3 A Year of Decision
2In 1918, during the last months of the war, people in cities in the United States and soldiers in military camps began to fall sick with a disease called influenza. Up until then, only babies and very old people had been thought to be in any danger of dying from this illness. Now suddenly people of all ages began to die by the hundreds. There did not seem to be any way to stop the spread of influenza.
3 Doctors insisted that crowding and spitting were two ways of spreading influenza; they urged people to keep away from theaters and to wear gauze masks over their noses and mouths. There was little agreement about how to cure the disease; some doctors recommended doses of castor oil, others claimed that alcohol would do the trick, while yet others told their patients only to get plenty of fresh air.
4 So, some influenza victims drank whiskey and others slept with their bedroom windows wide open in spite of the chilly fall weather. But neither of these treatments seemed to make much difference. Living or dying seemed to depend more upon a person’s own ability
5 to resist the influenza attack and not upon treatment.
6 The disease had begun in Europe, and then had moved to the North American continent. During the years 1918 and 1919, about twenty-two million people all over the world were killed by influenza itself or by complications, such as pneumonia, brought on by the disease. Such a sickness that sweeps across wide areas of the world, as did the influenza then, is called a pandemic — that is, a disease which is epidemic everywhere.
7 The influenza pandemic reached into almost every American home. And Bucky and Anne Fuller were not spared. Their little daughter, Alexandra, was stricken with the disease. For a long time it was not certain that she would recover; then the fever broke and she became well again. But the ordeal left her a frail child, with her body easy prey to harmful microbes. Within the next three years, she caught poliomyelitis and then one of the most dreaded childhood diseases, spinal meningitis. This was all she could bear; in 1922, at the age of four, Alexandra died. Her death left Bucky depressed and despondent; he seemed unable to return to the cheerful, optimistic person he had always been.
8 During the years of Alexandra’s illness, Bucky had moved through two different jobs. After receiving his discharge from the Navy in 1919, he had returned to the Armour Company. Remembering his past experience and excellent record, the management offered him the position of assistant export manager.
9 Many returning veterans of the war were not as lucky. During the months and years spent in the armed forces, their old jobs had been taken by younger men or by those who had escaped the call to arms. Great labor strikes were going on in many industries. Mines and factories all over the country were shut down. Bucky knew he was fortunate, and he enjoyed the new responsibilities at the Armour plant. With those responsibilities went a salary of fifty dollars a week.
10 Normally, such a salary would have been enough for two young married people. But at the Fuller home, the money had to cover more than just rent and food. Two trained nurses were needed to take care of Alexandra. Anne and Bucky hardly managed to keep up with their expenses. So, when Bucky was offered a better paying position with the Kelley-Springfield Truck Company, he gladly accepted. But then Alexandra died; the extra money seemed meaningless in the face of the tragedy.
11 That same autumn Anne’s father suggested a change. He showed Bucky a concrete block. It was about sixteen inches long, eight inches wide, and four inches thick. There were two cylindrical holes spaced apart and going all the way through; this made it easy to lift the block with one hand. What distinguished this concrete block from building bricks was its weight —only two pounds!
12 Bucky was amazed and interested. He could see some fibers embedded in the concrete and asked about them. Mr. Hewlett explained that these were simply pieces of straw bonded into the cement. The result was the lightest but toughest brick possible, easy to carry and difficult to break. This concrete brick had been invented by Mr. Hewlett himself. The holes in the brick were an ingenious addition. For an outside wall, the blocks could be laid so that the holes made a continuous cylindrical space. Then, concrete could be poured into this space to create extra support in each brick column. The blocks without filled holes could be used to build a lighter, insulating inner wall. Thus, an architect would have a way of getting around the difficult problem of brick wall construction —the expansion and contraction of bricks with changes in temperature. Regular brick tended to crack easily unless the brick mason worked very carefully. The straw-filled bricks could be used to make inside and outside walls that were independent of one another; there would be no cracking.
13 Now Mr. Hewlett told Bucky what he wanted of him. A machine was needed to mold the brick efficiently for manufacture and distribution. He knew that Bucky had the imagination and inventiveness to create such machinery. He asked Bucky to leave his job with Kelley- Springfield and to become a partner with him in a corporation set up to manufacture the blocks. Bucky would be president of the corporation and would share in the patent rights and half the profits.
14 It was a most generous offer and Bucky could not refuse. With a grin and a handshake he accepted. And ideas began to bubble up in his mind at the very moment —ideas about how to set up the molds so that a continuous pouring process could go on, about how to mix the straw and concrete and to get the mixture poured in the fewest possible steps.
15 Preparations for the new company were time-consuming. Patents for new inventions had to be filed with the government in Washington. Then, when Bucky had worked out the details of the block-making machines, new patents had to be filed. Mr. Hewlett and Bucky decided to call the new brick the Stockade Building Block. The first Stockade Company factory was built in 1923 in Summit, New Jersey.
16 Bucky knew little about the building business and less about how an industrial corporation should be run. But he was willing to learn. He set out to prove to the world that Mr. Hewlett’s invention was the most marvelous thing that had happened in the history of house-building.
17 The Stockade Company prospered. More factories were opened to meet the demand for bricks. By 1927, Bucky had built two hundred and forty houses using the Stockade system for the walls. And as he worked, he learned more and more about the building industry. He was astonished by what he saw; much of the planning and building of houses in the United States was carried out by methods that had not changed in hundreds of years! Few architects and contractors seemed to understand or even know about the new technologies that could improve the techniques of building. And what seemed even more astounding to him was that no one in architecture or in the building industry seemed to care about what would be happening during the following hundred years. No one seemed to be planning for the future.
18 The fourth Stockade Building System plant was built in Chicago; in 1926 Bucky and Anne moved to the great city on the shores of Lake Michigan. The lake was a poor substitute for the Atlantic Ocean, which Bucky missed. But he was content to see some water; it made him happy to stand at the lakefront of the ‘‘Windy City’’ and look out to the horizon, where the water and sky blended.
19 The following year another daughter was bom to Anne and Bucky. They named her Allegra, from the Italian word meaning joyful, or happy. And the coming of Allegra was a joyful happening for the Fullers. It meant they could forget the past sadness.
20 But with the joy came a new blow. Mr. Hewlett lost control of the Stockade Building System. He was forced to sell his shares of stock to a large business firm, the Celotex Corporation. And the men who now controlled the brick company did not have much confidence in Bucky’s ability as president. Bucky himself did not own enough of the company stock to enable him to make major decisions about policy. Celotex Corporation voted him out of office. In effect, Bucky was fired by the new management.
21 Bucky Fuller now found himself jobless in a city that seemed strange and hostile. He became confused. He did not know what to do next. There was a need for money to pay rent and to buy food. The Fullers had saved little of Bucky’s salary. And the shock of sudden change, the sudden belief that he was hopelessly incompetent was almost too much for Bucky to bear. Without telling Anne, he began to think seriously of doing away with himself.
22 This year of 1927, so difficult and miserable for Buckminster Fuller, was a year of exciting changes for the civilized world.
23 For one, a young airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh flew a single-engined plane across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Paris, without stopping. The challenge to span the ocean had been flung down in 1919, with a $25,000 prize as the lure. But all who tried had failed, until the lanky youth, son of a congressman from Minnesota, stepped into his tiny cabin plane, christened The Spirit of Saint Louis, and took off into a Long Island dawn. It took him over thirty-three hours to fly 3600 miles and he became a heroic figure to all the world.
24 Other things were happening in science. A set of ideas about the nature of time and space, labeled the General Theory of Relativity, had been proposed over twenty years before by a young German physicist named Albert Einstein. For much of that time, the difficulty in understanding what Einstein was trying to say caused many people to treat his theory as a kind of standing joke. But by 1927 it began to be apparent that Einstein’s joke was no joke at all, and that relativity theory might indeed open many of the closed doors of the universe.
25 Other scientists were beginning to find that atoms of matter were indeed made of other tiny parts that were in constant motion, but held together by electrical forces and other forces that were unknown. One of the important particles being studied was the proton, a major constituent of the kernel, or nucleus, of an atom. More disturbing was a new theory about the nature of atoms, that the parts of atoms behaved as though their energy too was atomic in nature. The idea that energy could exist in ‘‘lumps’’ called quanta was very revolutionary and difficult to accept. For example, the quantum theory of energy predicted that particles of matter that were in very rapid motion would also behave very much like waves. This kind of prediction was not only unexpected, but also unbelievable. Yet in 1927 two scientists named Davisson and Germer, working in a Bell Telephone Company laboratory, found that the tiny particles called electrons behaved exactly like light waves.
26 In 1900 one hundred and sixty-two out of every thousand infants under one year of age were dying in the United States. By 1927 this rate had been diminished to sixty-nine out of every thousand. Medical research had begun to eliminate the killers of man.
27 In 1927 a famous journalist named Lincoln Steffens returned from the Soviet Union, heralding that new country’s progress. He said that he had seen the future and that it worked. What he did not know was that a struggle for political control was going on in the Kremlin. The great Bolshevik leader, Lenin, had died in 1924. Two men with widely differing views on how to direct the economic and social progress of the new Russia were competing for his place. One was Leon Trotsky; the other, Josef Stalin. The winner was Stalin, in 1927; in that year the path that would be taken by the Soviet communistic society was decided.
28 In Italy, meanwhile, an elementary-school teacher named Benito Mussolini had come to political power as head of a party called fasci di combattimento, or ‘‘groups for combat.’’ Their party insignia was the bundle of twigs bound about an axehead, called fasces, and used by the ancient Romans as a symbol of authority. Mussolini believed in a new way of governing people —by force and by deception. This new way was given a name: fascism.
29 In Germany, a disgruntled and unhappy ex-soldier and artist named Adolf Hitler found that he had the ability to arouse and lead people. He entered German politics as the head of a new party called the National Socialists —or, for short, the Nazis. Hitler employed the same methods as Mussolini —he played upon the fears and hatreds of the Germans to win followers. But in 1927 his attempts to seize power had been repulsed. In the elections of that year, the Nazis lost most of their seats in the German Parliament, and most people felt that Adolf Hitler’s career was quite finished.
30 As for the United States, there had been unprecedented prosperity since the silent and dour New England Republican, Calvin Coolidge, had been reelected president in 1924. His Party’s slogan had been: ‘‘Keep Cool with Coolidge!’’ The presidential campaign was the first in which radio was used extensively as a means of reaching the public ear. One thing Coolidge did try to do was to get the nations of the world to disarm; however, the disarmament meeting he arranged ended in failure.
31 Private industry was earning more money than ever. By 1927 the total came to almost sixty-four billion dollars —up fifty billion from the total in 1900. The automobile had arrived as a major means of transportation; in those twenty-seven years, the output of motor vehicles had risen from four thousand per year to three and a half million.
32 Man’s greatest dream —to fly like the birds —was also coming true. In 1927, there were already twentyseven hundred civil airplanes in operation in the United States, with fifteen hundred pilots licensed to fly them.
33 But the most important change in America was in the quantity of energy available to move the levers and cogs of industrial machines. Petroleum and waterpower energy had tripled since 1900. Now a new form of energy had been made available in vast quantities: electrical energy. In 1902, what electric plants existed were turning out a bare six million kilowatt hours of electrical energy. By 1927 this amount had been multiplied almost twenty times.
34 It seemed to Bucky Fuller that there was no place for him in the rapidly changing world. He had taken on the responsibilities of a grown man —a wife, children, a home, and a job. But he had failed.
35 Or was it the other way around? Had the world failed Buckminster Fuller? Was Alexandra dead at the age of four because the world had failed in its responsibility to attack the diseases of man in a proper manner? Was his position with the Stockade Company gone because the building industry of the United States refused to move forward with changing technology?
36 Night after night, Bucky held these conversations with himself. Whose was the failure? Whose the blame?
37 One night, looking down at the black, tossing waters of Lake Michigan, he knew that he would have to come to a final decision. A bitter wind roared down the lakefront, but Bucky hardly felt the cold. He stared into the water and rearranged all the arguments in his mind. If he jumped now, Anne and Allegra would be freed from future want and suffering. Mr. Hewlett and the Fuller family would see to that.
38 All right, he said to himself, that much is obvious. If I go, Anne and Allegra will not suffer for want of material things. If I stay, I must stay on my own terms, and life may be difficult for them.
39 Did a man have the right to play God with his own life? Bucky knew that he would have to make a decision on this night, right there, looking down at the weaving, changing patterns on the water’s surface.
40 Suddenly, in the dark, windblown night, the answer came to him. It was a simple answer, and he knew it was right. The answer was: time to think! A man could only know if his genius was real and worthwhile by doing nothing except thinking for a long time. This was how a great philosopher named Descartes, over three hundred years before, had given birth to his genius; he had locked himself away in a little hut for the winter with nothing but a little food, a stove, and his thoughts. This was how Henry Thoreau, the famous friend of Margaret Fuller, had found his genius —alone in the country near Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
41 There was no mystery, no secret. If a man felt that he possessed some kind of genius, then he needed time to think things out, no matter what the sacrifice. Bucky turned away from the lake, pulled his coat more tightly about him, and went home to tell Anne.
42 How would an average American housewife, at home with a newborn baby, react to her husband’s coming home and saying, ‘‘Dear, I have decided that for a year or two I am not going to work. I have to use that time to think out my future, to figure out just what it is I can do for the world. I don’t know how we’ll live. I probably won’t talk to you very much. But have faith in me, and we’ll manage somehow.’’
43 This is what Bucky Fuller told his wife. He had made his decision about the future. He believed in himself and in his ability to do something important for the world. But doing it, there had to be much thinking and very little talking. He would have to cut himself off from outside influences. He had his real experiences in the Navy, in industry, and in building upon which to make his plans; not many men his age had such a valuable background.
44 ‘‘This may sound crazy, Anne,’’ said Bucky, ‘‘but I feel as though I have been placed in charge of an important natural resource —myself. My head is full of ideas about how to change the world, about how to make it a better world. I have to do it my way, Anne.’’
45 Anne Hewlett Fuller looked at her husband. Her eyes told him that she loved him and that her faith in him was unshaken. That was all Bucky needed.
46 He found them a flat in a low-rent tenement in one of the slum areas of Chicago. First he made sure that the building was fireproof. There, he, Anne, and the baby began a hand-to-mouth existence that lasted almost two years. Somehow there was food for the family; somehow there was clothing for Allegra. Bucky had made many friends in Chicago. Though he came from a blueblood Boston family, he was no snob; his friends came from all walks of life. One friend was the man who lived in the next apartment. He was a kind fellow who always helped Anne carry the garbage from her kitchen to the hall incinerator. When he bent over, Anne could see the butt end of a revolver poking out of his shoulder holster. He was a gunman who worked for Al Capone, the criminal king of Chicago’s gangs. But to Anne he was a kind neighbor who was Bucky’s friend, and who wanted to help.
47 During those two years, while his family was supported by the Hewletts and the Fullers and by his Chicago friends, Bucky began to invent things for the world of the future. His Navy experience had taught him that a ship was a self-contained, floating city that was at the mercy of nature. On board a ship, man learned quickly to cope with the unknown. New ideas and inventions that resulted from need were quickly put to use on ships. This was even more true in the case of the radio; the time lag between new inventions and their application was very short. Radio techniques were changing every day. And in the realm of flying, new inventions were tried out almost as soon as they appeared. In these areas, Bucky saw, progress in technology was causing almost instant change.
48 Where was the lag between invention and application the greatest? Bucky realized that it was in the building industry. Look how that industry had failed to take advantage of Mr. Hewlett’s invention. Man had hardly changed the type of shelter he had been building for himself in the past hundred years. Houses were still heavy, squarish masses that, once put down, could not be moved. They were still not being built to resist the stronger forces in nature; earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. The use of materials in house-building was terribly inefficient; there was much needless waste. Yet contractors and trade unions alike resisted the coming of new technological ideas, for fear of losing profits and jobs. Here was where inventiveness was needed the most. Here was where new ideas in science and technology could create the most needed changes.
49 Bucky saw that the new world, this world of 1927 about him, was a world of motion. More and more, man was on the move: first ships, then trains, then automobiles, and now airplanes. He realized that he would have to find a way to adapt to such an increasingly mobile world. The job that the universe had in mind for Buckminster Fuller was not to change man; it was to change man’s surroundings.