5 Taking Inventory
2BEFORE THE ASCENDANCY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, all previous empires of history, such as those of Alexander the Great, of the Romans, and of Genghis Khan, were flat-world empires. No one knew what went on beyond the map’s borders. The British Empire, securely established in 1805 with the great sea battle at Trafalgar, was the first empire in history on which ‘‘the Sun never set.’’ It was a spherical-world empire—the result of two hundred years of daring conquest, scientific exploration, and economic treaties. It was through the mechanism of the British East India Company that, for the first time in history, a harvest of economic, scientific, and social information from around the spherical Earth was collected and digested.
3 Thomas Malthus, when he became professor of political economy at the East India Company College, realized that he was the first human being in all history to have the vital statistics of humanity directly collected from all around a closed-system spherical planet, as distinguished from an open system with its only locally significant economic data. Thomas Malthus proclaimed in 1803 that the global data showed humanity’s population to be increasing at a geometrical rate while its life-support productivity was increasing only at an arithmetical rate. Based on this, he concluded something to this effect: Quite clearly the majority of humans are destined to live out their years in great want, pain, and suffering. Pray all you want, it will do you no good. That’s all there is. Planet Earth has been scientifically established to be a closed system.
4 Although Malthus’s assumption has long been assumed by economists to be a generalized scientific law—i.e., that an inherent fundamental inadequacy of life support exists on our planet—I saw as early as 1917 that technology provided an unexpected and adequate counter to his assumption and its later incarnations under the general rubric ‘‘limits-to-growth theories.’’
5 In 1859, Charles Darwin promulgated his theory of evolution, explaining his belief in the survival of only the fittest species and of the fittest individuals within those species. He later protested that he never meant his theory to have any economic significance. His contemporary Karl Marx felt that Darwin’s theory of evolution clearly governed socioeconomics. While Marx did not specifically say this, his written thoughts make it eminently clear that he accepted the findings of both Malthus and Darwin. To Marx, the worker was quite clearly the fittest to survive because he knew how to use the tools and how to make all the products. The worker knew how to nurture the seed and the lamb. To Marx, the wealthy people were parasites. They did not agree, thinking, ‘‘We’re on top of the heap, and Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ explains why we’re on top of the heap. We’re fittest. The worker is very dull, very locally preoccupied. What humanity needs is imagination, very big thinking and venturing, and a lot of courage and initiative to make the closed-system world work.’’
6 It was only a century or so ago that there occurred the fundamental ideological dichotomy in human political and economic affairs—the Communists versus the capitalists, who later preferred the appellation ‘‘private enterprise.’’ Being known as private enterprisers rather than as capitalists suggests daringly brilliant risk taking on behalf of humanity, which warrants capitalism using its power to gain benevolent tax and subsidy advantages not made available to the public in general. The fact is that today capitalism takes the least risk of all social functions. Capitalism’s prime interest is self-interest, that is, further government commitment to armaments expenditures.
7 It is very important to recognize that 99 percent of the people now ruled by Communism and most of those now controlled by capitalism did not elect so to be classified as Communists or capitalists. The great masses involved dreamed that they were doing what they wanted to be doing—i.e., living in a democracy. Both Communist and capitalist leaders have assumed dictatorial power to be essential to their respective successes and are ever reconnoitering to impose their ideology’s viewpoint on people.
8 Returning to Malthus, there was 99 percent illiteracy around the world at the time he was working on his theory. His inventory of facts was in effect a wealth of highly classified information belonging exclusively to those ambitious to run the world and reap its riches. Malthus’s discoveries and conclusions remained popularly unknown through the first half of the nineteenth century. His findings were of interest only to those interested in winning control of the world’s wealth away from its England-based masters, since and because of Malthus’s pronouncement of a fundamental inadequacy of human life support on our planet. Each of the respective ideologists said then and still say, ‘‘You may not like our system, but we’re convinced we have the fairest, most logical, most ingenious way of coping with lethal inadequacy of life support on our planet. But because there are those who disagree on how to cope, it can only be resolved by the trial-of-arms which system is fittest to survive.’’
9 The foregoing explains why the Soviet Union and the United States for over four decades have spent trillions of dollars and trillions of rubles to buy the highest capability of science to discover, develop, produce, and stockpile the means to kill ever more people at ever-greater distances in ever-shorter time.
10 When I was born in 1895, popular reality consisted of everything that could be touched, smelt, tasted, heard, and seen with the human senses. When I was young, a new era was opening.
11 I was born the year X-rays were discovered, the year Marconi first used the ‘‘wireless.’’ When I was two, electrons were first identified; it did not make the news. Nobody knew that electrons would eventually have socioeconomic significance. We were entering an age when, as today, 99.999 percent of the technological reality affecting all our lives is nondirectly contactible and apprehensible by the human senses.
12 As already mentioned, all structuring consists of tension and compression. Historically speaking, stone and masonry had a compression-resisting strength of 50,000 pounds per square inch, in contrast to a tensile strength of only 50 pounds per square inch. The strongest available wood had an average tensile strength of 10,000 pounds per square inch. At the time of my birth, metallurgy was developing the electrolytic refining and production of aluminum—a metal that is much lighter than steel but is not nearly as strong. Aluminum had theretofore been so difficult to produce that Napoleon had aluminum dining plates that ranked with gold plates in cost.
13 Suddenly, we began to develop metallic alloys of greatly increased but invisible strength. Our first mild steel production in 1851 had both tensile strength and compression-resisting strength of 50,000 pounds per square inch. In 1883, W. A. Roehling used high-carbon alloyed steel in his Brooklyn Bridge ; it had a tensile strength of 70,000 pounds per square inch. In World War I—my coming-of-age era—industry developed chrome-molybdenum aircraft steel with a tensile strength of 110,000 pounds per square inch. This was more than twice the tensile strength of 1851 mild steel, yet weighed no more per unit volume than the mild steel.
14 In World War II, we had chrome-nickel (rustless) steel with a tensile strength of 350,000 pounds per square inch of cross-section. Now we have in practical use carbon fiber with a tensile strength of 600,000 pounds per square inch and with the same weight per cubic inch as the mild steel of 1851.
15 No one can see the differences because they are invisible. Society pays no little attention to anything invisible. Up to the time of World War I, when steel steamships replaced wooden sailing ships, everybody thought of ship sizes only in terms of Archimedean displacement (i.e., their tonnage). All the old men-o’-war were identified by the ship’s tonnage and the number of ships in the armada.
16 There was a popular working assumption that ‘‘you can’t lift yourself by your bootstraps.’’ It was assumed that every function has a given (constant) weight and work involvement. Even today this is the economists’ working assumption. Economists differentiate only between aluminum and steel, not among various alloys. Because of the appearance of new alloys with their invisible increase in tensile performance per pound, we made a startling realization during World War I. We could defeat an enemy ship of a size equal to our own, of the same tonnage, with the same number of guns of the same caliber—everything virtually the same—if we had one all-important advantage. If our ship’s biggest guns, the same size and weight as theirs, were made of steel with twice the tensile strength per pound of theirs, our guns would be able to shoot accurately at a range perhaps one thousand yards greater than theirs. Firing at them as they first came within our range, we would be able to sink an enemy ship before it even got close enough to fire at us. Such information was ‘‘secret’’ (i.e., critical) information.
17 I saw that all the most highly classified information during World War I concerned the invisible reality of the emergent technological revolution of continually doing more with less. Nobody could see it. Because society could not see it, such secrets were readily kept. Nobody talked about an invisible technological revolution taking place.
18 Because society could not see it, society did not know about it.
19 There are as yet no economics books—or chapters or even sentences in such books—about doing more work with the same weight of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of time or about doing ever more with ever-less resource investments per function accomplished. The one great generalized law of all economics is the fundamental inadequacy of life support on our planet.
20 Evolution’s provision of an escape hatch from the otherwise ever more swiftly and invisibly developing consequences of the Dark Ages’ haze-over became compounded with the invisible evolution’s perils. Ultimately most lethal are the cosmological, academic, and everyday socioeconomic misorientations of all humanity by the insidious metaphysical influence of the Dark Ages, misassumed to have terminated long ago. These misorientations have been welded into human affairs as accepted ‘‘legal and academic’’ precedents and customs manifest in the world’s successively dominant socioeconomic and militarily supported power structures.
21 To acquire essential insights regarding the strategic role of Einstein’s conceptual breakthroughs in the realization of humans’ potential emergence from the Dark Ages, it is necessary to comprehend realistically the part being played by the invisible structuring of metallic alloys. This is only elucidatable by Newton’s law of mass interattraction and other, less well known mathematical laws.
22 Many scientists will not seriously accept nonmathematically expressed explanations. Because I am hopeful that some responsible scientists and engineers will comprehend the gargantuan economic significance of ever more effective performance with ever-less investment of resources and their altogether combined interfunctioning transpiring in the invisible ranges of technological evolution, I have included a mathematical elucidation of alloying as well as a verbal explanation.
23 Being a technologist and U.S. Navy officer of the line in World War I, I realized back in 1917 that the possibility of doing progressively ever more with ever less might mean that at some not too distant date we might attain such a magnitude of accomplishing more work with so much less resources that we would be able to take care of all humanity at an unprecedently high standard of living.
24 Technological invalidation of Malthus’s assumption of a fundamental inadequacy of life support on our planet became my most important goal. Of course, Malthus’s reading of his data was correct for his time. It was not a generalized law, however, as the economists assumed it to be. It was only a temporary condition, similar to what I saw as the situation with fossil fuels on this planet. I saw fossil fuels as a very precious resource that had taken millions of years to produce and could serve only as a temporary battery to fuel industrial growth on the planet for a relatively short period, until technology could advance to the level where all energy would come from renewable and solar sources.
25 I became very excited by the challenge.
26 Reviewing briefly my own history and its relationship to the swift evoluting changes in vital criteria, I came out of the navy and entered the building world.
27 By 1927, I was penniless and in abject dismay. I was certain that I would never be able to succeed financially in the competitive survival game of the peacetime business world. On the point of suicide, I determined that I had a unique set of experiences that were not mine to discard and might, given the right circumstances, have some incremental effect on the future course of humanity. To think of one individual, infinitesimal in importance in relation to human cosmic evolution, having a role in that evolution may seem to be a product of ego, megalomania, or exaggerated importance, but on that fateful day, I concluded that this relationship of the minute individual in respect to the whole is nonetheless the only possible common direct experience of each and every human being. All else is hearsay.
28 In order for you to understand how fortunate I have been to have had the life experiences I have had, you must get a sense of the crisis in which I found myself in 1927. I reasoned, ‘‘Since I’m really a throwaway, if, instead of committing suicide, I use my entire experience and knowledge inventory in an experiment of only working for all humans rather than one human, that commitment might validate my survival.’’
29 In 1927, when I was thirty-two, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) published an article about a single-family dwelling that they felt to be ideal under the most technologically and economically advanced circumstances of the time.
30 To appreciate the magnitude of 1920s improvements incorporated into that ‘‘ideal’’ 1927 AIA single-family dwelling, we must realize that before World War I we had sawed out blocks of pond, lake, or river ice to fill our home iceboxes. Also in our most opulent households we had coal-fired furnaces requiring coal-shovel stoking. This AIA ideal 1927 house had an electric icebox and a self-tending oil-burning furnace. Everything was ‘‘right up-to-the-minute.’’
31 I analyzed that house as described by the AIA. I calculated its total floor area and total volume of enclosed space. I listed and work-rated all its technical facilities and characteristics. Counting all its windows and their compass-orientation, I calculated the number of lumens of sunlight entering the house. I then calculated the total weight of the AIA house, including its incoming water pipes, sewer lines, and wires. That 1927 AIA ideal single-family dwelling weighed a total of 150 tons.
32 Then, using the most advanced aircraft technology of the time—aircraft aluminum alloys had just been developed—I calculated the total weight of a single-family environment-control and human-life-serving machine I had designed with the same cubic footage, the same floor area, and the same technological performance capabilities. I estimated that my autonomous dwelling machine would weigh only 3 tons, as against 150 tons for the AIA's conventional-building-technology single-family house—i.e., only 2 percent of the weight of the comparable conventional building technology. That was in 1927. My Dymaxion House did not resemble the conventional AIA architecture. It had its own aeronautical look about it.
33 In 1945, when the interim alloy research had been completed, I built two full-scale prototypes of the Dymaxion House for the U.S. Air Force at Beech Aircraft’s shops in Wichita, Kansas. These prefabricated, air-deliverable dwelling machines weighed in at exactly 3 tons, the weight I had predicted eighteen years earlier. This reaffirmed my confidence in both my understanding of design science capability and my speculative analysis.
34 There is an ultimate technological fallout from military production’s instrument and tool development into the furnishings and appliances of the home front, such as the already mentioned refrigerator. But often the transition takes a generation or more. Mechanical refrigeration appeared in the navy twenty years before World War I and thirty-eight years before the electric fridge of the AIA house. In 1927, I posited that if we applied the most advanced aircraft and naval production capabilities directly to the home front, we might be able to greatly advance the realization of a livingry advantage for all humanity, eventually taking care of all humanity’s physical comfort needs. I saw this as a means of shifting humanity from a failure strategy to a success strategy. I sought its implementation in all my inventions.
35 That is how I entered upon this fifty-five-year-long project. I could find nobody else even mildly interested in undertaking these experimental developments. I kept track of, and plotted, all the curves of rates of increase of tensile strengths in all the different kinds of metal alloys . I also started in 1927 to keep track of the increase in automotive horsepower in relation to engine weight and gallons of fuel expended.
36 I foresaw the ultimate development of a large plastics industry producing materials similar to our fingernails that would be opaque, translucent, or lucent and as relatively unbreakable as poker chips and fountain pen barrels, which in 1927 were among the only plastic products. At that time there were no plastic products larger than celluloid dolls. Anticipating products as large as our present-day seventy-foot-long yachts of reinforced fiberglass hulls, I predicted large, strong, and lightweight all-weather plastic reinforced by high-tensile-strength steel rods.
37 All of my fifty-year anticipatory planning was predicated on the up-to-then rates of increase in performance capabilities. Keeping careful track of many performance curves enabled me to make very powerful prognostications.
38 My integrated performance curves showed that the rates of actual increase in our ability to do so much more with so much less for so many more people made it realistic to assume that we might be able to take care of everybody at an ever-higher standard of living and do so within the twentieth century—at the slowest rate of improvement, by the year 2000; at the fastest, by 1990. There were, for instance, the curves for the per capita use of copper in the United States and in the rest of the world. There were two trends: an ever-decreasing per capita use in the United States and an ever-increasing amount for each world human. In 1936, U.S. humans had 125 pounds per capita and world humans only 15 pounds. The curves of decreasing pounds per U.S. human and increasing pounds per world human come level with one another in 1996.
39 In 1927 it was possible to calculate that it would take about half a century to get to a visible-to-others realization that we were indeed approaching that condition of universal technologically achieved abundance. In 1938, in ninechains [ninechains], I published some of my charts of these calculations, which means they can be reviewed today. I also published them in Fortune’s tenth-anniversary issue in February 1940.
40 The critical path for the Apollo Project’s ultimate 1969 successful ferrying of humans over to the Moon and back consisted of a list of the million-plus tasks that were going to have to be done—that had never been done before—as well as a list of all the essential things that we had already proven could be done and that must now be put to use. This schedule had to be satisfied before the blast-off of that ultimately successful Moon voyage. This schedule had to be satisfied before the blast-off of that ultimately successful Moon voyage.
41 Using a first-things-first strategy, the critical path of the Apollo Project had to sort out and arrange the order of tasks to be accomplished for this unprecedentedly complex and massive project. With critical-path planning, each task has a precise order of subtasks to be accomplished and a schedule for each. The critical path provides in advance a master schedule of dates by which the longest-to-accomplish tasks must be initiated, with subdates for all necessary and related tasks.
42 In 1927, I foresaw a fifty-year critical path necessary to prove that Malthus’s conclusions were limited to a special early-nineteenth-century case. I sought to prove this by demonstrating the logic of consciously implementing a high standard of living for all humanity by employing the invisible-reality technological revolution in producing livingry artifacts. My ultimate objective was to convert the most-advanced technology from producing killingry (armaments) to producing high-tech livingry.
43 In the widely published and discussed 1972 Club of Rome report about the ‘‘limits of growth’’ [*]Meadows:1972tu, the authors considered the world’s mines to be the only source of metals. They found that humanity had almost exhausted these mines.
44 So ignorant are our economists that there was no one on the Club of Rome’s economics computer team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who knew that 70 percent of our steel comes from recirculating scrap metal or that 80 percent of our copper comes from recirculating scrap.
45 We have reached the point where no more mining need be done. In my tracking of resource curves, I discovered that the average of all metals recirculates every twenty-two and a half years. Some metals come out of their functional-use state very quickly, say in five years, while others come to be recycled every fifty years. Each time they come around again, we have gained so much more know-how and can do so much more for so many more people with so much less in the way of physical resources per function that ultimately we need not mine anymore.
46 Long ago I saw that we could take the metals that are in all of our weaponry, melt them down, and implement them directly for livingry. Based on my logistical engineering experience—having had over two hundred thousand of my geodesic domes installed around the world in the most formidable arctic, antarctic, and equatorial environmental conditions—I see that it is now highly feasible to institute a millennial ten-year design revolution that could take care of all humanity at a much higher standard of living than anybody has ever known and could do so on a sustainable basis. During those ten years, we could also phase out forever all further use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. We can live entirely on our energy income from the Sun.
47 If you make such a statement publicly, you are sure to get rigorously checked. My contention has been checked by many specialists, none of whom, to my knowledge, has found me in error. Of the five billion human beings on our planet, possibly a million now know what I have discovered and that I am correct in my contention—that we presently have the technological option to establish five billion billionaires on our planet. I saw that humanity, largely unaware of its potential, might not exercise its options in time. A sense of urgency fueled my invention-implementation strategies, my writing, and my speaking engagements.
48 Though we humans are here in Universe to use our minds to discover principles and to employ them objectively, I find that today muscle, cunning, brains, fear, and selfishness are in control of human affairs—not mind. If mind were in control, or comes into control in time, we would certainly exercise our option to have everybody in ascendancy and come to a new kind of operating relationship with Universe.