6 Bucky as a Leonardo-like World Fellow in Residence

6  Bucky as a Leonardo-like World Fellow in Residence

2Professor Martin Meyerson

3 Bucky was a Leonardo-like character. Knowing most of his architectural, urban, and design concepts, I also had the privilege of being exposed to the automobile he built, the poetry he wrote, the mathematics works he authored, the boats he conceived and loved.

4 When I was in my early twenties and in my first job, which was at a policy research center adjacent to the University of Chicago campus, I met Bucky Fuller. In the evenings I would go on occasion to the New Bauhaus and be tutored by its head, the great design educator Moholy-Nagy. We would explore the planning of new communities, or we would speculate about a postwar Europe. And then one evening Bucky joined us, and I was enchanted by him ever since that initial meeting. I had come to Chicago from graduate-student days at Harvard, and Bucky reminisced about his short-lived Harvard days, and about much else of his life and work.

108 COURTESY OF THE BUCKMINSTER FULLER INSTITUTE

109 Not too long after, I was on the University of Chicago faculty and Margy, my wife, and I would on occasion house-sit for David Riesman, like Bucky a most imaginative mind: social scientist, lawyer, theoretician, utopian. In the Riesman home, the Meyersons assembled a group of up-and-coming professionals and scholars for dinner, with Bucky as our special guest. We listened and reacted, listened and reacted, and soon it was eight in the morning. We went off to our tasks. No one who was at that evening ever forgot it. Bucky’s extraordinary energy throughout his life was one of his special characteristics.

110 Later, at the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard (I was Williams Professor at Harvard and first head of the center), and then at Berkeley (where I was a professor, dean, and interim chancellor), Bucky would come and delight us as well as instruct us with his world views and

167 COURTESY OF THE BUCKMINSTER FULLER INSTITUTE

168 insights. I suggested that he move to Berkeley, but it was southern California which for family reasons attracted him as a base.

169 Bucky and I were together on as many occasions as possible. For example, we were among the fifteen or sixteen ‘‘regulars’’ in the yearly Greek island boat trips, with their discussions/seminars on human settlement stimulated, organized, and hosted by Constantine Doxiadis, who coined the term ‘‘ek- istics.’’ Bucky was a star.

170 I will not forget the times Bucky was with us in the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Buffalo, which we had restored and lived in when I was president of the state university center there. He would visit us there, and our four-year- old son adored Bucky—even now, when he is an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School, he has kept the tetrahedrons and other mementos

171 Bucky gave him. When Bucky left after those visits with us, Matthew would cry. Over the many years we knew each other, when parting company, I did not cry, but I always longed to be with him again soon.

172 During my presidency of the University of Pennsylvania (1970-1981), Ed Schlossberg (who had gotten to know Bucky) mentioned to me and Harris Wofford (then president of Bryn Mawr, later to be a U.S. senator) that Bucky might like to be based in Philadelphia. Harris and I were determined to make that happen. We developed an arrangement in which the three Quaker colleges (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore) joined with the University of Pennsylvania, with which they had an affiliation, to create a professorship for Bucky. Soon he also became a university professor at Penn.

173 He had the appealing notion of putting a dome over the entire University of Pennsylvania. I tried more modestly to get a dome of Bucky’s design built on land next to the university museum. Penn has in the Lower Egyptian gallery of the museum the outstanding Egyptian temple in the United States. Unfortunately, it was not possible to place it in the beautiful Upper Egyptian gallery, because of weight. Thus, the temple columns are in pieces in the lower level of the museum. A Bucky dome would have permitted it to achieve its full height and glory and would have been an attractive focal point for Philadelphia as well as the university, just as the more modest Egyptian temple at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is. One day that still may happen.

174 Bucky in addition was attached to the University City Science Center, which had been established earlier by the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions. The Science Center, headed by Dr. Randall Whaley, was and is an ‘‘incubator’’ for various kinds of small and medium-size research enterprises. There Bucky was a resource for the varied activities going on. Those in the Science Center would ask advice from Bucky on particular projects; sometimes the requests were modest, sometimes complex. Either way, Bucky would have important contributions to make. And Bucky was practical as well as theoretical. In the World Game which he and his associates devised at the Science Center, his judgments on energy, food, and all the resources required by civilization were quantified and interlinked. He was mindful of the requirements to actualize such prospects and not confine them to conceptualization alone.

175 The Science Center was a fine base in many ways for Bucky, but by then he was attached to many institutions throughout the country and the world. He maintained a hectic activities schedule, traveling constantly; only Shirley Sharkey, his executive administrator, could keep his appointments in order. Incidentally, Bucky always had his chronofile, but it was at the Science Center that Bucky’s archives first got established. And here in Philadelphia, with the help of the Bell System, we prepared a video record, about forty hours in length, of Bucky’s life, work, and findings.

176 Philadelphia does use a slogan these days: ‘‘Philadelphia, the city that loves you back.’’ It did love Bucky back, and I kept trying to think of settings which would help amplify Bucky’s varied brilliant qualities so that we could gain even more from him locally.

177 In that same period, I was a very involved board member of the Aspen Institute. Neva Rockefeller Kaiser and I enticed Bucky to Aspen, to the satisfaction of all.

178 On occasion we would accidentally encounter each other in places such as the Tokyo airport, and would readily resume our most recent conversation. Bucky would expand on his interest in quantitative analysis and on his continuing studies on form, structures, artifacts, and all the world. How the Internet would have pleased Bucky!

179 It was fitting that he and Anne, his wife of half a century, died within a couple days of each other. They had been mutually supportive and unconditionally accepting of each other. Bucky greatly loved his daughter and grandchildren, and had a very special relationship with young people of all ages.

180 At Bucky’s funeral at Mount Auburn Cemetery, it was clear that, as he was returning to his New England soil, his impact on individuals and on the world would continue to influence all of us in the new era ahead.

181

182from Education Automation

183The headache of a president of a great university is today probably the next biggest headache to that of a quasi-nation’s president. Take the problem of how to get the funds for this enormous educational undertaking. You educators are uniquely associated with people who are well educated and who have a great feeling of responsibility toward the new life. There is an enormous task to be done, and the budget gets to be formidable. How do you raise the funds? The now world-populated state universities have to keep raising funds from a political base which as constituted is inherently static, operating exclusively in terms of Illinois or Ohio or whichever state it may be.

184The point is that we—both as individuals and as society—are quite rapidly uprooting ourselves. We never were trees and never had roots, but due to shortsightedness we believed blindly and behaved as though we did. Today we are extraordinarily mobile. In this last election, 10 per cent of the national electorate were unable to vote because they hadn’t been in their new places long enough. The accelerating mobility curve that I just gave you indicates that by the next election 25 per cent of America will not be able to vote due to recentness of moving, and in the following election possibly less than the majority will be able to vote. We are simply going to have to change our political basis. We are now at the point where the concept of our geographically-based representation—which assumes that it realistically represents the human beings—is no longer valid. The political machine alone will continue to stay local. It sees the people as statically local. So those who are politically ambitious just stay put while society moves on, and, therefore, the static politicians become invisible to the swiftly moving body politic, which cannot keep track of their static machinations since society does not stay long enough in any one place to be effective in reviewing the local political initiations. The political machines soon will have no one to challenge realistically their existence validity except the local newspapers, whose purely local political news becomes progressively of less interest to a world-mobilizing society.

185 Comprehensively, the world is going from a Newtonian static norm to an Einsteinian all-motion norm. That is the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history. We are becoming ‘‘quick’’ and the graveyards of the dead become progressively less logical. I would say, then, that your educational planners are going to have your worst headaches because you will have political machines that are less and less visible to the people because the people are more and more mobile. You will have to be serving the children of the mobile people who really, in a sense, don’t have a base, and you will have to justify it with very hard-boiled local political exploitation. I am not particularly optimistic about the kind of results you are going to get. Therefore, when I begin to talk about the educational revolution ahead I see that the old system is probably going to become paralyzed. That is why your headache will get worse and worse until nature just evolutes and makes enormous emergency adjustments. President Morris, I not only recognize that your job is fabulously challenging, I recognize you as an extraordinarily able man. Yet I see that you are going to have a harder and harder time, and nobody could care more than you do about the good results you might get. What I am saying, then, is realistic. It is also going to be obvious to you, I am sure, that the kind of changes I will talk about next are probably going to have to take place.

186 We know that our world population is increasing incomprehendibly swiftly. There are enormous numbers to be educated. We are going to develop very new attitudes about our crossbreeding and our reversion to universal pigmentation. That is going to be slow, but it is going to be a great and inevitable event. In the end we are going to recognize that there are no different species of living man, and we will get over that kind of color class-distinction.

187 The big question is how are we, as educators, going to handle the enormous increase in the new life. How do we make available to these new students what we have been able to discover fairly accurately about the universe and the way it is operating? How are we going to be able to get them the true net value won blindly through the long tradition of ignorant dedications and hard-won lessons of all the unknown mothers and all the other invisibly heroic people who have given hopefully to the new life, such as, for instance, the fabulous heritage of men’s stoic capacity to carry on despite immense hardships?

188 The new life needs to be inspired with the realization that it has all kinds of new advantages that have been gained through great dedications of unknown, unsung heroes of intellectual exploration and great intuitively faithful integrities of men groping in the dark. Unless the new life is highly appreciative of those who have gone before, it won’t be able to take effective advantage of its heritage. It will not be as regenerated and inspired as it might be if it appreciated the comprehensive love invested in that heritage.

189 The old political way of looking at things is such that the political machine says we first must get a ‘‘school house’’ for our constituents, and it must look like Harvard University, or it must be Georgian and a whole big pile of it. ‘‘We see that the rich kids went to school in automobiles; so let’s get beautiful buses for our kids.’’ ‘‘Harvard and Yale have long had football; our school is going to have football.’’ There is nothing boys used to have that they are not going to ‘‘get’’ from their politicians, who, above all, know best how to exploit the inferiority complex which they understand so well as handed down from the ages and ages of 99 per cent have-not-ness of mankind. There is a sort of class inferiority amelioration battle that goes on with the politicos in seeking the favor of their constituents to get into or back into office, and little if any attention is paid to the real educational problems at hand.

190 In thinking about these problems, I have thought a lot about what I have learned that may be useful as proven by experiments in my own selfdisciplining. I have met some powerful thinkers. I met Dr. Einstein. I wrote three chapters in a book about Dr. Einstein, and my publishers said that they wouldn’t publish it because I wasn’t on the fist of people who understood Einstein. I asked them to send the typescript to Einstein, and they did. He then said he approved of it—that I had interpreted him properly—and so the chapters did get published. When Einstein approved of my typescript he asked me to come and meet him and talk about my book. I am quite confident that I can say with authority that Einstein, when he wanted to study, didn’t sit in the middle of a school room. That is probably the poorest place he could have gone to study. When an individual is really thinking, he is tremendously isolated. He may manage to isolate himself in Grand Central Station, but it is despite the environment rather than because of it. The place to study is not in a school room.

191 Parents quite clearly love their children; that is a safe general observation. We don’t say parents send their children to school to get rid of them. The fact is, however, that it is very convenient for mothers, in order to be able to clean the house for the family, to have the children out of the way for a little while. The little red school house was not entirely motivated by educational ambitions.

192 There is also a general baby-sitting function which is called school. While the children are being ‘‘baby sat,’’ they might as well be given something to read. We find that they get along pretty well with the game of ‘‘reading’’; so we give them more to read, and we add writing and arithmetic. Very seriously, much of what goes on in our schools is strictly related to social experiences, and that is fine—that’s good for the kids. But I would say we are going to add much more in the very near future by taking advantage of the children’s ability to show us what they need.

193 I have taken photographs of my grandchildren looking at television. Without consideration of the ‘‘value,’’ the actual concentration of a child on the message which is coming to him is fabulous. They really ‘‘latch on.’’ Given the chance to get accurate, logical, and lucid information at the time when they want and need to get it, they will go after it and inhibit it in a most effective manner. I am quite certain that we are soon going to begin to do the following: At our universities we will take the men who are the faculty leaders in research or in teaching. We are not going to ask them to give the same lectures over and over each year from their curriculum cards, finding themselves confronted with another roomful of people and asking themselves, ‘‘What was it I said last year?’’ This is a routine which deadens the faculty member. We are going to select, instead, the people who are authorities on various subjects—the men who are most respected by other men within their respective departments and fields. They will give their basic lecture course just once to a group of human beings, including both the experts in their own subject and bright children and adults without special training in their field. This lecture will be recorded as Southern Illinois University did my last lecture series of fifty-two hours in October 1960. They will make moving picture footage of the lecture as well as hi-fi tape recording. Then the professor and his faculty associates will listen to this recording time and again.

194 ‘‘What you say is very good,’’ his associates may comment, ‘‘but we have heard you say it a little better at other times.’’ The professor then dubs in a better statement. Thus begins complete reworking of the tape, cleaned up, and cleaned up some more, as in the moving picture cutting, and new illustrative ‘‘footage’’ will be added on. The whole of a university department will work on improving the message and conceptioning of a picture for many months, sometimes for years. The graduate students who want to be present in the university and who also qualify to be with the men who have great powers and intellectual capability together with the faculty may spend a year getting a documentary ready. They will not even depend upon the diction of the original lecturer, because the diction of that person may be very inadequate to his really fundamental conceptioning and information, which should be superb. His knowledge may be very great, but he may be a poor lecturer because of poor speaking habits or false teeth. Another voice will take over the task of getting his exact words across. Others will gradually process the tape and moving picture footage, using communications specialists, psychologists, etc.

195 For instance, I am quite certain that some day we will take a subject such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and with the ‘‘Einstein’’ of the subject and his colleagues working on it for a year, we will finally get it reduced down to what is ‘‘net’’ in the subject and enthusiastically approved by the ‘‘Einstein’’ who gave the original lecture. What is net will become communicated so well that any child can turn on a documentary device, a TV, and get the Einstein lucidity of thinking and get it quickly and firmly. I am quite sure that we are going to get research and development laboratories of education where the faculty will become producers of extraordinary moving-picture documentaries. That is going to be the big, new educational trend.

196 The documentaries will be distributed by various means. One of the ways by which I am sure they will be distributed eventually has very much to do with an important evolution in communications history which will take a little describing. First, I point out to you that since the inauguration of the United States and adoption of its Constitution some very severe alterations have happened in the evolution of democracy’s stimulation and response patterning and the velocity and frequency rates of that patterning’s eventtransformations.

197 At the time we founded our country, men were elected in small local areas out of communities wherein all the people were familiar with all the faces. Everybody knew Mr. Forbes or whatever his name was, and they trusted him and elected him to represent them in their federal assembly meetings. These ‘‘well known’’ representatives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to go to the Congress by foot or horse, for those were the means of travel. For instance, they went from some place in Massachusetts to Philadelphia or Washington, wherever the Congress was convening, and it took them a week or so to get there. They stopped along the way, meeting many friends and other folk and finding out what the aspirations of the different people’s localities were.

198 Let us hypothetically consider how they conferred at their Congress on their individual needs and requirements; how they found certain things that were of general pertinence to all of them and found some things that were relevant only to individual areas. While they were meeting they received a letter from France, and they were very excited because France, who had helped them in the Revolution, now critically needed some help from the new United States of America. They talked about what they might do about that letter. All of these men then went back by foot or horse to their different homes and conferred face to face with their townspeople. They told their constituents what they had found out about the various things, and they said: ‘‘Here’s a letter from France; this is what the various representatives at the Congress thought about it—what do you think about it?’’ Then they went back to the central meeting place again and acted on that letter and other pertinent matters in view of their direct knowledge of their constituents’ thoughts and ambitions. The term of office that we gave representatives was predicated upon this ecological pattern of on-foot and horseback traveling. It took about four years to complete the two trips just outlined to effect a basic democratic stimulation and response cycle. The velocity rates of stimulation and response were in a one-to-one correspondence.

199 Suddenly new industrial technology made scientific harvesting available through invention. Lincoln became the first ‘‘wired’’ president—the first head of a state to be able to talk direcdy by telegraph to his generals at the front. This was the first time generals no longer needed to be sovereignly autonomous, because now the head of state became practically available for the highest policy decisions right at the front. World War I brought in the radio, and in World War II, for the first time, the admirals at sea were hooked up directly to Washington. They didn’t need the autonomy they had to have when they took the fleet away for a year with no way to communicate with the president other than by a messenger sailing ship. Now ‘‘we the people’’ have radio and TV, and we obtain world-around event information from the telegraph, newspaper, and broadcast. With world-around news broadcast to us in seconds, there is no way we can respond directly to their problem-content stimuli.

200 We no longer have the one-to-one velocity and frequency correspondence between stimulation and response that we had in the early formative days of the U.S.A. We now have enormous numbers of stimulations and no way to say effectively what we think about them or what we would like to do about each of them. By the time that presidential voting comes around every four years we have accumulated ten thousand unvented, world-around emanating stimulations, and usually we are no longer in the same town with the representatives that we previously elected.

201 Automobiles move through the streets with pictures of political candidates’ faces on their sides, and we try to pick out the candidates whom we think least offensive. We rarely know them or whether we may trust them. So we vote superficially for the ‘‘least offensive’’ ones, depending primarily on the major party selections. That is about the best we can do.

202 Because all this is so, those now doing the representing, wishing to be returned to office, wish to know what people are thinking about all the important issues. So the surveys of public opinion have developed, and congressional investigations of many phenomena have increased. We have to have a kind of anticipatory political reconnaissance going on all the time. Even then, when the elected man comes in he knows that it is only as the result of indirect effects of total psychological moods; so he pays little attention to any specific ‘‘mandates,’’ and he begins to work right away on the psychological culturing of his next election. He is not really sure that there are any true mandates. He doesn’t really know what the people think. That is one large reason why democracy is in great trouble today, because of the vacillation and compromise arising from the lack of one-to-one correspondence between stimulation and response o£ the electorate. The Communists and dictatorships scoff at democracy—saying it doesn’t work. I am sure that democracy is inherendy more powerful and capable and appropriate to man’s needs than any other form of government, but it needs proper updated implementation to a one-to- one velocity correspondence in respect to each and every stimulation-and- response, and then democracy can work—magnificently.

203 I have talked to you about solving problems by design competence instead of by political reform. It is possible to get one-to-one correspondence of action and reaction without political revolution, warfare, and reform. I find it possible today with very short electromagnetic waves to make small reflectors by which modulated signals can be beamed. After World War II, we began to beam our TV messages from city to city. One reason television didn’t get going before World War II was because of the difficulty in distributing signals over long distances from central sources on long waves or mildly short waves. We were working on coaxial cables between cities, but during the war we found new short ranges of electromagnetic frequencies. We worked practically with very much higher frequencies, very much shorter wave lengths. We found that we could beam these short waves from city to city. Television programs are brought into the small city now by beam from a few big cities and then rebroadcast locally to the home sets. That is the existing TV distribution pattern. My invention finds it is now possible to utilize the local TV masts in any community in a new way. Going up to, say, two hundred, three hundred, or four hundred feet and looking down on a community you see the houses individually in the middle of their respective land plots. Therefore, with a few high masts having a number of tiny massers, lassers, or reflectors, each beam aimed accurately at a specific house, the entire community could be directly ‘‘hooked up’’ by beams, instead of being broadcast to. This means a great energy saving, for less than 1 per cent of the omnidirectionally broadcast pattern ever hits a receiving antenna. The beaming makes for very sharp, clear, frequency-modulated signals.

204 In the beaming system, you also have a reflector at the house that picks up the signal. It corresponds direcdy to the one on the mast and is aimed right back to the specific beaming cup on the mast from which it is receiving. This means that with beam casting you are able to send individual messages to each of those houses. There is a direct, fixed, wireless connection, an actual direct linkage to individuals; and it works in both directions. Therefore, the receiving individual can beam back, ‘‘I don’t like it.’’ He may and can say ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no.’’ This ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ is the basis of a binary mathematical system, and immediately brings in the ‘‘language’’ of the modern electronic computers. With two-way TV, constant referendum of democracy will be manifest, and democracy will become the most practical form of industrial and space- age government by all people, for all people.

205 It will be possible not only for an individual to say, ‘‘I don’t like it,’’ on his two-way TV but he can also beam-dial (without having to know mathematics), ‘‘I want number so and so.’’ It is also possible with this kind of two-way TV linkage with individuals’ homes to send out many different programs simultaneously; in fact, as many as there are two-way beamed-up receiving sets and programs. It would be possible to have large central storages of documentaries—great libraries. A child could call for a special program information locally over the TV set.

206 With two-way TV we will develop selecting dials for the children which will not be primarily an alphabetical but a visual species and chronological category selecting device with secondary alphabetical subdivisions. The child will be able to call up any kind of information he wants about any subject and get his latest authoritative TV documentary, the production of which I have already described to you. The answers to his questions and probings will be the best information that man has available up to that minute in history.

207 All this will bring a profound change in education. We will stop training individuals to be ‘‘teachers,’’ when all that most young girl ‘‘education’’ students really want to know is how they are going to earn a living in case they don’t get married. Much of the educational system today is aimed at answering: ‘‘How am I going to survive? How am I going to get a job? I must earn a living.’’ That is the priority item under which we are working all the time—the idea of having to earn a living. That problem of ‘‘how are we going to earn a living?’’ is going to go out the historical window, forever, in the next decade, and education is going to be disembarrassed of the unseen ‘‘practical’’ priority bogeyman. Education will then be concerned primarily with exploring to discover not only more about the universe and its history but about what the universe is trying to do, about why man is part of it, and about how can, and may man best function in universal evolution.

208 Automation is with us. There is no question about it. Automation was inevitable to intellect. Intellect was found to differentiate out experience continually and to articulate and develop new tools to do physically repeated tasks. Man is now no longer essential as a worker in the fabulously complex industrial equation. Marx’s worker is soon to become utterly obsolete. Automation is coming in Russia just as it is here. The word worker describing man as a muscle-and-reflex machine will not have its current 1961 meaning a decade hence. Therefore, if man is no longer essential as a worker we ask: ‘‘How can he live? How does he acquire the money or credits with which to purchase what he needs or what he wants that is available beyond immediate needs?’’ At the present time we are making all kinds of economic pretenses at covering up this overwhelming automation problem because we don’t realize adequately the larger significance of the truly fundamental change that is taking place in respect to man-in-universe. As automation advanced man began to create secondary or nonproductive jobs to make himself look busy so that he could rationalize a necessity for himself by virtue of which he could ‘‘earn’’ his living. Take all of our bankers, for example. They are all fixtures; these men don’t have anything to do that a counting machine couldn’t do; a punch button box would suffice. They have no basic banking authority whatsoever today. They do not loan you their own wealth. They loan you your own wealth. But man has a sense of vanity and has to invent these things that make him look important.

209 I am trying to keep at the realities with you. Approximately total automation is coming. Men will be essential to the industrial equation but not as workers. People are going to be utterly essential as consumers—what I call regenerative consumers, however, not just swill pails.

210 The vast industrial complex undertakings and associated capital investments are today so enormous and take so long to inaugurate that they require concomitantly rapid regenerative economics to support them. The enterprise must pay off very rapidly in order to be able to refund itself and obtain the economic advantage to inaugurate solution of the next task with still higher technical advantage. In that regenerative cycle of events, the more consumers there are the more the costs are divided and the lower the individual prices. The higher the frequency of the consuming the more quickly the capital cost can be refunded, and the sooner the system is ready for the next wave of better technology. So man is essential in the industrial equation as a consumer—as a regenerative consumer, a critical consumer, a man who tasting wants to taste better and who viewing realizes what he views can be accomplished more efficiently and more interestingly. The consumer thus becomes a highly critical regenerative function, requiring an educational system that fosters the consumer’s regenerative capacity and capability.

211 At present, world economics is such that Russia and China work under an integrated socialist planning in competition with our literally disorganized economic world (for our anti-trust laws will not permit organization on a comprehensive basis). The Communists have high efficiency advantage because of their authoritarianism. We have very little centralized authority, save in ‘‘defense.’’ The Communists now have the industrial equation, too, in large scale, and soon complete automation will be with them. They are very much aware of the fact that the more customers there are, the more successful the operation will be, because the unit costs are progressively lower. This is why the Soviets were historically lucky in getting China as customers. They would like also to have, exclusively, India and Africa as customers. If Russia acquires the most customers, we will not be able to compete. They will always have the lower costs on any given level of technology. We are going to have to meet this possibility and meet it vigorously, swiftly, and intelligendy. Within the next decade, if we survive at all as an organized set of crossbreeding men on the American continent it will be because we will have suddenly developed a completely new attitude on all these matters. In case you are apprehensive that social and political economics are to be so laggard as to impede your advanced educational programming, it is well to remember that the comprehensive world economics are going to force vast economic reforms of industries and nations, which incidentally will require utter modernization of the educational processes in order to be able to compete and survive.

212 Every time we educate a man, we as educators have a regenerative experience, and we ought to learn from that experience how to do it much better the next time. The more educated our population the more effective it becomes as an integral of regenerative consumer individuals. We are going to have to invest in our whole population to accelerate its consumer regeneration. We are going to be completely unemployed as muscle-working machines. We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school. That is, we are going to have to put our whole population into the educational process and get everybody realistically literate in many directions. Quite clearly, the new political word is going to be investment. It is not going to be dole, or socialism, or the idea of people hanging around in bread lines. The new popular regenerative investment idea is actually that of making people more familiar with the patterns of the universe, that is, with what man has learned about universe to date, and that of getting everybody intercommunicative at ever higher levels of literacy. People are then going to stay in the education process. They are going to populate ever increasing numbers of research laboratories and universities.

213 As we now disemploy men as muscle and reflex machines, the one area where employment is gaining abnormally fast is the research and development area. Research and development are a part of the educational process itself. We are going to have to invest in our people and make available to them participation in the great educational process of research and development in order to learn more. When we learn more, we are able to do more with our given opportunities. We can rate federally paid-for education as a high return, mutual benefit investment. When we plant a seed and give it the opportunity to grow its fruits pay us back many fold. Man is going to ‘‘improve’’ rapidly in the same way by new federally underwritten educational ‘‘seeding’’ by new tools and processes.

214 Our educational processes are in fact the upcoming major world industry. This is it; this is the essence of today’s educational facilities meeting. You are caught in that new educational upward draughting process. The cost of education will be funded regeneratively right out of earnings of the technology, the industrial equation, because we can only afford to reinvest continually in humanity’s ability to go back and turn out a better job. As a result of the new educational processes our consuming costs will be progressively lower as we also gain ever higher performance per units of invested resources, which means that our wealth actually will be increasing at all times rather than ‘‘exhausted by spending.’’ It is the ‘‘capability’’ wealth that really counts. It is very good that there is an international competitive system now operating, otherwise men would tend to stagnate, particularly in large group undertakings. They would otherwise be afraid to venture in this great intellectual integrity regeneration.

215 I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries, within which will flourish an educational machine technology that will provide tools such as the individually selected and articulated two-way TV and an intercontinentally net-worked, documentaries call-up system, operative over any home two-way TV set.

216 The new educational technology will probably provide also an invention of mine called the Geoscope—a large two-hundred-foot diameter (or more) lightweight geodesic sphere hung hoveringly at one hundred feet above midcampus by approximately invisible cables from three remote masts. This giant sphere is a miniature earth. Its entire exterior and interior surfaces will be covered with closely-packed electric bulbs, each with variable intensity controls. The lighting of the bulbs is scanningly controlled through an electric computer. The number of the bulbs and their minimum distance of one hundred feet from viewing eyes, either at the center of the sphere or on the ground outside and below the sphere, will produce the visual effect and resolution of a fine-screen halftone cut or that of an excellent television tube picture. The two-hundred-foot geoscope will cost about fifteen million dollars. It will make possible communication of phenomena that are not at present communicable to man’s conceptual understanding. There are many motion patterns such as those of the hands of the clock or of the solar system planets or of the molecules of gas in a pneumatic ball or of atoms or the earth’s annual weather that cannot be seen or comprehended by the human eye and brain relay and are therefore inadequately comprehended and dealt with by the human mind.

217 The Geoscope may be illuminated to picture the earth and the motion of its complete cloud-cover history for years run off on its surface in minutes so that man may comprehend the cyclic patterning and predict. The complete census- by-census of world population history changes could be run off in minutes, giving a clear picture of the demological patterning and its clear trending. The total history of transportation and of world resource discovery, development, distribution, and redistribution could become comprehendible to the human mind, which would thus be able to forecast and plan in vasdy greater magnitude than heretofore. The consequences of various world plans could be computed and projected. All world data would be dynamically viewable and picturable and relayable by radio to all the world, so that common consideration in a most educated manner of all world problems by all world people would become a practical event.

218 The universities are going to be wonderful places. Scholars will stay there for a long, long time—the rest of their lives—while they are developing more and more knowledge about the whole experience of man. All men will be going around the world in due process as everyday routine search and exploration, and the world experiencing patterning will be everywhere—all students from everywhere all over the world. That is all part of the new pattern that is rushing upon us. We will accelerate as rapidly into ‘‘yesterday’’ through archaeology as we do into ‘‘tomorrow.’’ Archaeology both on land and under the seas will flourish equally with astronautics.

219 Glenn Olds served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. He has been president of three universities, including Ohio's Kent State University after the tragic shooting of students on May 4, 1970, and has served as special assistant to four U.S. presidents. He is currently chairman of the board of the World Federalist Association.

220 Olds, E. J. Applewhite, and Neva Goodwin Rockefeller are best remembered by Fullerites as the nucleus of the Fuller International Design Science Institute. Olds was president of the institute as Bucky was developing the Wichita Dymaxion house. The Wichita house, when completed, would weigh only 6,000 pounds, with two bedrooms, two Dymaxion bathrooms, a kitchen, and a 28-foot diamond-shaped living room. Although designed more than half a century ago, this unique structure defies time and is today still a tour de force, an affordable experimental house for the average man or woman. It is regrettable that Bucky never saw the Wichita house go into full production. Currently the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, is restoring the Wichita Dymaxion house.

221 Glenn Olds remembers Bucky as a "Cosmic Surfer."