sociologists of twenty-four departments of the U.S. Government under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Labor at Brookings Institute, Washington, D.C., March 18, 1965.

Same address given to President Johnson’s Committee on Technology and “The Impact of Technological Changes on American Life” at Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., March 19. Committee members:

Garth Mangum, Secretary; Howard R. Bowen, Chairman, President of University of Iowa; Joseph A. Bierne, President Communication Workers of America; Albert J. Hayes,

President International Ass’n. of Machinists; Walter P. Reuther, President United Auto Workers; Patrick E. Haggerty, President Texas Instruments, Inc.; Philip Sporn, Retired President American Electric Power Co.; John I. Snyder, Jr., President and Chairman U.S. Industries, Inc.; Benjamin Aaron, Professor of Law and Director Inst. of Ind. Relations, University of California, Los Angeles; Daniel Bell, Chairman, Sociology Dept. Columbia Univ.; Edwin Land, President Polaroid Corp.; Robert H. Ryan, President Regional Industrial Development Corp. of Southwestern Pennsylvania; Whitney Young, Executive Director National Urban League; Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, Public and Industrial Relations Consultant; and, Robert M. Solow, Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This committee, appointed by President Johnson and confirmed by U.S. Senate, met frequently for two years before making fundamental economic reform recommendations to the President in 1966.

“Mathematics: Basic Agent of Change” World Conference at the University of Hawaii on “Frontiers of Knowledge” and “Impact of Mathematics on Humanities”. B.F. mms. too late for inclusion in formal printing on conference - to be available only as part of his book “Synergetics” to be published by McMillian.

Lecture by B. Fuller to Teacher’s College - Horace Mann Hall, Columbia University, “The Good Life, Education and the City”, as a component lecture in series on “Dynamics of Contemporary Urban Life”.

To be published by Columbia University Press, 1966-1967?

** American Institute of Planners Annual Congress, St. Louis, Missouri. October 1965 - Keynote Address by B. Fuller.

Published in St. Louis newspapers and in the Journal of American Institute of Planners, April, 1966.

Appendix “B”

** Industrial Engineers and Management Conference under auspices of Southern Illinois University, delivered at Edwardsville Campus, East St. Louis, Illinois, November, 1965.

Published as an article “Domed Over Cities”, in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November, 1965.

** B. F. to World Architectural Students, at Palais Gare D’Orsay under auspices of International Union of Architects during their VIII biennial World Congress at Paris, France, July 1965 - “Utopia or Oblivion”.

Published in four media including Delos Symposium Essays and in “The Iowa Architect”, 1965 and Journal of American Institute of Planners.

** Conference of Art Educators and Artists at New York University, Loeb Center, under auspices of National Science Foundation in search for fundamentals of educational detection of creativity in students. “Dead End of Non-Conceptual Science”.

Published in book form, paperback, 8 1/2 x 11 inches, under direction of Dean Conant, Department of Fine Arts, New York University and U.S. National Science Foundation Grant, 1965.

** Both the Keynote and Summary lectures delivered by B. Fuller to the “Vision ’65” World Conference of Communication Arts at Southern Illinois University, October 1965. Subject: “The Totality of Experience Propagated by the Expansive Contractive Complementarity of Physical Entropy and Metaphysical Anti-Entropy.”

Published in the 1966 Spring Quarterly of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, the national Phi Beta Kappa magazine.

** B. Fuller lectures on “Comprehensivity” to the National Headquarters Staff of the American Association of University Women at Washington, D. C., Winter 1964.

Published in the A. A. U. W. National Spring Quarterly, 1965.

134 W.D.S.D. 1967 Document 5

** U.S.A. Music Educators’ National Conference, Washington, D.C. B. Fuller’s Keynote Address, auspices National Educational Administration and National Science Foundation.

To be published as paperback book by the U.S. Office of Education. Was published in two parts in National Music Educators’ Journal, Subject: “Music, Science and Creativity”. April-May and June-July issues.

The eight double starred items, shown above **, are to be published as an integrated collection in paperback by Bantam Books - 1967.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Permission to reprint various writings is gratefully acknowledged to the following publishers:

Man with a Chronofile:

Saturday Review April 1, 1967.

Vision 65 Summary Address:

American Scholar Phi Beta Kappa Quarterly Spring, 1966.

Document layout and indexing by Dale D. Klaus, Research Assistant to R. Buckminster Fuller.

Other Volumes in the Series

Other volumes in this series are:

Phase I, (1963) Document 1: Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs by R. Buckminster Fuller and John McHale

Phase I, (1964) Document 2: The Design Initiative by R. Buckminster Fuller

Phase I, (1965) Document 3: Comprehensive Thinking by R. Buckminster Fuller

Phase I, (1965) Document 4: The Ten Year Program by John McHale

World Resources Inventory Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois U.S.A.

We find that a tetrahedronal city, to house a million people, is both technologically and economically feasible. Such a vertical-tetrahedronal-city can be constructed with all of its three hundred thousand families each having balcony “outside” apartments of two thousand square feet floor space. All of the machinery necessary to its operation will be housed inside the tetrahedron. It is found that such a one million passenger tetrahedral city is so structurally efficient, and therefore so relatively light, that together with its hollow box sectioned reinforced concrete foundations it can float. Such tetrahedronal floating cities would measure two miles to an edge, and can be floated in a triangularly patterned canal. This will make the whole structure earthquake-proof. The whole city can be floated out into the ocean to any point and anchored. The depth of its foundations will go below the turbulence level of the seas so that the floating tetrahedronal island will be, in effect, a floating triangular atoll. Its two mile long “boat” foundations will constitute landing strips for jet airplanes. Its interior two mile harbor will provide refuge for the largest and smallest ocean vessels. The total structural and mechanical materials involved in production of a number of such cities are within feasibility magnitude of the already operating metals manufacturing capabilities of any one company of the several major industrial nations around the earth. The tetrahedron city may start with a thousand occupants and grow symmetrically to hold millions without changing overall shape though always providing each family with 200 sq. ft. of floor space. Withdrawal of materials from obsolete buildings on the land will permit the production of enough of these floating cities to support frequently spaced floating cities of various sizes around the oceans of the earth. This will permit mid-ocean cargo transferring and therewith an extraordinary increase of efficiency of the inter-distribution of the world’s raw and finished products as well as of the passenger traffic. Three quarters of the earth is covered by water. Man is clearly intent on penetrating those world-around ocean waters in every way to work both their ocean bottoms and their marine life and chemistry resources. Such ocean passage shortening habitats of ever transient humanity will permit his individual flying sailing, economic stepping stone travel around the whole Earth in many directions.

TETRAHEDRON ENLARGES SYMMETRICALLY

TETRA CITY

HIGHEST T.V. ANTENNA

EMPIRE STATE BLDG.

EIFFEL TOWER

QUEEN MARY

ft. 9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000