BUCKY FULLER’S NOTEBOOK

BUCKY FULLER’S NOTEBOOK

2

3By Russell Davenport

4 An architect is a man who works in wood, brick, steel, and other materials that do not visibly move when they are put together. That is, his medium is static. Richard Buckminster Fuller has practiced architecture in this conventional sense, but it is not what he really means when he talks about ‘‘architecture.’’ His field, as he himself described it, is the architecture of things in motion. Bucky’s structures, or concepts, are built of motion—the motion of life, of wheels and other waves, of the Gulf Stream, of the earth, of electrons and civilizations, of stars and students. His attempt is not to make a static object appear dynamic through artistic design. His constant effort is rather to seize, for one fleeting static moment, the dynamics of the universe.

5 The items extracted from Bucky’s Dymaxion Notebook and his other writings (chiefly Nine Chains to the Moon, Lippincott, 1933) are such moments. They are brief glimpses—some important, some trivial—of a moving universe composed of powerful variables. Most of the selections are purely factual; but some are frankly bold estimates of things almost immeasurable, rough guesses that send shafts of light into the darkness of conventionalized thinking. Our little collection is not intended to add up into a significant whole, for indeed that ‘‘whole’’ is not yet entirely apparent even to Buckminster Fuller. For the Fuller universe is still in the process of growth and formation. But if these assorted guesses and facts can suggest a new type of thinking, a new dynamics of human progress, they will have served their purpose.

6 All this may sound somewhat formidable. The fact is, however, that Mr. Fuller is anything but a formidable character. He is as lovable as a Teddy Bear. No one ever calls him ‘‘Mister’’ for long—or Buckminster, or Richard. Bucky is just about right. With his round face and his eager brown eyes peering out at you from strong glasses, he looks like a rather large gnome—an affable genie, such as might appear if you rubbed Aladdin’s Lamp. A little on the stout side nowadays (though he has lost twenty pounds by giving up all forms of alcohol for the duration of the war), he is nevertheless strong and stockily built. Which is perhaps why he is such a good sailor. Bucky is a hardened sailing yachtsman, of the deep sea variety, and is never so happy as when he is buffeting a big sea with a wheel—or better, a tiller—in his hand.

7 He was born in Boston in 1895, the son of an old New England family and great-nephew of the illustrious Margaret Fuller, friend of Emerson. He went to Harvard, and in World War I served in the Navy as Ensign and Lieutenant U.S.N. In 1928 he coined a new word—Dymaxion—to describe his own basic approach to human progress and invention. At his own factory in Bridgeport he designed and built the first Dymaxion car, and succeeded in producing three before his funds ran out. This car, with its engine in the back and a single rear wheel (used for steering), was the basis of our present ideas about the automobile of the future, years ahead of anything of its kind. Then came the Dymaxion House, the most radical feature of which was that it was suspended from a pole-like structure rather than being set on a foundation. Just before Pearl Harbor, Mr. Fuller had simplified this house to such a point that the Dymaxion Deployment Unit could be mass-produced and erected for $700, and completely furnished for another $700. He has also designed a complete bathroom which can be mass-produced and set into any house for about $800. You would find him expert on copper, the stock market, credit, alloys, the Einstein theory, solid geometry, physics, and especially the physics of motion. And needless to say, loving boats, he has designed them.

8 In his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Thomas Gray spoke of ‘‘mute inglorious Miltons’’ who might be buried there. If there is anything mute or inglorious about Bucky Fuller—and our civilization is still too young to be sure—it would be as a Leonardo da Vinci. His mind has the scope and daring of Leonardo, who happens to be known to the ages for his painting, but who was really a scientist and a prophet. Buckminster Fuller does not paint. He does, however, write poetry. The conventionalized literary critics might object to his versification, just as conventionalized architects object to his Dymaxion House. But the truth is he is not a poet in words, he is a poet in science.

9 He is in fact the prophet of an utterly new age—the age of scientific man—the age in which the human race, highly educated to the basic principles of science, will live functionally, and work and govern itself functionally, in accordance with the aims that it wishes to achieve. This is the age that follows logically from the industrial revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the infinite expansion by science of man’s horizon, which has led to such confusion and bewilderment as has characterized the last decade. It is the age when men will seek to end forever the misery of unemployment, ignorance, frustration, famine, and maybe even war. It is the fashion to say that such an age is impossibly remote. According to Bucky Fuller’s lights it is just at hand. Here we have some of the gleanings of this synergetic oracle from Bear Island, Maine.

1.

In two decades, from 1920 to 1940, the productivity of agriculture in the wheat belt increased from .14 acres per man hour to .24 acres per man hour, or nearly 100 per cent. In the same two decades, college enrollment more than tripled, from 460,000 to 1,400,000. The number of scientific employees in industry quintupled from 6 to 32 per 100,000 population. The power of the microscope, which enables man to study the microcosm, increased ten-fold, from 3,600 magnifications to 40,000 magnifications. And the number of telephone messages that could be carried on one double circuit increased 40 times from 12 to 480.

2.

The pipelines of the United States carry twice as much tonnage as all the motor trucks put together.

3.

The total surface of all the bearings in the world, used in industry, the automobile, and all moving parts, is about 1,000 square miles.

4.

The power loss to the U. S. due to the reciprocal friction of these mechanical surfaces is about 94 per cent of the total national energy income in fuels and water power. So we are as yet far from efficient.

5.

There are more than 10,000 alloyed metals in current industrial use. There were but a handful of alloys before World War I.

6.

In the decade from 1925 to 1935 the United States consumed 256,000,000 tons of steel scrap as against only 200,- 000,000 tons of new iron ore.

7.

Only 15 per cent of all copper ever produced in the world has been lost. The remainder—27,000,000 tons—is all in use.

8.

This basic pile of copper had made a long journey through the entire evolution of industries, from copper pots, to copper fittings for sailboats, to steamships, to railroads, to electric utilities, to airplanes, to industrial electronics.

9.

A worker can develop 1057 kwh (kilowatt hours) of work a day. At the present average wage rate in Little Steel, this costs about $8. On the other hand, a kwh developed by a dynamo in the electric power industry costs $.006, when produced from fuels, or approximately $.003 when produced hydraulically. Paid at this rate an American worker would earn from $.0014 to $.0028 per day. This is 1/15 the going rate of 2i/>c to 5c a day for manual labor in many parts of China.

10.

There are many $50,000-a-year executives in the United States. If they were paid at the hydraulic power rate, each would have to develop 16,500,000 kwh per annum, or the equivalent of a 2,000 kw hydro-electric turbo-generator running 24 hours a day for a full year.

11.

The said $50,000 executive is paid at a rate which assumes that he is the equivalent of four 1,000-horsepower motors powering a Boeing Flying Fortress when turning up at full roaring speed in a non-stop flight of 110 trips around the world at the equator within one year.

12.

The effect of industrialization is to make the world man lives in increasingly ephemeral—i.e. less mass. Industrial man continually does more with less, always approaching (but never reaching) the goal of doing everything with nothing.

13.

Thus, a small brick Colonial-type house weighs about 200 tons, whereas a prefabricated wallboard house weighs only 25 tons. Future four-room houses, using alloys, will weigh as little as one ton, will thus be easily air deliverable and transportable.

14.

The ‘‘ephemeralization’’ of motive power has taken place under our eyes. A freight locomotive weighs 100 pounds per horsepower delivered at the track. An automobile engine weighs 13 pounds per horsepower. Modem aviation engines deliver more than one horsepower for every pound of materials used.

15.

The measure of a society’s industrial advancement is not dollars, but its use (consumption) of energy. In 1939, the last measurable year, the United States consumed enough energy (from mineral fuels and water power) to produce 746 quadrillion foot-pounds of work.

16.

It is estimated that one man, besides carrying his own weight, can do 150,000 foot-pounds of work in an eight-hour day, a total of 37,500,000 foot-pounds per year.

17.

Reduced to human terms, the U. S. consumption of energy, therefore, would provide the equivalent of the work of 20,000,000,000 human slaves. It is thus correct to say that our industrial plant provides us with that many mechanical slaves, or 153 slaves for each adult man and woman. In addition, of course, the inanimate slaves are more serviceable than human slaves would be.

18.

This exceeds by far the per capita slave-power of even the Roman Empire. By contrast, in 1939, Great Britain had only 41 slaves per capita, France only 35, Germany only 27, Africa only 5, and Asia (without Japan and China) virtually none at all. The average for the entire world, including the United States, was only 17. Since then, of course, Germany’s mechanical slave power has greatly increased. The figure shows how efficiently she uses her slave power for war, and how inefficiently we have as yet used ours.

19.

Nevertheless, it is clear that when a military victory can be won, the demonstrated ability of our society to create and harness mechanical slaves for the use of the common man will open the way to a new era in which these slaves will be multiplied and the common man emancipated.

10 The revolution has come—

11 set on fire from the top.

12 Let it burn swiftly.

13 Neither the branches, trunk, nor roots will be endangered;

14 only last year’s leaves and

15 the parasite bearded moss and orchids

16 will not be there

17 when the next Spring brings fresh growth and free standing flowers.

18 Here is God’s purpose—

19 for God, to me it seems, is a verb—

20 not a noun,

21 proper or improper;

22 is articulation,

23 not the art, objective or subjective;

24 is loving,

25 not the abstraction ‘‘Love’’ commanded or entreated;

26 is knowledge dynamic,

27 not legislative code,

28 not proclamation law,

29 not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.

30 Yes, God is a verb,

31 the most active,

32 connoting the vast harmonic

33 reordering of the universe

34 from unleashed chaos of energy.