12 Epilogue
6 I have been asked: ‘‘What would you do if you were building commissioner of the U.S.A. or even of the world?’’
7 I would resign!
8 It is popularly assumed that democracy’s checks and balances—its political and economic institutions—frustrate logical housing solutions.
9 Many think that housing of man can be accomplished only through a powerful political mandate.
10 They overlook the far vaster prerogatives of the inventor. The inventor has natural and immediate access to all the potentials of the universe. Edison, Bell, Marconi, and the Wrights needed no licenses from anyone to light the night, to shrink the earth and interlink all of humanity.
11 Yesterday’s capitalists were naturally eager to prolong the earnings of profitable machinery investments. They disliked inventors. Inventors made their going machines obsolete. Businessmen were powerful enough to persuade society that inventors were screwballs. All that is changing. Businessmen now find change profitable. Inventors are becoming respectable.
12 Inventors pay no attention to man-made laws—pay attention only to the physical laws which alone govern what man ultimately may do in universe. If humanity succeeds in becoming a total success it will have been initiated by the Wright- and Bell-type inventions and not by the always debilitating and often lethal biases of politics.
13 All humans are born inventors. As children we invent games until grownups persuade us that our inventing is futile and that we should conform with yesterday’s seemingly proven but usually outworn inventions. But the inventiveness remains latent in us all.
14 Inventors may employ man’s innate capability to think effectively in cosmic terms. As inventor I now ask the cosmic questions. ‘‘Is man needed in the universe?’’ ‘‘Does he have a universal function?’’ ‘‘If he is essential what needs to be invented to improve his functioning?’’ ‘‘What are the largest overall trends of human evolution that need accommodations?’’ If we can answer such questions we will know what to do about housing man on earth or anywhere else.
15 My answers to the first two questions are that man is needed to employ his mind to put things in order in the areas of universal events in which he finds himself existing. Physical universe is forever expanding and multiplying in ever more disorderly ways. This is called entropy. Biological life is forever sorting, selecting, compacting, and producing more orderly chemical substances. This is called antientropy. Human mind is the most powerful selector and order formulator thus far evidenced in universe. Mind reduces billions of special case experiences recorded by brain to a few hundred generalized principles observed to be always operative in universe. The diffuse multiplication and expansion of physical universe is regeneratively countered by the contractive metaphysical capabilities of human intellect. The greatest of our scientists are those who discover additional interrelationships of the comprehensive order always embracing the only at first seeming disorders of the physical. The antientropic metaphysical takes the measure of and progressively commands the entropic physical. Intellect’s identification of E = MC2 is irreversible. Energy cannot identify intellect.
16 According to my speculative reconstruction, the ecological history of humanity around earth has two chapters. In chapter one, humanity—whose bodies are better than 90% water—lived in huts on rafts beside the rivers, lakes, bays, and oceans, for fish were the most plentiful food and the raft kept the humans safe from wild animals on shore. Some of these raft dwellers were blown out to sea and preponderantly eastward around earth’s surface, three-quarters of which is water.
17 In the second chapter of all history, men learned to sail to windward. Seeming to follow the sun, to which they intuitively attributed their metabolic regeneration, men worked westward fighting preponderantly into the headwind seas.
18 Approximately the whole of the last 10,000 years’ span of recorded history takes place during chapter two’s preponderantly westbound movement of humanity. In the Eurasian continent, where 76% of humanity exists, this westward motion finally funnels into Western Europe. As humanity converged it crossbred. Western Europe represented an amalgam of a myriad of previously isolated ‘‘nations.’’ The ‘‘nations’’ had developed through millenniums of inland inbred adaptations to unique local subsistence patterns. Forced to hibernate and cover up their skin those in the north became bleached and blond, those isolated in the hot equatorial sun darkened and blackened. Further inbreeding heightened the differentiations. Along the waterfronts the sailors crossbred and their skins became pink or swarthy.
19 Crossbreeding Europe, intermingling with the Angles and Jutes, poured into the British Isles to crossbreed even more. Westbound Indian Ocean people inhabited Africa in ever further westward, tribally inbreeding, ever-darkening skin, inland isolations. Then crossbreeding Western Europeans jumped westward across the Atlantic to the Americas. For 11 successive generations they have settled further westward. As they moved westward they crossbred acceleratingly, not only with their own westbound, chapter-two Eurasian stocks but with the Eurasian stock of chapter one, which had drifted eastward to the American continents between 30,000 and 10,000 years earlier. Into the North and South American continents and their islands there also flowed westward, both by slave trade and migration, a swiftly crossbreeding homogenization of the inbred African tribesmen.
20 In California, at the midpoint of the western shores of America, crossbreeding man has become so genetically integrated he frequently is unidentifiable with any of the earlier inbred national characteristics of Eurasia. Chapter two climaxes in the emergence of World Man.
21 In California we have an advanced phase of crossbred world man poised on an epochal springboard to fly both skyward and into the seas’ depths around the earth, thus to open chapter three of history—that of Universe Man.
22 From this pad, humanity is taking off—from its flounder-, snail-, and crablike previous existence, only around the two-dimensional bottom of the sky-ocean world—into its self-interference-free, four-dimensional occupancy of universe. Man will free himself from local time and geographical bases and will progressively discard encumbrances, giving all heavy, static, and economically nontransportable properties to libraries, museums, and universities or scrapping them as he is able to rent superior devices and services everywhere around the earth.
23 For the last decade many of the world’s responsible scientists have conceded for the first time in human history that Malthus was wrong and that it is physically feasible to employ the earth’s energy-income resources and recirculatable metals in such a manner as to make all of humanity physically, economically, and continuously successful within 20 years. This potential is the optimum we are interested in accomplishing.
24 The best way to solve world housing problems is first to see how many feasible solutions there are for emerging world man and how long each would take and what its logistics are. Having chosen the optimum solutions that may be progressively attained we may see how to get from here to there—from 1966 to Utopia.
25 The concept of cities as they now exist developed entirely before the existence or the thought of electricity or automobiles, or before any of the millions of inventions registered in the United States Patent Office had occurred. Cities developed as warehouse trading-posts. All warehousing is gone out of the modern city. Warehousing has become dynamic. The warehousing now is mostly on wheels, wings, or in ships. The cities were later used to house vast hordes of immigrants to work in the factories which were also centered in the cities. The factories have now been deployed from the cities along with the warehouses. Cities, as we know them, are obsolete in respect to all of yesterday’s functions. Trying to rebuild cities to make them accommodate the new needs of world man is like trying to reconstruct and improve a wrecked ship as the shipwreck rests upon the reef, pounded by the surf. The surf of technical obsolescence is invisible but is more inexorably powerful in its destruction than are pounding waves of the visible ocean.
26 Mankind is deploying all his physical activity, both the prosaic business of manufacturing and the recreational business (such as mountain and water skiing), completely out and away from cities. Mankind now converges in the old cities essentially for abstract, almost weightless, activity. Cities are great exchanges of abstract, weightless equities. Only a few cities can maintain the prestige of being the great cultural or stock exchange centers—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and a handful of others. These great cities will turn into great universities as automation replaces the humans functioning only as automatons.
27 Columbia University, New York University, Fordham University, and City College of New York are now the prime real-estate holders of New York City. All the cities which do not have the cultural and economic exchange prestige will become totally obsolete.
28 It is my lifelong resolve to accomplish tasks by reforming the mechanics of the physical environment rather than by trying to reform man. I’m confident that humanity is endowed with extraordinary capabilities.
29 Only about one-half of the total brain is now employed.
30 I surmise that our higher potentials are unrealized because inauspicious environmental conditions into which life has been born have heretofore frustrated realization of most of man’s potentials. We have learned much however through recent behavioral-science research, for instance that environmental conditions determine how much of the child’s total brain potential will blossom successfully into coordinate effectiveness. Fifty percent of a child’s total IQ capability has tried to blossom in coordinating competence by the time it is four years old, another 30% by seven, and 12% more by thirteen. At seventeen the blossoming is over. ‘‘Blossoming’’ frustrated by environmental conditions is usually lost.
31 Scientist Benjamin Bloom of the University of Chicago has demonstrated time and again that if you list the pertinent environmental conditions affecting a life throughout each of its first seventeen years, he can predict within one point of accuracy what any youth’s IQ will be at seventeen. He must know—year by year—what kind of home the child lives in, whether the parents are alcoholics, etc.
32 Bloom validates my commitment to progressively reforming only the environment. Politics undertakes only to reform man.
33 When I was young, I saw that society undertook to reduce automobile accidents by attempting to reform the drivers with arrests, fines, propaganda, behavioral exhortations, and laws. I saw that instead it was physically possible to prevent accidents by split-level crossings, banked turns, and divided highways. In 1906 people said, ‘‘You can’t do that, it would cost millions.’’ After trying unsuccessfully for 60 years to reform the drivers and alter a greater mortality on the U.S. highways than in World Wars I and II combined, society has at last undertaken to reform the environment with a $100 billion national highway program which has already safely multiplied the 1906 auto speeds fivefold while greatly reducing the accident rate per each accomplished passenger-mile.
34 Inventions alone have upped the numbers enjoying an advanced standard of living—one now superior to the best known to any sovereign before 1900—from 1% in 1900 to 40% of all humanity in 1966—despite continually decreasing metals per each human being. That same advantaged 40% are also living three times the number of years that man lived a century ago. All of that has come about through inventions which have induced appropriate social reforms but only as accessories after the facts of invention.
35 Take away all the inventions from humanity and within six months half of humanity will die of starvation and disease. Take away all the politicians and all political ideologies and leave all the inventions in operation and more will eat and prosper than now while racing on to take care of 100% of humanity.
36 My task as inventor is to employ the earth’s resources and energy income in such a way as to support all humanity while also enabling all people to enjoy the whole earth, all its historical artifacts and its beautiful places without one man interfering with the other, and without any man enjoying life around earth at the cost of another. Always the cost must be prepaid by design-science competence in modifying the environment.
37 Man now sprawls horizontally upon the land—uncheckable by planners who enjoy only the right to ‘‘suggest.’’ Visionless realtors, backed by government funds, operate indiscriminately in acquiring low-cost options on farmland upon which they install speculator houses. This continually reduces the productive land per capita and unbalances the ecological regeneration of life on earth. Despite the fact that the average American family now moves out of town every four years man is forced by the government-backed realtors to buy his home on 30-year mortgages which never get amortized. Man was designed with legs—not roots. He is destined to ever-increasing freedom of individually selected motions, articulated in preferred directions, as his spaceship, Earth, spinning its equator at 1,000 miles per hour, orbits the sun at one million miles per day, as all the while the quadrillions of atomic components of which man is composed intergyrate and transform at seven million miles per hour. Both man and universe are indeed complex aggregates of motion.
38 Over ten million humans have now traveled more than three million miles around their spinning orbiting spaceship Earth’s surface in contrast to the 30,000 miles per lifetime averaged by all humanity prior to the year 1900. So ignorantly, myopically, and staticly conceived and so obsolete is the whole housing art that its death led the Crash of 1929, since when its ghost script has been kept in rehearsal by U.S. government subsidy at a total underwriting cost to date of $200 billion.
39 If we take inventor heed of all the foregoing conditions and trends and if we build vertically, both outwardly and inwardly of the earth’s surface, we may use less land and return good soil lands to metabolic productivity. We can also install vertical habitations upon and within the three-quarters of the earth covered by water.
40 The Queen Elizabeth is a luxuriously comfortable abode either at sea or in port. She is a mobile city. She is shaped to get passengers across oceans in a hurry. If such floating cities didn’t have to speed and were designed only to be towed to an anchorage, having their occupants boated or flown to them, they might have an efficiently symmetrical shape. It is eminently feasible and economical to develop floatable organic cities of immense size.
41 It has been discovered also that it costs no more to go into the ground and remove earth than it does to go skyward. The great atom-war-anticipating government cave building of the last 20 years cost the same per cubic foot as building fireproof skyscrapers.
42 Frank Lloyd Wright designed a proposed one-mile-high tower building. His magnificent drawings excited people. But there was no engineering analysis to show whether his structure would stand under adverse conditions such as earthquakes and tornadoes. A one-mile tower is four times the height of the Empire State Building which is, as yet, in 1966, the tallest occupied building man has erected. However, in recent months calculations, only feasible by computers, have been made on a 21 ⁄ 2-mile-high tower habitation which will be approximately ten times the height of the Empire State. It is as high as Mount Fuji. The calculations show such a tower is physically feasible—assuming winds up to 600 m.p.h. and the tower members all encased in ice one foot thick in all directions as it is shaken by earthquakes. Though the project is feasible, the amount of steel required is formidable.
43 To visualize the various design-controlling conditions under which such a high building can be constructed pinch a camera tripod’s legs together in parallel. Take hold of the very bottom of the tripod in one hand and try to hold it vertically on the top of an automobile going at 70 miles an hour over rough terrain. But as we open the legs of the tripod, each time we spread them, the tripod gets steadier and steadier. This is the stabilizing effect obtained when tension stays are rigged from top to bottom on three sides of a mast, as with radio towers. It is equally effective to have the legs spread outwardly as in the Eiffel Tower. When the three legs are spread apart so that the length of the edges of their base triangle equals the length of each of the legs the tripod attains its maximum stability. This conformation of the tripod and its base triangle is that of the regular or equilateral tetrahedron. As the tripod’s legs go further apart than the regular tetrahedron, its top can support less and less load. Thus we learn that the most stable structure is the regular tetrahedron.
44 Following that design-science clue we find that a tetrahedronal city to house a million people is both technologically and economically feasible. Such a vertical-tetrahedronal city can be constructed with all of its 300,000 families each having balconied ‘‘outside’’ apartments of 2,000 square feet, i.e., 200 square meters, of floor space each. All of the organic machinery necessary to its operation will be housed inside the tetrahedron. It is found that such a one-million-passenger tetrahedronal city is so structurally efficient, and therefore so relatively light, that together with its hollow box-sectioned reinforced-concrete foundations it can float.
45 Such tetrahedronal floating cities would measure two miles to an edge. That is, each of the three base legs will be two miles long. This means that their reinforced-concrete, box-sectioned, and frequently partitioned bottom foundations will be 200 feet in depth and several hundreds of feet wide. Such a tetrahedronal floating city can be floated in a triangularly patterned canal. The structure can be assembled on the floating foundations. This will make the whole structure earthquake-proof. The whole city can be floated out into the ocean to any point and anchored. The depth of its foundation will go below the turbulence level of the seas so that the floating tetrahedronal island will be, in effect, a floating triangular atoll. Its two-mile-long ‘‘boat’’ foundation, on each of its three bottom edges, will constitute landing strips for jet airplanes. Its interior two-mile harbor will provide refuge for the largest and smallest ocean vessels. The total structural and mechanical materials involved in production of a number of such one-million-inhabitant tetrahedronal cities are within feasibility magnitude of the already operating steel and other metals manufacturing capabilities of any one company of the several major industrial nations around the earth.
46 Tetrahedra are geometrically unique in that they can be added to on any one of their four surfaces while increasing symmetrically in size. The tetrahedron city can grow symmetrically by adding to any one of its faces. Tetrahedronal cities will be symmetrically growable as are biological systems. They may start with a thousand occupants and grow to hold millions without changing overall shape though always providing each family with 2,000 square feet of floor space.
47 Withdrawal of materials from obsolete buildings on the land will permit the production of enough of these floating cities to support frequently spaced floating cities of various sizes around the oceans of the earth at distances negotiable by relatively small boats such as operate safely between Miami, Florida, and Nassau on the Bahama Islands.
48 At the present time, ocean cargoes must go from one country to another, e.g., from Buenos Aires to London because ships cannot dock beside one another on the ever-heaving ocean to transfer cargo. Because the depth of their ‘‘foundations’’ goes below wave turbulence, permitting dropped thresholds over which the deepest draft ships may pass, such floating tetrahedron cities will permit midocean cargo transferring within their harbors and therewith extraordinary increase of efficiency of the interdistribution of the world’s raw and finished products as well as of the passenger traffic. Such tetrahedronal cities floated upon the oceans will generate their own energy with atomic reactors whose by-product heat will be used to desalinate the city’s water supply. All major ships of the sea already desalinate their water.
49 Such ocean-passage-shortening habitats of ever-transient humanity will permit his individual flying, sailing, economic steppingstone travel around the whole earth in many directions. Three-quarters of the earth is covered by water. Man is clearly intent on penetrating those world-around ocean waters in every way to work both their ocean bottoms and their marine-life and chemistry resources.
50 When we double the length of an airplane fuselage, we increase its surface area by four and increase its volume by eight. This means that every time we double the length of a ship we eightfold its useful cargo and passenger space while only fourfolding its surface. The amount of surface of a ship governs its friction and drag. The larger the ship, the more economically its cargo may be carried. Yesterday’s limitation in relation to the bigness of airplanes was occasioned by their horizontal speeds requiring longer and longer landing strips. The new generation of large airplanes emerging, which will carry 700 to 1,000 passengers and ‘‘up,’’ are all equipped for vertical takeoff and landing, which does away altogether with the necessity for prepared landing strips. With the long landing-strip limitation removed, the size of the airplanes will multiply very rapidly.
51 To take advantage of the progressive economy gains of increasing size, leading airplane manufacturers already have airplanes on their engineering boards of a size adequate to carry 10,000 passengers or their equivalent in cargo. The 10,000-passenger ship has a length equivalent to that of the Empire State Building. The leading aircraft manufacturers realize that it will be possible to produce Empire State Building-size skyscrapers in horizontal position under factory-controlled conditions in mass-production jigs with mass-production tools.
52 Working on scaffolds, the Empire State Building was erected under approximately noncontrolled conditions of wind, rain, heat, and cold in the heart of New York City’s traffic. One man was killed for every floor of the Empire State Building’s 102 stories. No men should be killed in the production of the horizontal skyscraper in the airplane factory. Such skyscraper-size airplanes may then be taken from their factory and with vertical takeoffs and temporarily applied wings will be flown horizontally, with minimum effort, to any position around the world and horizontally landed. Using their vertical takeoff equipment they will be upended to serve as skyscrapers, anchored, and braced. Thus we see that whole cities can be flown to any location around the world and also removed in one day to another part of the world just as fleets of ships can come in to port and anchor in one day, or be off for other parts of the world.
53 In 1954, the United States Marine Corps helicopter-lifted, at 60 miles per hour, a geodesic dome large enough to house an American family. This dome had a floor area of 1,000 square feet. In 1955, the Marines air-delivered geodesic domes twice that size, from aircraft carriers to the land, fully skinned and ready to occupy, also at 60 miles per hour. In 1962, the Ford Motor Company helicopter lift delivered a geodesic dome covering a five-times-larger-again floor area of 10,000 square feet. The latest helicopters being built for Vietnam can air-deliver geodesic domes, at 60 miles per hour, large enough to cover an American football field including the end zones, the quarter-mile running track and side bleachers. By 1970, it will be possible to air-deliver geodesic domes large enough to cover complete baseball stadiums. By 1975, it would be possible to air-deliver geodesic domes able to cover small cities. It is now possible with a number of separate helicopter lifts to deliver large subassemblies to complete a geodesic dome large enough to cover a large city and do so within three months’ time.
54 Domed-over cities have extraordinary economic advantage. A two-mile diameter dome has been calculated to cover mid-Manhattan Island, spanning west to east at 42nd Street from the Hudson River to the East River, and spanning south to north from 22nd Street to 62nd Street.
55 When we wish to make a good air-cooled engine, we design it with many thin fins and spicules to carry away the heat by providing the greatest possible external surface area. The dome calculated for mid-Manhattan has a surface which is only 1/85 the total area of the buildings which it would cover. It would reduce the energy losses either in winter heating or summer cooling to 1/85 the present energy cost obviating snow removals. The cost saving in ten years would pay for the dome.
56 Domed cities are going to be essential to the occupation of the Arctic and the Antarctic. The Russians are already experimenting with them in the Arctic. The Canadians are also studying them. Mining of the great resources of the Antarctic will require domed-over cities. Domed-over cities will be used in desert areas to shield new growth from the sun while preventing wasteful evaporation of piped in, desalinized water. Gradually the success of new domed cities in remote places will bring about their use in covering old cities, particularly where antiquities are to be protected.
57 The domed-over cities will be so high and their structural members so delicate that their structural members will be approximately invisible. They will operate like a controlled cloud to bring shadow when shadow is desirable and bring sun when sun is desirable, always keeping out rain, snow, and storms as well as exterior industrial fumes, while collecting all the rainwater in reservoirs. The temperature inside the dome will be so stabilized that a semitropical atmosphere will exist. Inasmuch as there will be no rain or snow in the area, people will live in gardens, or upon garden-terrace skyscrapers needing only local screening for privacy.
58 There are already 5,000 geodesic domes in 50 countries around the world, many so light and strong as to have been air-delivered.
61 The great historical applications of science have been fundamentally underwritten by the munitions industries and the weapons programs of great nations. When scientists designed the cannon, they didn’t have to do anything about the man who fired the cannon. He could sleep beside the cannon and there was air for him to breathe; there was water near at hand, inclement temperature could be offset by clothing. Science produced bigger guns, floated by battleships. Men then could sleep on the deck. However, now that scientific warfare has gone into space, men who handle the warfaring apparatus in space find no air to breathe and no water or food waiting to drink and eat. For the first time in history, it has been necessary for science to upgrade environmental and metabolic regeneration conditions of man and to package them for economic delivery by rockets. To do so requires that science understand man as a process. When the astronauts go beyond the thermos-bottle-and-sandwich excursion limits and live for protracted periods on the moon or elsewhere in space all the regenerative conditions provided by the great biological interactions within the biosphere around earth’s surface will have to be reproduced in a miniaturized and capsulized human ecology which will emulate all the chemical and physical transactions necessary to sustain the process ‘‘Man.’’ All the apparatus to do so will be contained in a little black box weighing about 500 pounds and measuring about 20 cubic feet. Man in space with the little black box will be able to regenerate his many organic processes, needing only small annual additions to the recirculating chemistry and physical transforming.
62 The first men living comfortably in space, by virtue of the little black box, will be watched by TV through every moment of their time by continuously rotating audiences of two billion humans on Earth. The whole of humanity will be swiftly educated on the uses and success of living with an entirely new set of environmental control mechanics.
63 To be successful, the new apparatus will have to operate as unconsciously, on the astronauts’ part, as do all of humans’ internal organic processes. Men are only aware of their internal organisms when they get a pain in the tummy, or of their eyes when they get a cinder in them.
64 The little 500-pound black box will have to be produced on earth. The astronauts will not be asked to produce their own black box in space. Though the first black box will probably cost the United States and Russia, combined, well over $7 billion, it will be mass-reproducible on earth at around $2 per pound. This means that a $1,000 box could be rented profitably at $200 a year. Any individuals, and their families, could take their black box, costing approximately $18 a month, and go to any remote ‘‘dollar-a-year’’ or wilderness park lands part of earth—mountaintop or island—and enjoy essential services superior to those now available in any city complex because the sewers and energy lines will all be displaced and improved upon by the little autonomously recirculating black box.
65 The black box as domestic technology fallout from the space and munitions programs will constitute the first wholesale application of science directly to making man a physical and economic success anywhere in universe which of course includes ‘‘on earth.’’ It will swiftly divert firsthand application of science from almost exclusive development of weapons and their support and the latter’s heretofore almost inexorable nosedive toward self-extermination.
66 In 1927, a single-family dwelling machine was engineeringly proposed whose structure was similar to that of a wire wheel—laid horizontally on its side—with its axle elongated vertically to act as a supporting mast around which the circular dwelling was supported. This high carousellike dwelling machine had advanced living apparatus suitable for a family of six. It had a top sundeck above and an airplane hangar and garage below the dwelling zone. It was finally prototyped in the aircraft industry in 1944. It weighed only three tons which was approximately 3% of the weight of the equivalent facilities when provided by conventional structures and mechanics. It was popularly hailed. All that was lacking was the little black box to make this air-deliverable dwelling machine the world’s most luxurious, remotely installable, and economic family habitat.
69 A one-hundred-foot-diameter geodesic sphere weighing 3 tons encloses 7 tons of air. The air to structural weight ratio is 2 : 1. When we double the size so that geodesic sphere is 200 feet in diameter the weight of the structure goes up to 7 tons while the weight of the air goes up to 56 tons—the air to structure ratio changes to 8 : 1. When we double the size again to a 400-foot geodesic sphere—the size of several geodesic domes now operating—the weight of the air inside goes to about 500 tons while the weight of the structure goes up to 15 tons. The air to structure weight ratio is now 33 : 1. When we get to a geodesic sphere one-half mile in diameter, the weight of the air enclosed is so great that the weight of the structure itself becomes of relatively negligible magnitude, for the ratio is 1,000:1.
70 When the sun shines on an open-frame aluminum geodesic sphere of one-half-mile diameter the sun penetrating through the frame and reflected from the concave far side bounces back into the sphere and gradually heats the interior atmosphere to a mild degree. When the interior temperature of the sphere rises only 1° Fahrenheit, the weight of air pushed out of the sphere is greater than the weight of the spherical-frame geodesic structure. This means that the total weight of the interior air, plus the weight of the structure, is much less than the surrounding atmosphere. This means that the total assemblage of the geodesic sphere and its contained air will have to float outwardly into the sky, being displaced by the heavy atmosphere around it. When a great bank of mist lies in a valley in the morning and the sun shines upon the mist, the sun heats the air inside the bank of mist. The heated air expands and therefore pushes some of itself outside the mist bank. The total assembly of the mist bank weighs less than the atmosphere surrounding it and the mist bank floats aloft into the sky. Thus are clouds manufactured.
71 As geodesic spheres get larger than one-half mile in diameter they become floatable cloud structures. If their surfaces were draped with outwardly hung polyethylene curtains to retard the rate at which air would come back in at night, the sphere and its internal atmosphere would continue to be so light as to remain aloft. Such sky-floating geodesic spheres may be designed to float at preferred altitudes of thousands of feet. The weight of human beings added to such prefabricated ‘‘cloud nines’’ would be relatively negligible. Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard one-mile-diameter and larger cloud structures. The passengers could come and go from cloud to cloud, or cloud to ground, as the clouds float around the earth or are anchored to mountain-tops. While the building of such floating clouds is several decades hence, we may foresee that along with the floating tetrahedronal cities, air-deliverable skyscrapers, submarine islands, subdry-surface dwellings, domed-over cities, flyable dwelling machines, rentable, autonomous-living black boxes, that man may be able to converge and deploy at will around the earth, in great numbers, without further depletion of the productive surface of the earth.
72 It may be that after we get to the large skyscraper-size airplanes that they may be economically occupiable and economically flyable from here to there with passengers living aboard as on cruise ships.
73 It may be that human beings will begin to live in completely mobile ways on sky ships and sea ships as they now occupy cruise ships in large numbers, for months, while traveling around the water and sky oceans. As people live completely around the earth, changing from ‘‘summer’’ to ‘‘winter’’ in hours, the old concept of man as a cold-area or warm-area dweller or as a fixed, static dweller anywhere, and all the old concepts of seasons, or even of work as related only to daylight hours, will gradually be eradicated from man’s conditioned reflexes.
74 Man will come to occupy mobile habitats which may at will be anchored habitats and live independently of day and night and season schedules. This will mean a much higher occupancy in use rate of environment-control facilities. Nowadays, at international airport hotels, people with one-to-eight-hour flight-transfer waitovers follow one another in rooms and beds which are made up freshly as one occupant follows the other. The rooms are occupied, not on a noon-to-noon schedule, but on a use schedule which we may call a frequency-modulation schedule. Such frequency-modulated occupancy of rented space in mobile hotels or in dwelling machines will become the fundamental patterning of man’s living around the earth.
75 On the old farmstead there were a great many buildings to be seen—the great barn, containing hay and cows, the stables, corncribs, silos full of wet fermenting ensilage, the woodshed, pigsty, the carriage house, the cold cellar, and the warm cellar. All these buildings and many others on the farms are disappearing or have disappeared because machinery in the house has displaced the functions carried on by the so-called ‘‘buildings.’’ The small electric refrigerating device took the place of ice, the icehouse, and icebox system. The electric current took the place of the wood, the woodshed, and stove system, etc. In two decades the windmills, formerly on every farm, have gone.
76 In this way, we discover that the buildings, which controlled energy conditions of heat, cold, dry, and wet, were in effect machines because machines process and control energy. All those machines known erroneously as ‘‘buildings’’ have now been replaced by machines more readily recognized by us as machinery. Now however the recognizable components are decreasing as technology employs more and more of the invisible capabilities of electronics. What we are witnessing is the disappearance of the ever less economic ‘‘housing’’ or slow-motion phase of machinery as its functions are taken over by the high-speed machinery that brings about and maintains the preferred environment conditions at ever less cost and personal effort. This evolution is well underway, but we hide it from our awareness through semantic error, typical of which is society’s noncomprehension of what Le Corbusier meant when he said, ‘‘A house is a machine for living.’’
77 When the early homesteaders went on the land with few or no tools, they had to work in the fields or build their energy-controlling structures during every minute of daylight. Spent, in 12 hours of hard labor, they slept from twilight to dawn. The design of their farmhouses told the story—little boxes with vertical walls going down into the ground. There were no porches or stoops. There were a few windows, enough for the farmer’s wife to see where he was around the farm and to see if the Indians were coming. When tools, and more tools, came to shorten the time taken to do a given job, the farmer gained more time of his own. Finally, he had enough time before twilight to sit and look at the scenery, and he built porches around his house. As he began to have more and more time, he began to put screens on the porches. With ever more time, he began to put glass windows on the porches. Sitting on his porches, he watched other people go by. Then came the automobile, which in effect put wheels under his glassed-in front porch, so instead of waiting to see people go by he drove down the street to see the people. In a very real sense, the automobile was part of the house, broken off, like hydra cells going off on a life of their own. The young people who used to court in the parlor, then on the glassed-in front porch, now began to do their courting in the automobile, or the porch with wheels. Today, the young people do their courting in their parlor on wheels, driving it to the drive-in theater. Because we are conditioned to think of the house as static, we fail to realize that the automobile is as much a part of the house as is the addition of a woodshed.
78 In 1920, 85% of the cost of production of a single-family dwelling in the United States went into the house’s shell and foundation. Only 15% of the general contract went into what we call ‘‘mechanical inclusions.’’ In North America, that 15% covered a kitchen sink and a furnace. There was no electrical refrigeration at that time. Only a small percentage of houses had indoor toilets. A very small percentage had electric wiring. Due to the high mechanization of World War I, the postwar ‘‘fallout’’ of advanced technology brought one mechanical inclusion after another to be incorporated in the general contract for a single-family dwelling. Then came the electric refrigerator, the oil-burner furnace, the hot-water heater, the radio, etc.
79 In 1929, 28% of the general contract for a single-family dwelling went into mechanical inclusions.
80 In 1940, 45% of the general contract went into mechanical inclusions.
81 At the present time, 65% of the general contract goes into mechanical inclusions, which embraces electric wiring and plumbing, as well as the obvious machinery.
82 During this same time, the size of the various domestic machines has continually decreased. As an instance, the electric sewing machine decreased from a very big device to a small one. As transistors and other miniaturizations occurred, the machinery of the general contract continually produced more service with less apparatus and effort. Through the years, the cost of the electrical current to operate the mechanization continually decreased despite the increase of costs in almost all other directions.
83 Concurrently, the size of the houses greatly decreased as servants were replaced with machines, which eliminated servants’ rooms. Sizes of families decreased as life expectancy increased. Despite the continual decrease in the size of individual homes, the cost per cubic foot of the enclosing structure has rocketed upward.
84 Clearly the machinery is giving man more-and-more for less-and-less, while the structural arts are giving man less-and-less for more-and-more.
85 The great city electric generators and the great chemical factories were once housed in vast Georgian-architecture brick factories. The chemical industries learned how to make machinery so that it would not deteriorate in the open air. The electrical industry did the same. Today we see enormous petroleum refineries and other chemical plants with their machinery completely exposed to the atmosphere—no walls. This is invisible architecture. We see the electrical switchyards entirely outdoors, with only high fences around them. We can correlate these trends—of the single-family dwelling’s swiftly transferring tasks to machinery from the relatively inefficient structural shells—with the trend of the front parlor onto wheels to go off down the street to be called the ‘‘automobile.’’
86 Because of these trends, what we now call ‘‘home trailers’’ are simply modern, lightweight, aluminum boxes, full of the mechanical package which constitutes the improved standard of living—minus the expensive house—compacted into usable array which mobile home packages prosper as the ‘‘regular’’ static home market has never prospered, despite the lack of esthetic appeal, and despite cultural inertias.
87 The home-trailer business has rocketed into a major industry without any federal subsidies and mortgages, while the whole home-building business has been kept going only by the 40-year government mortgage-loan guarantees, and is now in fundamental decline.
88 The environment always consists of energy—energy as matter, energy as radiation, energy as gravity, and energy as ‘‘events.’’ Housing is an energetic environment-controlling mechanism. Thinking correctly of all housing as machinery we begin to realize the complete continuity of interrelationship of such technological evolution as that of the home bedroom into the railway sleeping car, into the automobile with seat-to-bed conversions, into the filling-station toilets, which are accessories of the parlor-on-wheels; the trailer, the motels, hotels, and ocean liners. All this living machinery complements the inherently transient nature of world society and its progressive emancipation from the local shackles of physical-property ‘‘machines’’ which were so inefficient and so enormous as to be nonportable and therefore to have imposed a static property condition upon world society which misled man into thinking of himself as geographically rooted. The new pushbutton-operating, energy-processing machinery makes operative preferred conditions on wheels, on boats, on wings, or on temporarily anchored earth beds anywhere around the earth and outwardly in space, permitting man to rest or go where he wills.
89 But the conditioned reflexes of society make laws that force the mobile home owner to emulate only the realtors’ static horizontality. The realtors’ zoned trailer parks grow up everywhere to capture the swiftly multiplying mechanical house packages. The rapidly expanding fiberglass-plastic-and-metal boat production is turning out houseboats, motor cruisers, sailing cruisers all with living machinery of the highest order of efficiently and livably compact packaging. Mooring or storing of these boats operates horizontally in harbors or marinas.
90 The tetrahedronal city which can be expanded from a 100,000- to a 300,000-family-supporting device consists structurally of a complex of trusses. Such tetrahedronal cities make it a practical matter for power cranes to pick up the mechanical package in the form of trailers, houseboats, or cruisers and park them on the open terraces of the tetrahedronal trusses.
91 One reason that we allowed 2,000 square feet (200 square meters) per family on the vertically paralleled terraces of the tetrahedronal floating cities is to permit the storage of mobile trailers, houseboats, and mobile homes in general on the terraces, leaving an additional thousand square feet for a garden for each mobile tenant. These devices will be all weatherproofed and therefore require no additional ‘‘walls’’ or external skins to be fastened onto the tetrahedron city. Such a two-mile-high tetrahedronal city will consist of an open-truss-framework ‘‘structural mountain’’ whose sides are covered with parked mobile homes which at night will be ablaze with light as are the great petroleum refineries.
92 There will be no brick- or stone-sided tetrahedronal ‘‘mountain’’ cities. There will be delicate, fireproof, prestressed-concrete open-framework tetrahedronal cities consisting of hundreds or even thousands of decks one above the other on which the floatable, flyable, roadable mobile-home mechanical containers will be economically parked as their occupants dwell locally for periods during their world-around peregrinations. Each mobile home safely locked in place on its mechanical mountain terrace will provide its own all-weather skin.
93 As we consider these fundamental transitions in types of machinery from what seemed to be ‘‘buildings’’ to obvious mechanics, we realize the complete evolutionary continuity of all these trends. We realize also that the transition to the faster technologies, which will open up all oceans and skies to man’s support and enjoyment, is an inevitable consequence of what is already irrevocably and inexorably underway, but has been mistakenly identified by the wrong names, wrong conceptions, and wrong categories with which man has processed his experiences.
94 By and large, the great world housing problem is an educational problem . By and large, man’s inertias are only overcome by virtue of his own personal discoveries, discernment, and understanding of what it is that is happening to him. There will be no instant world housing solutions. There are fundamental rates at which the educational gestation takes place.
95 Publishers who try to exploit man’s imagination by giving him only the end-product concepts, without showing how man will get from here to there, postpone the opportunities for helping man to educate himself on how these events may come to pass and the advantages which will be gained.
96 I, for one, am unwilling to allow anyone to be only amused by startling concepts of tetrahedronal cities and air-deliverable Empire State buildings while keeping from society the opportunity to understand the complex of factors that lead to such tangible results.
97 The comprehensive introduction of automation everywhere around the earth will free man from being an automaton and will generate so fast a mastery and multiplication of energy wealth by humanity that we will be able to support all of humanity in ever greater physical and economic success anywhere around his little spaceship Earth .
98 Quite clearly, man enabled to enjoy his total earth, enabled to research the bottom of his ocean, and to reexplore earlier patterns of man around earth, will also be swiftly outwardbound to occupy ever greater ranges of universe.
99 Within decades we will know whether man is going to be a physical success around earth, able to function in ever greater patterns of local universe or whether he is going to frustrate his own success with his negatively conditioned reflexes of yesterday and will bring about his own extinction around the planet earth. My intuitions foresee his success despite his negative inertias. This means things are going to move fast.
