Chapter 18
Continuous Man
2The tentative encouragement in the direction of large geodesic domes for Europe and Asia experienced by recent observers, coincides with similar encouraging experiences which I have had. Many occurred during my most recent European travel. Largest encouragement is found, however, in my increasing communications. These accrue partially to my three around-the-world trips and to my 233 visits at 123 world universities and news of geodesic dome developments. Most especially they accrue to my conceptual planting in the fertile minds of voluntary students. A ‘‘Dymaxion’’ educated generation has now developed a working conviction of the comprehensive validity of my viewpoint, which was to them at first only theoretical. Their own protracted and maturing post-graduate experience has witnessed multiplying realizations of Dymaxion concepts reduced to going economic practices all around the world.
3 In 1927 I published my conviction that two billion new era premium technology-dwelling devices would be needed within this century, requiring a whole new world-encompassing service industry. I predicted that it would take a quarter of a century to establish that new industry. In 1952, right on theoretical schedule, the Ford Motor Company was the first purchaser of my geodesic domes, which were the prototypes of the new era premium technology structures. By 1962, I was able to count over two thousand of my structures in forty countries. The growth curve, slow in starting, is now rising in marked acceleration.
4 World-around employment of geodesic domes and autonomously packaged living mechanics now read clearly on my trend curves as the most powerful of immediately-future economic growths. That growth will be in acceleration for a half century. It then will level off at a steady rate of replacement evolution.
5 However, the present crux of domestic problems in respect to large geodesic domes is the high cost of installation. While welding operations on some types involve skilled labor at the site, most geodesic domes, including the Kaiser dome, do not require skilled labor at the site. In most geodesic dome cases, all the skill goes into the calculations, planning, and the development of unique tools, and the unique tools reproduce the unique end products, preferably within carefully controlled environmental conditions. If geodesic strategies of installation are properly designed, they do not even require importantly experienced scaffolding and rigger men at site. Best are the air-delivered domes.
6 The first U.S. Information Administration’s nine-thousand-square-foot floor space, one hundred feet in diameter. International Trade Fair Geodesic Pavilion of aluminum tubing and outwardly stretched nylon-neoprene skin, was shipped in June 1956 by one airplane over the Atlantic to Kabul, Afghanistan, from Raleigh, North Carolina. It then was flown to New Delhi, to Burma, to Bangkok, to Tokyo, to Osaka, to Manila and then back across the Pacific to South America. Since that time a number of similar international trade fair domes, each accompanied by one of our Geodesics, Inc. engineers, have been air-delivered, each entirely in one airplane, complete with scaffolding and erection tools—to Poznan, Poland; Milan, Italy; Salonika, Greece; Istanbul, Turkey; Tunis, Tunisia and a number of other European, African and Asian cities. The first U.S. Information Administration’s nine-thousand-square-foot floor space, one hundred feet in diameter. International Trade Fair Geodesic Pavilion of aluminum tubing and outwardly stretched nylon-neoprene skin, was shipped in June 1956 by one airplane over the Atlantic to Kabul, Afghanistan, from Raleigh, North Carolina. It then was flown to New Delhi, to Burma, to Bangkok, to Tokyo, to Osaka, to Manila and then back across the Pacific to South America. Since that time a number of similar international trade fair domes, each accompanied by one of our Geodesics, Inc. engineers, have been air-delivered, each entirely in one airplane, complete with scaffolding and erection tools—to Poznan, Poland; Milan, Italy; Salonika, Greece; Istanbul, Turkey; Tunis, Tunisia and a number of other European, African and Asian cities.
7 In approximately every instance, these domes were erected at their respective foreign trade fair sites by completely unskilled native labor in less than forty-eight hours. They were color-coded for erection in any language; required no more than the ability to put nuts on bolts and match colors. The natives often thought they were building a cubical building and were amazed to find they had contrived a spherical structure.
8 Because the men erecting buildings have been historically associated by the public with the unique skills essential to old building, the public in each of the places where these domes have been erected have The United States Department of Commerce purchased the domes simply because of their low cost and last-minute availability to a headache foreign budget and had considered them to be only bad weather-excluding quick space controls. They were completely surprised to discover that the domes also had a unique social kudos factor. So greatly did the geodesic kudos factor multiply that it showed up in the foreign trade fair experience as the prime local friends-winning factor.
9 When the Department of Commerce found we were to have our United States exhibit at Moscow, it decided that the geodesic dome would become the ace card in playing the Russian-United States cultural exchange game at Moscow in the summer of 1959. They asked me which dome I would recommend, and I said a hard shell dome as I wished to anticipate heavy snow loads in Russia and avoid the requirements of any field skills, such as welding and painting. Therefore, I recommended the Kaiser dome which was used and which evoked the direct statement by Khrushchev that ‘‘some American inventions are good,’’ and that he would ‘‘like to have ‘J. Buckingham Fuller’ come to Russia and lecture to my engineers.’’
10 I visited the Soviet Union in 1959, during which visit the Russians made it clear that they are going to go into geodesic domes in a big way. They told me they would probably erect an eight hundred-foot geodesic clearspan dome over their Magneto Stadium in Moscow. They purchased the United States Kaiser dome after the exhibition for $550,000, probably for static-load testing in order to discover its structural theory, which is not in any of the engineering text books, else I could not have patented geodesic domes. This dome is now used for a sports palace in the winter and in the summer for housing international trade fairs. We also have used geodesic domes of aluminum tube, hub, and stretched nylon vinyl skin of ten-thousand-square-foot floor space, identical to the Kabul dome at a number of points in the United States, as for instance at the Golden Jubilee Fair at St. Louis six years ago. (The same dome was later re-erected and stands at present in Detroit’s Northland Shopping Center.) In contrast to the forty-eight-hour foreign native installations of this type dome (which included the natives’ ready assembly of the two aluminum, rolling-scaffold towers, included in the price of the dome with the tools), the St. Louis dome took a month and a half to be erected by the Boilermakers Union at $5.50 an hour. In St. Louis, the contractor had another union elevating the scaffold from time to time and pushing the towers around and handing up the parts while the boilermakers sat in chairs under sun shades atop the scaffolds in conversational pairs putting the nuts on the bolts. This occurred quite naturally, for in the United States we also erroneously assume that the building erector must be a skilled artisan.
11 I am far from an anti-labor man. I am a card-carrying journeyman-machinist in the International Association of Machinists, but it is clear to me that all the countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain are completely confused by the entirely unprecedented behavior requirements of the industrial equation, which, for instance, will shortly involve comprehensive, world-around automation, and will render man as a ‘‘worker’’ or automaton— a muscle and reflex machine—utterly obsolete. World peoples have confused this problem of disemployment by improving industrialization as one to be solved by tire age-long political precedent of a class struggle.
12 Political class struggles relate to the all-history-long struggle for survival exclusively under the seemingly absolute fact of inherent failure of the majority of the human family, due to the entirely pre-industrial economic accounting of Malthus, which seemingly showed scientifically that world peoples were continually multiplying their numbers more rapidly than did their sustaining metabolic resources increase. It was thought politically that people could carry on either in socialism’s austerity, a political scheme by which all peoples would die off slowly in commonly shared inadequacies, or by the mysterious political theory of ‘‘survival of the fittest class,’’ which would progressively annihilate by warfaring, or leave to starvation, all the progressively unsupportable increments of self-multiplying peoples.
13 I pointed out to the Russians, during their fair, in the summer of 1959, that the only difference between Russia in 1917 and 1959 was the same difference as that standing between the United States in 1775 and 1959, to wit, industrialization. If the 1917, preponderantly agricultural and craft Russia had since been modified only by socialism’s political reforms, they would now have half as many grains of wheat per capita as they had in 1917 and fifty million instead of sixteen million people would have starved to death in the intervening years. If the agricultural and craft United States of 1775 had tried to solve the needs of an eighteen-fold multiplication of its population exclusively by social reform laws enacted by their democratically representative government, one hundred million people would have starved to death in the interval. Both Russia and the United States, together with the general European economies, have changed, due almost entirely to the twentieth century emergence of the nineteenth century’s industrialization baby into a full grown giant—the ‘‘continuous man’’—the name I have given to industrialization, the latter an awkward word. Continuous man swallowed hammer, sickle and shovel.
14 I have given the name ‘‘continuous man’’ to the slowly accumulating total world experience and total literate knowledge regarding all the discovered physical resources and generalized patterning principles—in contradistinction to the illiterate, discontinuous man, local in time and geography, whose nonrelayed experience-won knowledge limited his tool capabilities to devices which any one individual might invent entirely on his own initiative, starting nakedly in the wilderness. My definition of industry is a tool-regenerating complex in which none of the tools could be produced, operated, or used by one man—for example, the Queen Mary, Grand Coulee dam, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, etc.
15 All around the world are found unbelievably large heaps of artifacts of discontinuous man, each, in effect, starting all over again learning a little, incorporating the little in hand-crafted tools, dying without comprehension of aught but the local limitations and inadequacies of his infinitely surrounded and apparently exclusive local reality.
16 Though one third of our time is pre-allotted to the discontinuance of consciousness as sleep, the rotation of night as a shadow around the earth results in a rotating wave of shadow sleepers, while two thirds of all mankind are at all times continuously awake. My continuous man represents a world-around interlinked and continuously intercommunicating continuity of consciousness, which with the spoken word and the invention of mathematics and discovery of generalized principles operative in universe and discovery of the total resources of earth and the character of the total resources of universe, constitute a continuous extra-corporeal memory and a continuously enlightening experience, continuously translated into continuously improving extra-corporeal rearrangements of the total resource of unique pattern behaviors of physical universe within which only individual man is engulfed as an inherent island of physical discontinuity. The individual is linked, however, to continuous man by the extra-corporeal intellections recognized by individual intellect. Continuous extra-corporeal or industrial man is an extra-corporeal tool or pattern inducing continuity which renders industrialization identifiable as an extra-corporeal universal chromosome common to all men’s post-natal evolutionary transforming beyond the patterning corporeally induced by the integral genes and chromosomes. The latter have so far failed to disclose any integral memory capable of inhibiting new pattern conceiving potentials; therefore industrialization may well be the second derivative, synergetic-surprise capability to remember and teleologically realize evolutionary pattern controlling.
17 Continuous man’s intellectual capability multiplies geometrically as his experiences accumulate and their observed data are recorded and converted to the extra-corporeal chromosomic function of anticipatory patterning. Industrialization, or our continuous man, knows no national or political favorites. Continuous man’s laws are of the universe and are only realizable through its comprehensively integratable and multipliable world and universe resources. The intellectual integrity of the industrial equation utterly reverses the history of inherent inadequacies of local agricultural and craftable resources.
18 As a result, the enormous energy-relaying patterns of universe are continually shunted by consciously continuous man in greater magnitude into the man-world patterning and applied to the ends of increasing numbers and lengths of levers. This tooling is in itself regenerative as man stands apart from and surveys and critically appraises and improves its working. There tooling rearranges universal energy flow patternings from which physical man can detach himself and enjoy new degrees of a priori energy environmental patterns control. In satisfaction of man’s consciously apprehended needs and desires, his time is freed by the tooling to be invested in more perspective for realization of more tool invention. Tool capability becomes reinvested in improved tool birth and mass tool reproductability.
19 So enormous is the energy wealth of universe and so great is the memory and intellectual wisdom of continuous man in respect to his previous experiences, and so fundamentally has he inter-tooled his advantages, that it is completely clear that all men now may be successful in living in a progressively satisfactory enjoyment of total earth. This was unthinkable at the time of the Declaration of Independence. It was still unthinkable at the time of Marx and Lenin, though its pre-dawn and dawning must have bestirred the intuity of support of both the American and Russian revolutions, respectively. Lincoln initiated ‘‘right makes might.’’
20 Because individual men’s concepts of adjustment to change are historically fixed upon earlier categories of social reforms, and because comprehensive economic commonweal seems to refer historically only to the category socialism, America has misinterpreted entirely the new realization potentials and credit-accounting requirements brought about by industrialization. It has interpreted the changing relationships only in the political economy terms of a class battle between worker and employer operating uniquely under obsolete, discontinuous man’s either-you-or-me survival rules. World society everywhere has popularly misinterpreted the higher production per hour and its concomitant requirement of lesser production hours per function in the terms of social reform as seemingly won by the only and hard way—by organized labor from disgruntled employers in the U.S.A, and by lethal revolution in the U.S.S.R. Only techno-invention cuts work.
21 Though there is more than a dawning awareness of the real significance now emergent, the meagerness of that awareness is manifest both in labor’s near-sighted drive only for a shorter work week; and in management’s drive to convert all techno savings to stockholder’s dividends or to salary bonuses for management itself as ‘‘class war.’’ The new frames of reference for realistic accounting must be (1.) the lifetime economic security of all individuals and (2.) their actively functioning peak physical coordination years. Instead of a four-day week of work with three days to spend on crowded highways getting to and from resorts, the additional fifty-two days per year could be added to the fifty-two Saturdays and provide fourteen continuous weeks away in battery-recharging sojourn and thirty-eight continuous weeks of forty-four hours each on the job. Further man-time gains of progressive automation would be realized in more continuous weeks away and lesser continuous weeks on the job, plus earlier and earlier full pay retirement.
22 With imminent completion of world-around industrial automation, man will have lost his significance as a worker altogether. Here we have need to recognize one of industrialization’s most important principles—to wit, industrialization becomes increasingly efficient, ergo increasingly profitable in direct proportion to the total numbers of well-dollared consumers. (The more consumers the easier the amortization of the mass production setup’s progressive stages.) Its corollary is that there are minimum numbers of consumers, without which industrialization cannot exist. For instance, the mortality in the 1920’s of one hundred out of one hundred and twenty-five starting automobile producers taught that the mass buyer market could not be found or met in buying capability at yearly productions of less than one hundred thirty-five thousand cars. Mergers of bankrupt corporations’ nonvanishing tool inventories and capabilities finally stabilized four residual major automobile producers’ capabilities at well over the critical minimum for enjoyment of lowest mass production pricing, while all other makes had to earn premium prices to exist.
23 Man having lost his significance altogether as an automaton must now discover himself realistically as being essential to the success of industrialization only in the function of regenerative consumer. He must develop a world-around industrial economic accounting system which scientifically and comprehensively implements realization of this principle. Regenerative consumers continually become dissatisfied with each stage of technical improvement as experience teaches them where the inefficiencies lie. Universal evolution is continuous and only our continuous man synchronizes successfully with its patterning.
24 Even as we find ourselves forced to pay farmers not to use the productivity of their fields in order to avoid world market glutting and waste, in the same way we will soon find ourselves forced to pay people not to work. We may use a positive technique by employing them to go to school, as in the G. I. Bill, or by giving fellowships which employ them to go to graduate schools, or to pre-industrial research schools, or by pre-paying their continuance at school for indefinite periods, to become ever more competent in the general scientific searching for the principles operative in universe.
25 When we boast that we have sixty-nine million people employed in America as workers, we ignorantly subscribe to the fallacy of ‘‘survival of the fittest,’’ seemingly securable only through yesterday’s noble ruggedry, which pathetically clings to a hangover morality economic requiring that people sacrifice themselves blindly in ‘‘sweat and tears’’ not only to justify their industrial consumer credit, but their right to live.
26 We don’t seem to see that industrialization is inexorably displacing all incoherent systems as primary survival-amplifying mechanism. Instead of paying those boilermakers not to work and to go to research school in Florida, for fear that this is socialism, we are giving them $5.50 an hour dole to sit up there and pretend to be capitalistic workers while putting nuts on bolts. Because these men can kid themselves into thinking that this is skilled work, they don’t have to think of the $5.50 an hour as dole; therefore, they feel pretty good, and that is good. What is most destructive about it is the fact that the self-kidding also involves a comprehensive labor strategy of decelerated output in squandering its share of techno-industrial gains in battling equally ignorant management. This indirectly murders millions.
27 Another loss is that of a man’s own self confidence and satisfaction in the knowledge that he is giving his best in commonwealth building—in fullest measure even as he enjoys doing so in his athletic battling. Much of the beatnik-into-delinquent stems from contempt of youth for the patent self-kidding of a social ‘‘class’’ struggle, which concept is no longer valid because economic scarcities causing aristocracy are swiftly vanishing. Many a U.S. worker citizen, participating in the installation of the American Exhibit dome in Moscow, looked with envious reminiscence upon the unstinted, unlimited hours of enthusiastic work dedication universally exhibited by the Russian laborers assigned to carry out the U.S.A. Exhibit’s installation chores. The more work we gave them the more friendly they became.
28 Deep within our subconscious reflexing which we speak of as intuition (which many seemingly fear to heed realistically) I experienced in 1959, in and about both the Russian National Exhibit in New York and the American National Exhibit in Moscow, a vivid awareness of the mutual superficiality of both the communist and capitalist game-playing by a world democratic man and woman richly alive in both the Americans and Russians which looked unselfconsciously with deep, underlying, mutual, yet consciously suppressed, confidence to common emancipation from eco-political restraints soon to be inexorably removed by the inherently comprehensive ramifications of commonly recognized industrializations’ accelerating acceleration of its self-reaugmenting capabilities. Each country naively thought itself to be the exclusive inventor and proprietor of industrialization—as children look at the outset upon their respective parents as being the only real, loving, living fathers and mothers and upon all other children’s parents as formalized, game-playing impostors. But in 1959, in Russia and in America and everywhere else that I traveled around the world, industrialization as a generalized, impersonal, non-political realization of pure, mathematical, complex functions was everywhere dominant in emergently looming pure principle. Both Russia and American national expositions commonly celebrated the twentieth century’s miraculous expansion of industrialization. Our continuous man was astride of all continents. Continuous man was performing so magnificently as the invisible family head and real breadwinner that the world’s industrial people of both pseudo-nations could play their economically innocuous caps and commies comic games all day and all night without any historically deleterious effects—because poppa—the continuous man was so fabulously and realistically rich that a little overheating of air here and there just didn’t matter. ‘‘I bet you don’t dare—to play class warfare’’ phooey!
29 Amusingly, the same self-kidding in respect to work patterns holds true for most of the striped-pants officers in the increasing number of branch bank houses in the United States today. They have no true banker authority whatever in the pre-industrial and pre-1929 sense—that is, that the banker was a man of vast wealth who loaned his personal funds to industry and government. Today’s vice-president ‘‘bankers’’ can compete for one another’s bank depositors so that they can have more vice-presidents in their respective banks, but in the end they can function as bankers only when they loan not their own monies, but their depositors’ monies. And this loaning can be arranged, not at the bankers’ discretion in articulation of his economic acumen, but only when Federal regulations are closely observed. So much equity has to be pledged that if the loan is not paid, the bank realizes a profit by government fiat. In the end the government, which is the people, guarantees the whole banking transaction to itself—the people. Every time it shifts the same people’s credit integers in and out of Federal and industrial accounts, it charges up enough interest to fund many other categories of seriously invented jobs. All of these services and in-and-out charges require large numbers of government bureaucrats to police them. In a complex game of intricate self-kidding and synthetic bias, which we call ‘‘capitalism,’’ we, as our government through government ‘‘orders’’ to industry, as hidden subsidy have, since 1933’s total unemployment and bank moratorium, put sixty-nine million people on the consumer rolls by pure but hidden socialist strategy.
30 We have subsidized our entire economy through bankable initiation of all prime capital undertakings of the accruing new capabilities potential, as exclusively articulated by our military servants under the negative political mandate of future defense which is always politically expedient to all parties. We pour in at the top end of the economic irrigation machine ninety billion dollars for internal and external government expenditures. We allow an average of ten per cent subsidized profit on the external industrial corporation prime-contractor expenditures which is distributable in pseudo ‘‘earned’’ dividends to give purchasing power to another large population category called stockholders, a form of aristocratic doleship. Finally we take out our ninety billion in taxes at the bottom of the irrigation system and send it around again.
31 Each time this initiated credit is circulated, however, it allows industrial metabolics to grow far greater and more precise capabilities out of its intellectually multiplied continuous man comprehension, which objective intellectual capability augmentation is the invisibly and uniquely multiplying synergetic increment exclusively responsible for the swiftly amplifying regeneration of the industrial world’s common wealth.
32 The Russians use the same political expediency to warrant initiation of their evolutionary participation in the comprehensive acceleration of industrial evolution. Russia, too, is going quickly toward automation. The meaning of Marx’s workers will soon have to be looked up in the Russian dictionaries, its function will be so obsolete. And Russia, too, goes on with its own selfkidding by pretending that socialism and Marxism are exclusively responsible for its newly won success, whereas their success is the direct result of Stalin’s dictatorial contracture with the Western world’s industries to provide Russia with the prime components of industrialization’s regenerative tooling.
33 I am not at all a reformer or at all against anything. I am not against either America’s or Russia’s legendary pretenses. I am all for the human dignity pageants and individual self-satisfaction of participation in the commonwealth building of continuous man.
34 I am, however, convinced that our world-around problems will become more excruciating until world man and his leaders, both industrial and political, are educated to realize that what we are going to have to do to make the world work is to get all of humanity onto the consumer-implementing payroll in progressively greater magnitude in direct proportion to the swiftly evoluting, increased capability of world-integrated productivity. I hope I have identified the comprehensive rationality by which we may be guided into the comprehensive separating-out of the function of consumer funding from its now lethally parasitic imposition upon and almost invisible insinuations within each and every important technical invention gain and its collateral functions.
35 The increase of consumer buying capability is historically essential, but it is economic suicide to superimpose costs where they do not belong and thus falsify fundamental economic data.
36 For instance, my comprehensive anticipatory design science has effectively realized the anticipatory concentration of all design skills into the industrial laboratory, where most favorably controlled field conditions surround the prototyping gestations. From the exquisitely controlled prototyping gestations emerge the scientifically tooled capabilities of automated mass production, which sends products ready-to-operate reliably under generally uncontrolled conditions, whose perversities are rendered innocuous by the anticipatory scientific capabilities fully designed into total industrial undertaking.
37 Built into the products are the immediately realizable capabilities of men to deal adequately and satisfactorily with the theretofore hostile conditions of Nature. The umbrella must, however, be openable by the user. If we have to have an umbrella opener’s labor organization to open our umbrellas for us, just in order to get more consumers on the credit ledgers, we will all soon be wet. If we have to have a shirt button-upper’s labor union to button our shirts in order to distribute consumer buying power, we will all soon lose all our shirts. If we have to have boilermakers open up and button up our buildings under noncontrolled rain and sun conditions, we are soon going to have to do without buddings.
38 Class warfare may force invention of invisible architecture. This would be a way in which men could go anywhere about the Tropics, the Arctic, the sea bottoms, and the air and airless sky without getting too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, or too uncomfortably or too injuriously anything. Quite a trick but it’s in the works. It was suggested almost a half century ago by an as yet little-known, but truly great new-era architect, Knud Lonberg-Holm, a Viking-American who has spent his life searching, researching and teaching industrial research departments how to anticipatorily realize the integratable myriad of evoluting industrially produceable building products which have been progressively tooled into production over the last one third of a century. Thereafter, these building products were commercially catalogued, also under his guidance of general architectural and engineering office catalogue files which have become generally available for the last three decades’ architects’ general design-use which made possible what has become visibly recognizable as modern architecture—no one of whose shiny, nonrusting, neatly fitting and functioning parts were fashioned by craftsmen. Lonberg-Holm is the twentieth-century counterpart of the anonymous architects of the Gothic and Renaissance eras.
39 Returning from that long overdue digression of recognition— we see ourselves backing further into our future by adopting laws prohibiting any individuals from driving their own automobiles unless the other front seat is occupied by a member of the motorman’s, truckdriver’s, and conductor’s union. This could mean forty million more jobs and enormous buying power. But we would all prefer to pay the professional ‘‘drivers’’ to stay out of our cars, though of course the cost of operation would be prohibitive either way. And that kind of nonsense goes on in the ‘‘building’’ arts, approximately without knowledge of the public, and in utter frustration of the peaceful advance of democracy’s fundamental wealth while fifty-six per cent of humanity is in need.
40 Why does the public not know of the ineconomy in the building arts? Because the costs are underwritten, deferred and hidden by the government’s socialized subsidy of the uneconomic prototypes through mortgaged guaranteeing, and thirty-year amortization of the astronomical costs of homes, whose costs might otherwise be felt personally by the public.
41 We are dealing with a comprehensive industrial accounting problem that has been misconceived of as a political class system problem. We are dealing with a mistaken inferiority complex identity. The problem is now for the first time in history subject to complete solution by comprehensive anticipatory design science in a way utterly painless to men and utterly non-reminiscent, ergo, nonarticulative of antipathetically conditioned reflexes.
42 All around there exist important reflex inertias which must be avoided by competent design rather than treated curatively with educational and political reforms. Political reform must be anticipatorily eliminated to die off altogether through the self-atrophy of obsolescence.
43 It is for all the foregoing reasons of complete detour of geographically concentrated negative inertias, reflexes, codes and mores that I myself started in 1927 to undertake the then seemingly preposterous air-deliverability of entirely tool-skill designed and tool-skill fabricated large buildings to remote parts of earth to be spontaneously installable and openable by entirely unskilled peoples within the extraordinarily critical time limits of predictably favorable conditions in the otherwise hostile frontiers. In 1927 I designed a ten-deck, air-deliverable apartment house for the Arctic. In 1960, my company, Synergetics, Inc., delivered two one-hundred-and-fourteen-foot-in-diameter ‘‘quarter-acre’’ floorspace geodesic domes to the Ford Motor Company, who by one helicopter each fly them to sites fully erected—where they are used as Ford tractor exhibition pavilions. The Ford Company has succeeded in eliminating a myriad of debilitating practices.
44 Much of the D.E.W. Line radome installation was accomplished by Eskimos. All of the geodesic radomes’ installations averaged fourteen hours at their Arctic sites. The predictable limit of favorable hours was twenty. The same domes erected for testing on Long Island and Cambridge took a week each. The same dome in New York’s Museum of Modem Art garden took three weeks using ‘‘skilled’’ union labor.
45 Luckily, in 1927 I had cast my lot with proving the economic feasibility of comprehensive anticipatory design science, as applied to the building arts, by priority of experiment in the Arctic and in remote foreign countries. I detoured so-called civilization.
46 When Sputnik suddenly displaced the man-flown airplane as the world’s number one weapon of furthest, swiftest, greatest hitting power, the total world nations’ capital investment in subsidy of the establishment and development of the comprehensive aeronautical realm of industry stood at $2,500,000,000,000, approximately, in contradistinction to the $580,000,000,000 life insurance bet against themselves by America’s seven per cent of the world population which $580 billion capital bet by its life insurance buyers now constitutes the only free enterprise venture capital, unwittingly underwritten by mutual savings investors, and is in ludicrous contrast to the meager $40,000,000,000 worth of the world’s total gold employed as prime capital by yesterday’s ‘‘bankers.’’ Most of the gold is owned by governments, primarily the U.S.A.
47 The British aircraft industry, in frank realization of their secondary position in any subsidized amelioration of the aeronautical industry’s dilemma, has made a critical reconnaissance of their economic plight and states that the all-nations’ total forward rocketry undertakings, compounded with all-nations’ forward jet transport in accelerating freight and passenger accommodation, can employ but ten per cent of the world’s present total aeronautical industry’s fundamental production and evolutionary support capability. In passing, it is to be noted that three fourths of San Diego, California’s, million are engaged in the aeronautical industry. Swift allocations by Western governments of additional rocketry undertakings and collateral studies will have to stem the grave unemployment in San Diego due to this unique preponderance of absolute aeronautical industrialization and its promised letdown. Building unneeded air power is expensive make-do.
48 Our American legendary success in seeming avoidance of socialism, deceptively occasioned by our extraordinary and complicated ecopolitical game-playing, in the economic roles and costumes of pre-industrial history, plus our powerful government lobbying capability in the sustenance of the llegendary ecopolitical theatricals, altogether prevent the clear-cut statement that what hit America at the time of Sputnik was not a mild recession from yesterday’s success patterns, controllable by soft and hard credit modulations, but was simply the sudden kicking out of the master’s house of his fifty-year subsidized air industry mistress, and consequent lay-off of her vast retinue of first, second, and third-hand accomplices.
49 Every action must have its reaction; every priority must have its counterpart—anti-priority. While the aeronautical industry enjoyed its fifty-year supreme economic priority, as it went from utter scarcity to a surprising state of full-blown abundance of production capability, the uttermost economic anti-priority went to the housing and building arts which have for ages past occupied the cellars of economic advantage. In wartime it has always been considered utterly immoral to invest any of our technical and resource capability in furthering the home nestmaking, while sending our boys to the front. The entire housing arts represent, no matter how superficially glamorous, the all-time make-do with the leftovers of economically desirable resources—dirt and trees.
50 Obviously, the world aeronautical industry capability has now boiled over at the top, and we are about to witness the application of continuous man and all his wisdom and experienced memory to his historically deferred anti-priority problem for which I have invented the word livingry in contradistinction to weaponry. The prime focus of man’s most highly developed capability is being transferred historically from destructive weaponry to constructive livingry.
51 I think we will see a world trend to establishment of rental service industry of livingry in enormous magnification of the telephone service precedent. Such a livingry service will then transfer the function of design evolution entirely into the laboratory. The design evolution will include all the functions of installation, maintenance, removal and reinstallation. The progressive problems hitherto relegated to social reforms by over-locally preoccupied exploitations will be progressively inhibited by competent anticipatory design science within the service instrumentations.
52 We will stop having the customers diagnose themselves, telling the professional doctors what it is they need, which is the as-yet-illogically-persistent case in the ignorant craft preoccupations of the building world.
53 When I compound what I learned reflexively from the Russian engineers’ and architects’ questioning of me, with my thirty-year study of Russian planning (in the light of my own very different economic strategy), my intuition tells me that the Russians, unembarrassed by lobbies to defend the enormous, relatively ignorant systems of solution of anti-priority building and building material problems, are right now in the process of converting their high aeronautical tool-up’s advance industrial capability and large production capacity directly to livingry, to be first installed in remote places such as their vast Arctic frontiers. I think the Russians will be delivering the livingry equipment and environment-controlled structures of a city of ten thousand in a one-day air drop within the next five years.
54 Because of this historical reorientation of highest priority capability from weaponry to livingry, I am sure that Khrushchev is going to agree to much disarmament. I think you can safely say that this major shift of weaponry to livingry production is at the back of all his present strategy. Its interpretation in the United States and Europe as exclusively for propaganda is erroneous. It has favorable incidental by-products as propaganda favoring Russia’s comprehensive attitudes. Khrushchev is glad to have his adversaries think of his desire for disarmament as constituting only propaganda, for this will give him just so much of an advance start in capturing consumers for his conversion of weaponry to livingry.
55 Khrushchev’s present strategy started with his 1958 boast that by 1970 Russians would be enjoying a higher standard of living than that known by any other people at any other time in history. He certainly must have had in mind an entirely different economic strategy than that of just catching up to American standards, tastes and cultural proclivities, which do not always suit Russian and Oriental aspirations in any neat way.
56 Russian effectiveness in courting the favor of the majority of humanity, which is as yet scratching along unsuccessfully, will be enormously advantaged by Russia’s converting its aircraft production capability to production of air-deliverable livingry. President Eisenhower’s December, 1959, statement on departure for his trip to India was that sixty per cent of humanity is lethally ill-housed, ill-fed and ill-clothed. This corroborated my 1952 New York Times published figure of forty per cent of the world’s population having attained industrial have-ness status. My curve of world industrialization passes through the fifty per cent point in 1970, which could only be realized by Russia’s ten per cent of the world’s population being shifted over to the industrial have-ness column, which it was not in 1952.
57 The next decade will see the industrial equation as employed on our side of the Iron Curtain forced to compete in livingry at a more advanced state of scientific capability than has yet been applied even to weaponry or rocketry.
58 These points are all indispensable and integral factors of the synergetic behavior of total world industry—synergetic because it is utterly unpredicted by behavior of any of its components.
59 To provide this leadership we will have to include helicopter delivery of whole structures which belong to the service company operating on service industry right-of-way franchises privately negotiated with various governments of the world. Such service will altogether circumvent local ways and means contractual inertia’s. In contrast to U.S.A.’s big-industry strategy we will have to avoid the pitfall of exploiting the relatively low foreign wage scales vitiating foreign industrial consumers potential buying capabilities. We will have to act as swiftly as possible to adopt the highest of American wage scales in the relatively few industrial functions of an automated service industry’s controlled condition products, thus increasing as swiftly as is permitted by the law of industrialization the establishment of increased numbers of advanced livingry consumers on an around-the-world basis.
60 We will also have to incorporate the extendably-autonomous, energy-exchanging, metabolical-mechanisms (that is, food conditioning and sanitary facilities) packages within our air-delivered environment-control structures. I am now working with a major industrial corporation on the development of such a package, which will be to the geodesic dome what the electronic relay core is to its environment-controlling tube.
61 These autonomous packages will be as jet power plants are to jet air frames, and their supply will emanate from tire past suppliers of these respective categories in the aeronautical manufacturing industry.
62 These autonomous facilities and helicopter transport will make possible the initiation of utterly new civil centers requiring neither sewage, water nor power mains. This independence of mains will permit overnight air dropping of complete towns at new sites, together with earth-moving equipment and general employment of the typical logistical technology of advanced U.S. Marine Corps air bases.
63 We will also have to design our comprehensive economic strategy in the establishment of a world-around service industry of livingry, in view of the fact that a world-around livingry service can and should be organized outside the United States. Because there are no anti-trust laws governing the high seas which surround three fourths of the earth’s surface, comprehensive capital facility can be subscribed to by all of major U.S. industry, probably of sufficient magnitude to cope with the safe launching of what will soon be the largest chapter of industrialization of all history.
64 Though anti-trust laws within the United States would not have permitted in 1917 the comprehensive underwriting of the new upcoming world aeronautical services industry, it is improbable that if the anti-trust laws had not existed, the integrated capital capability of the United States would, at that time, have had the vision to undertake and sustain the evolutionary development of the trillion dollar aeronautical undertaking. Certainly the forty billion dollars worth of gold capital would have been utterly inadequate. The economic strategy thoughts of those days linked wealth exclusively to a gold monetary capital. It also held changes to be abnormal and abhorrent to the enjoyment of already established industrial capabilities.
65 Science paces technology, technology paces industry, industry paces social economics, social economics paces political expediency and popular educational conceptioning. At the outset of the twentieth century the concept of change as normal to universal evolution displaced Newton’s classical concept of the static as normal, quoting from Newton’s first law of motion, ‘‘A body persists in a state of rest (or in a line of motion) except as affected by other bodies.’’ Einstein saw that all bodies were always being affected by other bodies; ergo, motion was normal. Newton’s ‘‘state of rest’’ became the special condition of a ‘‘chip on the shoulder,’’ where two bodies happened to be in congruent motion.
66 It took the same half century that developed the aeronautical industry, and that very aeronautical industry itself and its militarily required accelerating evolution of transformation, to bring home Einstein’s relativity to social economics.
67 The German Luftwaffe of World War II taught the Allied air strategists by accelerating design change that change was normal. The American mass production industry of Detroit, to which change orders were anathema, which had tried to freeze up mass production tooling of both bomber and fighter planes and which was relying strictly on mass production to offset any gains by the other fellow of superior design, had not counted on the fact that American democracy’s representatives would not tolerate the mass slaughter of their most capable youth in the inadequate frozen mass production Flying Fortresses and Curtiss-Wright fighters.
68 The initiative in the production of airplanes and their design had to be shifted west of the Mississippi allowing the Detroit metal smashers to continue their contracts. Their obsolete planes were flown from the end of the production line to Kansas fields for graveyard storage.
69 The aeronautical manufacturing centers of Kansas, Texas and California then took over. Between the first and the hundredth B-29, over one million engineering design change orders in production tooling were written. Detroit would have fired five thousand men if one of those change orders were written. West of the Mississippi the aeronautical phase of world industry for the first time realized Einstein’s conceptioning. They did not think of Einstein, but they were proving Einstein right. To the grand strategists of aeronautical production and to the legal fraternity that began to write the new contracts, there dawned the irrevocable awareness that change is normal.
70 Then the World War II premiership of the aeronautical industry in the comprehensive defense economics imposed change as normal upon the whole frontier of world economics. With this new great lesson learned, it will be essential that our world-around livingry service assumes in its now rejoined integrated capital capability that change is normal.
71 As the Bell Laboratories find it necessary to inaugurate new instrumentation throughout its network, the changes are scientifically fed into the continually realigning and regeneratively evoluting service. Change is normal to them. They anticipate it scientifically.
72 It is the factor of change as normal that is going to require that the world-around livingry industry be managed on a rental basis so that the consumers need not find themselves harnessed with progressively obsoleting ‘‘owned’’ equipment. Such a rental service can then improve at an evolutionary rate scientifically synchronized with the comprehensive capability advance. The service return when prior purchase is nonimposed will be so enormous as to represent very high annual profit as ratioed to comprehensive capital underwriting.
73 You must remember that the comprehensive capital underwriting is today not gold but tooled up capability—tooled capability capacity over and above that necessary to the maintenance of already established standards. Investible industrial capital is surplus capability capacity, as modified by most recently accreditable scientific laboratory gains in mechanical efficiency potential. During World War II, corporations with large amounts of money frequently found that money was no longer the key to the industrial equation. What was needed over and above money was a U.S. government high priority certificate. Priorities meant access to the industrial capacity capability, and if a company had the right industrial capacity capability, it did not need money. It got the order and that was as financable as a wild duck is eatable. Anybody will provide the salt and pepper which is the accounting function of money, all done in a big way with entirely abstract ‘‘credit of capability.’’ This was the acid test which forever divorced the concept of capital from its historical wedlock with gold or any other metallic or raw realty base.
74 Our accounting system is based unrealistically on the nonfunctioning metallic, or intrinsic, dollar as the measure of wealth. Realistic accounting would be predicated upon the metals extracted from the ground and processed into tools, and the tools organized in a comprehensive industrial network. And the industrial network of tools is hooked up to the world’s energetic metabolic system shunted into valvable articulation of the tooling. This is the real wealth of organized technical advantage capability which was employed by Germany after World War I when all monies were taken away from it. This organized industrial capability wealth was the wealth that was employed by Russia when it had no metallic money. This was the wealth that was employed by fascist Italy in the late 1920’s and 1930’s. The 30’s saw all nations of the world go off the gold standard because of its complete inadequacy to implement the new magnitudes of the wealth transactions generated by the new realistic industrial capability wealth.
75 Industrialization ran into hundreds of billions of dollars whereas the total gold supply of the world amounted to approximately forty billion. In the late 1920’s, when all the world nations were going over to the new industrial capability wealth and America was the creditor nation of the world, all the gold ended up in the United States and was stored in the Kentucky mountains at Fort Knox. World War II products and ignorance of wealth accounting saw the United States insisting on going back into gold payments. World War II industrial capabilities of Europe and the Orient saw the United States balancing its annual trading by shipping gold back into the world accounting system. Now as the foreign nations begin to take the world trading advantage away from the United States through lower wage scales and resulting lower pricing, the short-sighted accounting throwback will see the United States losing its position in world economics at a rapid rate. Major American industry is able to move out of the United States into its many acquired proprietorships of foreign manufacturing establishments, whose automobile production, for instance, has successfully invaded the American manner. This move of American industry out of the United States to enjoy the lower wage scales of the foreign countries and the superior technical and product exploitation is analogous to the wholesale abandonment of New England by the cotton manufacturing industry, when it moved into the South in order to institute its partial automation. Our approach to the new one-town world economic accounting is completely fogged with our mistaken concept that the rest of the world is trying to leech us of our economic advantage, and our ostrich theory that ‘‘minding our own business and letting the rest of the world tag along’’ will make for continuous prosperity is utterly fallacious. Our continuing emphasis on weaponry and de-emphasis of livingry or exploitation of our economic advantage by aping a Tudor, Georgian, or Victorian social mores are manifestations of our need for focusing the best minds of young America on the major patterns now emergent. We must provide the most powerful tools that can be devised for man’s planning of his own future, as implemented to the fullest extent permitted by Nature and Nature’s second derivative—continuous man’s cumulative undertakings accomplished in world industrial network capability. It would be the greatest blunder of all time if at the moment man acquired the tools for his success he underplanned himself into great pain or failure because of myopic and political anarchies.
76 I have become disciplined through my comprehensive anticipatory design science explorations in the extraction of the minimum-maximum family of factors governing the successful design of comprehensive industrial enterprise initiations. I first generalized the laws governing comprehensive naval and aeronautical logistics and ballistics controls. I have been able to interpolate the mathematical formulations governing the target delivery of the greatest energetic hitting power the greatest distance in the shortest time from this problem of weaponry systems to the problem of livingry systems in such a manner that I am confident that we are now possessed of the scientific capability of delivering the most livingry to the comprehensive consumer target around the world in a satisfactorily operating manner in the shortest possible time.