‘Designing a New Industry’ by Buckminster Fuller

1945-46 Published as a booklet by the Fuller Research Institute Wichita Kansas.

This booklet has been prepared as a composite of numerous talks by R. Buckminster Fuller explaining the evolution and development of the Fuller house from its basic philosophy to its final realization in the prototype model completed late in 1945. Before anyone was allowed to see the house it was felt that he should be told something of the principles that went into its design. Mr Fuller has made essentially this same specch to the various engineers, government officials, bankers and businessmen, experts from the Army and Navy, housing authorities and union and labor leaders who have been invited to see the house. On several occasions his talks have been recorded and transcribed; passages from all of them have been combined and amplified to make up the compositc. All the repetitions and digressions of the original presentation have been set down just as they were given. Sentences which run on with the grammatical license of easy conversation have been left as they were recorded to preserve the spontaneity and personality of the speaker. It should be read as a speech, rather than as a finished piece of literature. This version is based principally on a talk made on January 26th, 1946, to the new engineers who had just joined his production engineering activity. These engineers, who had been recruited from twelve of the nation’s leading aircraft companies, represented a vast experience and an impressive technical talent. In addressing his remarks to them, Mr Fuller has emphasized the structural and technical principles with which they would be working and he told them they had every prospect of becoming one of the finest design groups in the country

To the Engineers:

My purpose in preparing this talk in printed form is to make available for your constant use an outline of the principles and the scope of our project and a reminder of the bold approach to its problems, which you must keep in mind if our enterprise is to be successful. The progress we have made is not the result of blindly proceeding from one precedent to another. Only by escaping from the popular frames of reference and critically examining the conventional methods and techniques have we set up a new hypothesis and arrived at our present solution with its prospect of a new and transcendental industry. To do this it was necessary to make broad and daring assumptions. This talk is full of them, and I have not taken time to substantiate or develop them in detail. Assumptions grow out of experience and new postulates stem from observation which reveals the inadequacies of our previous concepts. However short of the mark our answers may be, I know that our method is right, for all the great scientific advances in history have been made by the Newtons and Galileos who were not afraid to form their own hypothesis. I am saying this to you because engineers have too often let others make their assumptions for them. In the months ahead the engineering staff has a great responsibility in getting our house into production. By attempting merely to improve and modify the familiar ways of designing and building you will succeed only in perpetuating original errors and limitations. So do not be afraid of radical methods or of setting up your own hypotheses.

What I want to talk about to you is the history of our project and the principles upon which it was designed.

As you will learn very quickly, we set out to design an industry, not just one end product, and the principles that I will talk about as applied to the house you will often find will also apply very well in the whole procedure of organization. We are very lucky that the project has now advanced to the point where our art is being applied to organization and not just to the first demonstration of a prototype for an industry to center around.

I will take you back a number of years to 1927 when the project started, and even further back to know how it started. I had been in the Navy in the last war and I was in the regular Navy—I went to a short course at Annapolis, but I was confirmed in the regular Navy and stayed in for a while—and had had mechanical training and was very much impressed with the wonderful equipment that was put at the disposal of the Navy. It was a world in which there was no such thing as a secondhand battleship. You cannot win a war on secondhand equipment; we have had this well demonstrated recently. It was equally impressive to me later on when I left the Navy and went into the building world and discovered how unscientific and secondhand most of the approach to housing was—how people really drifted from one old house to another, and the few new houses that were built were without any benefit of engineering. If they did have a designer at all, he was trained in architecture. He was trained much more in the ‘orders’ of architecture—that is in the ‘looks’ of the thing, starting design from the outside and making it look like something that had historical precedence.

Few small houses, I discovered, were designed by architects. Only four per cent of the single family dwellings in the United States were designed by architects. The other ninety-six per cent were built by somebod using a drawing out of a magazine or out of some old book or fust by hit or miss on the spot.

In that building world there were some few accessory products of advanced engineering that were beginning to infiltrate into the houses in the way of electric wiring and electric lights. In the early ‘twenties we began to have the oil burner and about 1926 we began to have the electric refrigerator. The radio was coming in during the late ‘twenties. But most of the housing mechanics were heavy and crude—such as the furnaces. These had low thermal efficiency as a basic unit—the thermal efficiency of the whole house being extremely low.

The housing world was so ignorant that the idea of reinforced concrete being used in a small house was a strange idea when I entered the building world in 1922. I discovered this because I had become interested in a system of reinforced concrete which could be applied to small houses. The reinforced concrete was cast into molds which later served as insulation for the wall—big, fibrous molds—and then acted as a bond for interior and exterior plaster. It was a good idea and it worked well. The university tests we had made on it indicated great strength and low conductivity, low moisture absorption, and no cracking of the wall. The wall was so good that it was employed in a great many structures, but everyone of these structures was expensive. When it was used in residences, they were residences that ran from $25,000 up to $100,000.

When 1 man could afford a good architect and a house of almost unlimited price, the architect was liable to choose this system. I found it impossible, however, to get reinforced concrete structure into small low-price housing, that is on a competitive basis, and not because the true costs of this construction were too high. We found that contractors could not bid advantagcously because they had no idea of how to reinforce concrete! There were no engineers in the small-house building world of 1922. The contractor thought only of putting a rod in the center of a column which provides no rein-forcement. The reinforcing must be near the column surface. If vou were going to have any reinforcing done in 1922 you had to have it done by vour own well-trained specialists.

That building world did not however lack interest on the part of the great mass purchaser. In the ‘twenties I often built expensive houses for speculative builders who would open the house for ‘model house’ inspection out on his lots—say thirty-five or forty miles outside of Chicago—and often on a Sunday 10,000 people would go through that house. Not one of the persons, however, who went through the house could afford to buy the house, but the people’s standards were very high and they knew what they really wanted for good living, and you could not blame them for dreaming.

I put my particular type of building system on exhibition in the form of walls and miniature houses in a number of ‘own your home’ shows in different parts of the country during the ‘twenties. We decided to make some test cases on ‘customer probability’ as developed from ‘own your home’ shows where large crowds went. We had at the opening year of the Madison Square Garden in New York, I think it was in 1924, a very nice little house. Fourteen thousand people signed up at our booth as being ‘interested’ in that house and in our building material, saying they ‘wanted to build’. We followed up a great many of these people with our own salesmen and a great many of them followed us up and came to our offices in New York. Five thousand of the fourteen thousand were recontacted and we followed those cases through. Some of them had bought speculative lots—a great many, really—and the potential customers had saved up money with which to build, or had money in building and loan associations. We helped them to get some designs. We had young architects, who did not have any other job, help them make the drawing on speculation, and then we would send them down to the architect’s sample place to look at the windows and other material. We held their hands all the way through. We had to go to talk to their building and loan association and insurance companies. We helped them try to raise the rest of the loans. Those are typical items of the many problems we were handling with those families. At the end of the year we had as yet no customers, but 1,000 of the original 5,000 prospects were still on the books, and this thousand drifted along for many months more, but we discovered that though we had had five fairly successful years of building, we never had one customer out of the ‘own your home shows. That indicates the difficulties the low-income individual encountered in attempting to build.

In addition to these troubles which confronted the little individual, I will tell you some of the problems of the jobs that did go through. We would have to call on the architect’s office very frequently, and help him design our system right into the building; and we would have to instruct five contractors on how to bid and convince them of the ease of building with our new system. He was not inclined to that; he would rather build in brick or wood and familiar materials. We would have to promise him, if he would give a favorable figure on our system, that we would go down and start to build the wall for him in his house, if he got the job.

Then we would have to talk to the banks loaning the money and convince them of the value of our material; then we would have to talk to the insurance company. We would have to go out and meet three or four members of the local town council in order to be allowed to introduce reinforced concrete in that township, and usually had to speak at the next town meeting in order to get a special building permit and often there were no engineers on the board to pass on small-house structures. This would necessitate a test at the local university. In Chicago they would not take the tests of New York’s Columbia University. Even in south Chicago we had to get the University of Chicago or Armour Institute and in Evanston we had to go to Northwestern to have our tests made. Finally, one of the contractors would get the award, and we would send out a truckload of insulating molds, at low prices. Next we would run into trouble with the contractor’s labor.

These building blocks were made out of wood fiber but they were semi-petrified by magnesium oxychloride cement. The carpenters said they were forms and therefore they would have to lay them; the bricklayers claimed the work because they said the material looked exactly like brick; so also the metal lather said it was a lath because you plastered on it, and so the jurisdictional disputes grew. The insulating form blocks were sixteen inches long by eight inches through by four inches high, and they were laid up with staggered joints but no mortar in the joint. Structural steel men said they would have to put in the reinforcements. So we really had many difficulties and had to play ball with the strongest union locally. When each job had been accomplished each permit and concession terminated and all had to be repeated at the next iob.

I became convinced after five years that no company could bring an improvement into the structural phases of the building world and make money out of it, that improvement was a matter of reform requiring centuries to markedly advance the small-house building art. Because of that people were not able to buy houses as they did cars. Technology was not able to make its imprint on housing. The unions were not opposing improvement because they really wanted poor houses or because they wanted people to pay so much, but simply because it was a seasonal economics wherein they worked only on the good days in the spring, summer and fall, and they might get laid off and they had to make as much as they could while they were able.

So I decided that it was fortunate that I was young, and was blessed by coming along in the automobile and radio and airplane world and had had a vigorous experience in the Navy; I said I think that somebody who has had that advantage and has also been up against this terrible mess in housing ought to do something about it.

I had worked very hard at getting factories going in different parts of the country to manufacture these materials. I had had to invent my own machinery to mix up these fibrous materials with magnesite, etc., had had to raise a lot of money. I could see that you could only carry on that way by real labor of love and simply because you believed in progress. But that was not going to pay any dividends. I could not get any salary, and I was always busted. So it seemed to me that without any other qualifications than this vivid experience I would be justified in taking as much time off as was needed to try to think out what might be done about such a situation.

I was very much impressed with the action and scope of the housing world anyway. In the first place, my father-in-law was a very prominent architect and had invented the reinforced concrete system 1 had developed and I had met many other architects from different parts of the country and found them delightful people. I had also had a very sad experience. My first child was born just at the time of the 1918 armistice when I was in the Navy and my wife lived in a very poor kind of house that we had to live in, as people often have to do during wartime. My child caught spinal meningitis, then infantile paralysis, and then flu. After three years she seemed to be almost well, and just the week before her fourth birthday she died. She had caught pneumonia again. All of this I attributed to the messy world of ignorance and superficiality in houses.

Nobody seemed to know where the housing traditions and the diseases they bred came from and why they were going on. I could not seem to be able to maintain health conditions as I wanted them in the kind of rentals I could afford, and I blamed it very much on housing. ‘The more I saw of the housing world the more it seemed to me that about this great ignorance much could be done if we could think of our whole economics in the terms of a preventive pathology instead of a curative pathology. In our curative pathology we wait until somebody is very sick, and if they are lucky they might be able to get the right drugs from the research institute. I am talking of the picture of 1927.

This present war has, however, seen an enormous advance in these curative matters. One of our boys here today had an infection in his nose which started in his eye the day before yesterday. They rushed him to the hospital and they gave him penicillin. He is all right now. It might have been a fatal case a few years ago, since the infection would have gone right up to his brain. It is just wonderful; but that has happened now in 1946. War releases an enormous amount of technology, and that at least is one benefit showing up. But that came as a remedial form of pathology.

If we were to really attempt preventive pathology, we would question how these things get started and, it seemed to me in 1927, we would learn to measure and to adopt the enormous amount of data being set down by technologists everywhere relative to measurements of man’s universe and man himself and the forces seeking to destroy him and we would try to build in advance a form of environment control for man that would both occupationally, in the manufacture of this environment, control and equally, in its end use, prevent much of the present inroads of physical and mental and moral diseases into good health and well-being and general happiness.

I decided then that as I viewed all the many difficulties quite practically (having been active in that ignorant housing world) that no small scale measures of reform or advance would be successful, and on the other hand, that the only way that would be successful would be the establishment of a complete and new transcendental industry, a revolutionary new way of acquiring dwelling facilities. In 1927, at the time I was thinking exploratively, it took from four to six months to build a house even with a very well trained crew. It was a long tedious affair and it seemed to me that theoretically it was possible in terms of the world I was growing up in—a mechanical world—to think of houses being delivered and installed within hours. When I foirst talked about that a few years later, it did sound preposterous to people. Today it does not sound so preposterous.

We are just coming out of a blitzkrieg war where that kind of thinking has been the order of the day, but in 1927 it sounded pretty foolish to even say such words. Nevertheless, I said it is possible to think of a transcendental industry in high efficiency economic terms as built on best technology—possibly that is the simplest way to think anyway. Why fool around with any compromise? If you are going to do some dreaming and take some time off to look things over in a big way, ‘depend on practical sense and dare to think in the biggest way that you know how’. In fact, that is the first training you have to give yourself—to keep yourself thinking broadly. I had had an advantage that practically all of you boys who have been in the war have had—that is that I had learned to think in the terms of large mechanics, as my part in the last war had consisted of my commanding a few small craft up to a destroyer, and then I was an aide to Admiral Gleaves who was in command of the U.S. Cruiser and Transport Force. We had 130 ships in the Atlantic transport operation and turning those big ships around on as short a round trip schedule as possible I suppose became a very logical way of thinking to a young man, so that I had lost entirely any apprehension in thinking about big tons moving over large geographical patterns, and that is the kind of thinking young people have been accustomed to very recently, so I am hoping that we will see a large momentum of that kind of thinking in our present operations as we all come together here with fresh initiative.

At any rate, in 1927 I decided that as I was going to approach the problem in the biggest possible way, therefore I would have to take some very comprehensive measurements of man—his history and the phenomena of industry itself. I would have to discover what industry’s principles were and would have to make a scientific project of applying them to a new mass production housing industry by actually measuring the different elements that would be involved in such a solution. That would be the first step.

I am going to recite a lot of those statistics to you as we go along, and I think it would be useful to you later on to look at those figures and begin to build in the terms of them yourself. In the first place, I had decided I must discover as clearly as possible what were the inherent principles of industry. Industry, I thought, must be defined. The definition evolved: industry is a co-operative phenomenon in which three or more individuals working together, two as remote activity instrument or tool manipulating specialists co-ordinated to superhuman effectiveness by the third party, could produce work that could not be produced by one man or any number of men operating singly. That was the fundamental of industry. It was a corollary that industry, based upon constantly improving performance of production, depends on improving technology and produces items that give increasingly improved and measurable performance.

Measurably improved performance was the result of the phenomenon industry, and its total economic performance had soon begun to measure into improved magnitudes of performances war beyond the abilities of one man or any number of singly operating craftsmen to produce. We acknowledge such fine demonstration today when we speak of a ‘railroad system’. No one man could possibly lay a whole transcontinental track, build the locomotives and operate the system. It is the same with the giant central station whose operation can distribute light through a great network. Those are rather exaggerated examples of what I discerned in 1927 in a simple way as constituting the effects of the industrial principle of constantly improved performance.

Now inasmuch as improved performance was the key to the success of industry and was the key to it because the improvement made the performance measurably desirable to many pcople, it, therefore, developed a mass patronage. Therefore, performance could justifv industry’s going far afield to obtain the better performance materials. Thus, for instance, as men started in working on a system of graphing so that they could produce through letters or symbols some degree or understanding with each other, they found, for instance, that scratching on slates could be used. But they then found they could do a little better with some staining materials; then they found lead was better than some other forms of stone for scratching or depositing marks and that by encasing lead in wood it would last longer and their hands would not get so dirty. But lead was not to be found anywhere and everywhere, and you had to go exploring geographically to find it. So as they kept on measuring improved performance in the means of graphing they also found that getting graphites or leads meant going some distances for those materials, which was economicallv worthwhile because of the high performance of the end product. Because it was worthwhile, pencils became uni-versallv adaptable to man’s needs. The performance was so high that it took care of many needs of graphing, and the pencil became just as useful and applicable in Africa as it was in Norwav or New York. As the performance was measured and improved and industrial man went to specialized geographic sources for the elements that gave him improved performance, industry began to decentralize and man began to travel and transport great distances in order to have the means of giving improved performance. As he did so he had to produce products that were ever more universally needed in order to justify the increasing economic investment in mobilizing new sources. The products came from ever greater distances until in the and the now economics of industry justified going to Java for rubber and bringing it to Akron, Ohio, for processing, and then redistributing rubber products such as tires all the way to Africa and Norway. So industry could go all the way around the world to get a product and then redistribute it all around the world. That was a very clear and simple part of the industrial picture.

As we began to weave this enormous pattern of motion a great deal of energy was necessary to move the materials over the great dis-tances. A great deal of ingenuity was necessary to reduce the heavy loads as near source as possible so that you could concentrate enough to get the constituent product that was desired many miles away to some centralized location where industry could give it final refinement and finally get it down to very small tolerances and then begin to recompose the high performance components that were finally sent off as the end product all over the world.

All that motion and the cost of that motion seemed best measured in terms of pounds. The weight of the product to be moved was measured in tons and in tons of coal to provide the foot pounds of energy to move it. That seemed to be the best language for measuring industry and for accounting the great big movement. So you will find that throughout the whole world of industry the basic economic accounting unit, or constant, is the pound (avoirdupois).

A publisher begins to produce a very good school book. They get the book set up on the presses, and if a great many books are needed, they must keep those presses going fast day after day, and they don’t have to change the presses very often. They keep buying pounds of paper and ink to run through those presses. After the thing is set up nobody knows anything about what those words say until some child and teacher begin to read them. If the child learns readily, then it can be said that the user finds that the book has high performance. The performance per pound of a good dictionary is very high. Just to bring those pounds of paper and ink together the publisher kceps buying the pounds of paper and ink. The economics of the accounting are in that.

Next I found it useful to discover additional principles inside of those primary principles of the world motions of industry and constantly regenerating improvement of technology. In terms of absolute principles, the more you used technology, the more it improved instead of wearing out; thus balancing other factors of thermo-dvnamics where vou had some possible guestion as to ultimate conservation of matter. Technology was not in that category. The more you used it the more it improved. Every time you had the chance to do something over again you were forced by intellect to take advantage of experience to improve. This was a wonderful constituent hard-boiled accounting factor of the phenomenon industry.

Within the broad principles of industry we have just discussed—i.e., the running of many books of the same press set up—we have a secondary phenomenon that we identify as mass production. Mass production is a very specific term in industry; that is, from the viewpoint of our scientific discussion here tonight. It has not been used concisely in our language. In the popular sense it means anything ‘industrial’. Mass production occurs specifically when the original cost of setting up that press and the original cost of hiring and taking on help (which might be a $200 expense), and the original and continuous costs of building the building to house those presses (which we call overhead) and all the other costs (except the pounds of paper and ink) which must all be accounted for in the cost of the first book, begin to reduce to the point where ‘all other costs per book curve downward per book as consumption is sustained, until the curve of all other costs’ begins to parallel the constant cost level of pounds of paper and ink and coal or coal equivalents of energy from other sources converted in physical terms of foot pounds of work. When the cost lines parallel, then mass production is said to occur.

So you discover in industry that the constant of cost is pounds which is very useful to engincering because it can measure improvement in performance in foot pounds of energy cost. (I am not a technocrat, in case anybody has ever been exposed to talks by technocrats, and I am not talking technocracy to you. There is no political aspect to my talk.)

Industry demonstrates another set of general principles within the principles which define mass production. For instance, we find that a book often gets into mass production, yet a machine tool, which is an industrial product, rarely gets into mass production. Not enough machine tools are needed. I would like to make that distinction very clear. During this latest war period we had a great deal of mass pro-duction, particularly in the arts of acronautical manufacture, but mass production was by definition confined to the manufacture of component parts; there was no mass production attained in assemblies of component parts into whole airplanes.

That brings you to another main category to be discerned in the phenomenon of industry. We have simple products, simple inventions, such as the pencil we mentioned—with lead and a wood casing. We have simple alloys, brasses and bronzes. Then we have some very complex inventions, and the complex inventions are relatively very few. You have special machinery which is complex and which never attains direct mass production. Then we have complex machinery which does attain mass production. When I said very few items, I was thinking about the mass production of these complex machinery units. There are, of course, many of the special complex machinery units. But the mass produced complex units you can practically count on the fingers of your hands—watches, baby carriages and, finally, the largest complex invention that man was ever able to get into mass production, the automotive vehicle.

That is man’s peak demonstration to date in mass production as measured in pounds and performance complexity. He has now mass produced a three-ton unit of 5,000 types of parts. Because of this discovery of present limit of performance, the automobile, it seemed to me, was something that I would have to inspect very closely because I also was talking about a complex invention when I was talking about a house, and though the complex invention ‘house’ had never scemingly been industrialized, and certainly not mass pro-duced, what I was thinking of seemed to indicate that the day would come when I would have to think about it in terms not only of industrialization but of mass production as well. That is why I must observe very closely the curve of increasing magnitudes in industrial and mass production performance.

The mortality point, the critical point in the history of automobile companies, could be picked out on those production graphs. You found that when an automobile company which sought the mass market failed to produce at least 135,000 cars a year, its all-other-costs were still so high relative to the basic costs of the pounds of the car that they had to either have great psychological ability in selling to make the people think that their car was worth the extra amount of money per pound, or else they had to get some more money and build another model to recourt the mass market or else they had to plan to merge with somebody, or go out of business. That 135,000 cars per year per company was the critical, or minimum mass production rate.

Now interpolating from these characteristics of industry discovered in auto making into the housing world, we must first make some quick examinations again of the gencral means by which man had been producing those houses. We find, from the same viewpoint from which I have been inspecting the phenomenon industry, that man’s building of a house had been almost entirely a fortuitous matter—a secondary consideration in the scheme of prioritics which he had assigned to the solution of his survival problems.

He had not gone about saying, ‘What would make me a good house?’ He did not have time to measure the performance of the house and see what would give the highest performance, because he was preoccupied with other more pressing problems in opening up fronticrs. Ile had to clear away tres and stoncs out of the field so he could produce means of subsistence. The wealth (or sustenance) he was making was primarily agricultural and secondarily of animal hunting or husbandry. As he cleared the wilderness away in order to survive offensively he had to do something defensively about survival. He wanted to get immediate protection against the wild life of nature, storms, Indians and wolves. If there were caves, he would go into a cave and build a stockade in front of it. But there were very few places where there were caves; therefore, he piled up the stones or the felled trees which he was clearing from the fickds. That was the emergency act-use the stone and use the wood. The wood lent itself to rectilinear stockades. It could be used in two ways: it could build a vertical stockade or a horizontal wall.

In the places that most of us have grown up in, a moderate climate somewhere near the 32° mean-low isotherm, where there were pretty good trees in abundance, you will find our forefathers laying them down horizontally as the tree lent itself to a rectilinear design. Thus they made log cabins which they could soon chink up with mud. After a while they would have time to put roofs on them. In this particular area of Kansas there were not so many tres and there were hot many rocks in the fields, so as the pioneers sought cover in a hurry (being interested in agriculture and familiar with the soil) they built soil houses—mud houses. You will find that in almost every instance carly housing was emergency building, fashioned out of materials at hand. Later and casier times brought only decoration and aggrandizement to the carlier emergency shelters.

The motion of the pioneer into the wilderness did not allow him to carry very much with him. He could carry his immediate clothing, the family and a few tools, but he could not afford to bring building matcrials so he did not think about building in terms of what would make the best building material. It was entirely fortuitous, and rather than blame him you must applaud him for doing the best he knew how. Where the blame lies is with the integrity of those who came later to exploit the security of wealth opened by the pioneers. Here, the advantage gained provided the opportunity to introduce tcchnology into producing better housing, but exploitation of cunningly protracted emergencies preoccupied them.

As man put environment under control and he gained some advantage over environment, he then began to refine his building superlicialls, and though he began to get industrial tools moved forward to the frontier, he used them only to produce the traditional emergency components in quantity. He lived in the temporary scaffolding and construction shacks, so to speak, even though he fancied them up. Ile cut up the logs and split them up into boards, more dollars per tree, and he now had much time of commonwealth on his hands to carve those boards. In summary, the habits of building started with that emergency method. Housing, therefore, in no way follows the scheme of industry of constant improvement in performance per pound, going after the material to gise you higher performance. Performance of wood was not good in buikling. It was just—lazily—handy. It was all right for the first emergency; the logs stopped the bow and arrow pretty well; that was prous good. It could also stop a bear. But, in the long pull, it burnt up very readily and it rotted: termites ate it, and that was not good performance.

So far, you can see that scientifically speaking housing was considered almost entirely a local affair. You used what you had at hand at that place and that was all. The ultimate cost of traditionalizing local expediency is reflected today in the figures of our national debt. That is how far short of initial potential advantage dollar exploitation as primary incentive dubbed the shot. Housing has been said architecturally to be verv beautiful when it really reflects the site that it is on and looks a wart of the land. In fact, people really came to feel housing to be part of the land. This was because they did not move the materials very far, and they really felt that in building that house they were reshaping the land at that point, massaging it into a sculptured form so to speak. Also, they hoped and assumed the house would probably be there for generations. House was thought ofas a very stolid affair. Devised before the automobile and railroad, housing had to do with hoping that you had found the right spot in the world and that the next generation would grow up there and think of that as the only place in the world. People’s viewpoints were extremely local in the terms of that house, and generations did follow there. So geocentric was house and home that it was very easy to think of the earth as flat—that is the way you saw it out there, and it was certainly very easy to think of the sun as going around the earth. You will find that most people are still geocentric in their actual thinking despite their subscription to the validity of Copernicus’ discovery and to general astronomical data. Thinking is retarded centuries by house habits.

So widely do the economics of housing differ from the economics of industry that vou don’t find any language of pounds in the building material commerce. You find board feet and barrels of cement and cubic yards of sand, but none of the industrial pound, energy, performance language. When industrially mass produced nails came in man began to talk about pounds of nails, but that was as far as it went in housing. When man began to operate the house, however, he began to get into the pound language, and he began to get tons of coal, pounds of sugar, etc. Now that is a fairly good proof to you of the great gap that existed between the housing world as I was looking at it in 1927 and what we called industry. I also discovered that people did not talk about what a house weighed. Nobody talked about having a very beautiful little 350-ton cottage or a 700-ton Georgian job. That wasn’t the language.

However, coming out of the Navy, I was very weight conscious. I tried on the idea of ‘weight of houses’ at a meeting in New York in the 19305. I was asked by somebody to take part in a symposium at the Women’s University Club where they were having a discussion of modern architecture. I had been carrying on the idea of industry’s mass production of housing for three years, and one of the architects who had been asked to talk was interested in my work and he suggested to the program committee that they invite me to speak along with the others. All the other men there were prominent in architecture. There was Raymond Hood who had done the Tribune Building in Chicago and who had just completed the Daily News Building in New York and the American Radiator Building in New York. There was Harvey Corbett who had worked out the setback floors for skyscrapers in New York and built the Bush Terminal Building in New York. There was Van Allen who had iust finished the Chrysler Building. Nobody had been in it set at the time of this dinner, but he told us about the elevators and how it was going to look inside. Also Schreve of Schreve and Lamb who was working on the design of the Empire State Building, which they were excavating for. Frank Lloyd Wright was also there. All of these men were easy to identify to the audience by the buildings they had or were then building, and they were being asked to talk about trends of modern architecture to the women. When I was asked to get up, there was nothing in the public ken to identify what I was working on, so I had to describe what I was working on and had only ten minutes to talk.

I told them I was working on something that was not going to have being for a number of years, so it was fairly tough going. I told them I was working on the idea of turning the advantages inherent in industry into the production of man’s means of living, and though you did find industrial ability demonstrated in big buildings of the architects present in the form of steel and particularly in the clevators and the lighting and heating systems, little of the benefit in technology and advanced engineering was going into the building of homes, and that I was working on the industrialization of those homes.

I told them the key to all industrialization was weight. Then I recited something that Iam going to recite to you tonight. I thought that just to show how remote the language of weight is from the building world that it would be interesting to ask the assembled famous architects who designed the famous big buildings what their buildings weighed. There wasn’t a sound from the architects sitting there at the table, so I said to Mr Van Allen, ‘Can you tell me what the Chrysler Building weighs?” ‘No.” Can you tell me within 100,000 tons?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can you tell me within 1,000,000 tons?’ He could not. The other architects did not know the weight of their buildings cither. ‘Ther had engincers who figured that. I then asked, ‘Can anybody in this room tell me what the Leviathan weighs?’ She was still about the biggest ship afloat. Everyone knew that she weighed 54,000 tons. That was interesting because the audience and the architects had much more to do with those buildings than they did with the Leviathan. I said that it might then be interesting for me to make the comparison for them of one of these buildings the architects built and one of those big ships. For that purpose I found a pretty good basis for comparison in the Hotel Belmont in New York and the Mauretania which had the same passenger capacity in terms of useful cubic feet per passenger or guest.

‘The Mauretania, of course, had to provide her own power to maneuver across the ocean, and the Hotel Belmont did not have to do so. ‘The Belmont got its power and light from the city, in fact, it bought its steam from the New York Edison Company. It got its food twice daily from the local suppliers, so it did not have to have a very large ice box. The Mauretania had to carry thirty days supplies of food for 1,500 people and fuel for power, fuel and light. Yet the Mauretania weighed one-fifteenth as much per guest space, cubic foot as did the Belmont. So additional weight did not mean additional strength as was popularly thought in building security—for one mild motion of the tides in New York Harbor would rack the Belmont to pieces while the Mauretania could ride out the mountainous seas. If the Maurctaniaweighed as much as the Belmont per unit of performance she would sink to the bottom of the ocean at launching.

The Belmont was a very poor piece of structure. They simply got away with such building because it was not publicly tested by the severity of the elements as was the Mauretania.

Out of the habit they were going right on up with the quadrangular building into skyscrapers in forms that at first had been wise, but as produced for emergency only out of trees and boards. But now they were going high up with the quadrangular framing in steel, and the steel was just taking the place of the boards, and the parallelograms were so unstable that they had to put enormous gusset plates at the joints thus providing enormous leverage against the joints and resulting in highly redundant structures and enormous weights. I hope I have impressed on you the great gap in intellectual approach between the phenomenon of industry and the phenomenon of house building as we have known it.

In view of the fact that ‘house’ was the largest personal material acquisition of man’s lifetime and that it was completely outside the industrial scope when everything else that man was doing was within the advantage of industrial scope, it scemed to me the fundamental incompatibility of this basic economics would cause war and trouble for a long time to come unless something revolutionary was done about it.

Now, what did houses weigh, if you were going to think about bringing them into the industrial advantage? Houses were in 1027 somewhat larger than they are now. The minimum permanent dwelling standard now set up by the F.H.A. in 1946 for minimum loans of $1,500 provides 650 square feet of floor area. This house weighs 45 tons in frame, not including foundation. If you include foundation, plumbing, etc., which you must for a permanent dwelling, the minimum F’.I.A. house weighs about 150 tons.

They weighed more than that in 1927, but 150 tons is close enough for us to think about now. Therefore, I am talking about a complex invention (house) for mass production that requires a ninety-eight per cent weight reduction from its present weight in order to bring it within possibility range of actual curve increase in the size of units which man can mass produce (now 6,000 pounds).

It would be well to get an idea of how many craft houses man has built in his record years. How many could he get out under the methods that he has used in a fairly ignorant way? I found that the all time peak in building was 1925. That was in the United States where the most advanced technology existed. In that year we produced somewhere around 837,000 dwelling units of which 572,000 were single family dwellings. The rest were multiple dwellings—hospitals, apartments, duplexes, etc. Of the 572,000 unly 270,000 had any interior plumbing of any kind at all (that is even a kitchen sink). Therefore, less than 300,000 houses represents the all time peak attained by man in the production of single family dwellings—that is dwellings anywhere nearly approaching what we might call a desirable standard of performance. However, industrially speaking, in that same vear 1925, we produced in the United States five million cars, three million of which were produced by three prime contractors while in the housing world, three hundred thousand prime house contractors built only 270,000 houses, or less than one unit cach per year. If vou consider the house contractor as the complex invention manufacturer, it is seen that he produced at a rate of less than one unit annualls. There again is seen the difference in magnitude of service performance between craft traditions and industrial economics.

This less than one house per year manufacturer rate must be converted to an activity somewhere better than 100,000 units a year, all by one manufacturer if we are to be successful in bringing houses within the advantages of scientifically paced industry. Taking the optimum, the largest number of houses ever built in one year by any one contractor was during this last war when 5,000 dwelling units were turned out by one contractor in one year. Therefore, the most extreme case of house building fell far short of the minimum figures we were talking about – 100,000 per year.

It was intercsting to see what would happen if we upped the record building performance from 270,000 150-ton houses to somewhere in the millions, thus talking in economical mass production figures of the automobile business (5,000,000 units a year). You will find that the tonnage to be carried by the U.S. cconomy would be way beyond the capacity of all the transportation system. An annual production of 1,000,000 single family dwellings (150 ton) would cause an over-all industrial economy effort over twice that demonstrated at the 1944 World War peak.

When people talk just off hand about an enormous building shortage today and they talk about upping dollar appropriations to get out 1,000,000 houses, they are really not well informed, because they are talking about handling a tonnage twice that of their best war year.

Now, to come back to the principles of industry, there is one more point it is going to be necessary to make in order to begin to transfer the phenomenon house into the industrial equation. The point I am going to make simply stresses a point already made, which is that of mensured performance per pound per hour.

It was fairly easy for me to measure and demonstrate that the performance of the industrial end products, and particularly of the complex inventions which attained mass production, was enormously better than the predecessor methods of attaining facility in the respective categories.

The automobile, for instance, in the category of transportation provided a service enormously better than that of the horse and burgy. The auto’s performance was not only measurably better, but the span of performance was tremendous; the horse and buggy on the negative side required a great deal of stable work. You had to build a barn to hold your hay. There was an enormous time service that must be given just to the service of that transportation. There was a relatively small net of time for the use of the transportation. The automobile, of course, could go way beyond the distance that the horse and buggy could go, and it could go very much more rapidly. Overnight the little individual by use of this new method of transportation, which cost him very much more initially (an industrial characteristic) than horse and buggy suddenly could do what no man had been able to do before in transportation. In all history no king with his coach and four could come anwhere near the performance little man could get out of his new mechanical transportation.

Suddenly little man was in physical fact a superior human being to all presious monarchs. That increased performance event was terribly important psychologically because in your prc-automobile times man’s motion was extremely limited and he could not get outside of the confines of the original placement of house. Very few men ever traveled out of the first horizontal circle wherein they were born. Families stayed for centuries within the original horizon which was the limit of their experience, their conceptions, their economics; it was the limit of their practical thinking. It is not surprising that they thought of this as a flat world, to which square town blocks and cubical dwellings and square dealings were natural, and the curves of nature’s structures unnatural, if not immoral. Of course, as a result of static housing they were extremely self-centered, economically and politically speaking.

‘The automobile suddenly took them over the horizon, as they previously had seen the feudal lord or the well-to-do in their con-munity alone able to do. Little man’s whole world and his practical potentials had changed for him in the terms of automobile. Inherent industrial principles had emancipated him as no political scheme could ever profit him.

He might not have any particular place to go, but just the potential of going, the joy of riding, had a great deal to do with man’s sudden new realization of the real world flung endlessly about him in all directions.

He found the people in the next town to be perfectly all right, neither ‘savages’ nor ‘bums’. Ile found that they did things in pretty much the same way as he; he could get pretty goud products over the horizon. He began to range outward to enlarge his world with increasing frequency, speed, directly attained knowledec.

In effect, the front porch on which man had previously sat and watched the limited world go by, because he was pretty tired from all the burdensome toil of limited local survival, from limited local potentials, suddenly had been furnished with wheels and he could go about the world on his new front porch.

‘The industrially mass produced complex transportation did so much for him that man was able to overcome his own great inertia of habits, in the wars of doing things.

It seems to me then that the factor of enormous improvement in performance inherent in transfer from the craft to the industria system was a very important factor and that the fantastic increase in performance required to dislodge the old way of doing things was as important in principle as the other principles already cited. You must remember that man didn’t think he wanted other men to go at more than five miles an hour. or possibly ten miles an hour, but no faster. It took a lot of courage to buy a car and it was not until the banks found it was an extremely good thing- that they could make as good money out of autos as out of mortgages – that they gave any cal encouragement along those lines. In short, the gain had to be enormous to offset the inertia of man against himself. Therefore, in principle, if we are to get houses into industrial mass production, they will have to be so much better than anything man ever thought of having before as to be able to offset that inherent mental inertia.

‘Better than’ brings us abruptly to the matter of performance of house. We find that people haven’t classified to any important degree the standards of performance of house, and for a very good reason. As engineers you certainly understand that man is born inside the frame of scientific measurement reference’, therefore, it is impossible unless he gets ‘outside of the whole phenomenon house for him to be very critical of his performance standards. In the matter of measuring performance of dynamic products, such as automobiles or anything that moves, the history of performance facts is accelerated for high speed comparison of the appraiser stationed outside the arena of performance.

Man starts life crawling around on the floors and associating the smell of the floor and the color of the walls with the most important events in his life which are warmth of understanding and love. I found it very hard to discuss house scientifically with people. Architects were verv tactful with people and knew how to discuss these delicate things, but compromised science at every turn to please the ignorance of a well-dullared patron. You could however discuss big buildings and hotels scientifically, which man had evolved from houses and which had perforce to discard the idiosyncrasies of the one for service to the common needs of the many. Because the hotel ‘guest’ found public buildings impersonal affairs, he also found himself inadvertently ‘outside the frame of reference which quickly aroused critical facultics and advanced his desired standards. He might for instance have a privy at home, but he insisted on his private bath with modern plumbing at the hotel, or he would not think of having the sponge and lace curtains in his bathroom at the hotel that he found at home. When he went traveling he manifested to his own surprise a high set of standards, but at home, no, you could not get him to see that critically. So we had to take advantage of his inadvertent out of house behavior in learning about converting the house into the advantages of industrial technology.

Now I will relate some of the performance characteristics that we could measure in determining standards of houses. In order to say that we are going to make ‘house’ do much more than a house ever did before, it is essential that we first discover and set up the categories of performance. First and foremost the house is to be conceived of scientifically as man’s initial advantage relative to forces of environment. He is born into the situation, it is a tough one and he must be aided in his survival. The house can be considered as his first line of defense against the large category of elements which seck constantly to destroy him, such as fire, earthquake, tornado, flood, pestilence, politics, selfishness. Then you can catalogue the clements or forces which seck to destroy him inside his house as well. These are bacteria, accident, Inziness and habits (which have to be severely inspected) and the routine inevitable functions of man as a process, that is cating, sleeping, being clean, refusing, etc., which if you did not help him with by physical apparatus of sanitation, heat and cold controls, etc., might readily get the better of him. Technology can help him to gain great advantage over the routine necessities.

Thus you might provide man a fairly large increment of his own time-which is all that he has indisputably as his own—therefore some command over his life. Relative to this latter category of performance standards, for house, which are on the plus side, you can give him measurably improved timely means of articulating his spontaneous necessities -of exploration or expression. If a man wants to write and can write better with a typewriter, the typewriter must not be buried under his overshoes, in the hall closet, because that is too much trouble and he is frustrated by inadequacies of house. Things should be made easy for him to do; he must be able to pick up the telephone and talk wherever he wants to. It should be cast for him to make his primary articulations extending his inherent facilitics to mechanically advantaged magnitudes, ‘talk around the world, ‘see’ to the other side of the earth, instrument his fingers, his hands, his communication, his sight. If he wants to see at night. technology flows the energy of the sun to his fingertip command. We must delimit his original faculties, his means of appraising the universe and his means of doing something about it, which is by his own hands. That seems to be the main statement of positive performance of house.

Then we discovered that while a house had been an initial advantage to man in an agricultural economy, wherein he owned his own piece of land and tilled the soil with increasing facility, that house as he built it there fixedly to the ground became an initial handicap instead of an initial advantage in terms of an industrial economy whercin man was moving ever more rapidly, to work new sources of matcrials and power and to establish new lines of distribution to newly opened industrial areas.

And that motion pattern is only beginning for he has as yet only started to use a few of the chemical elements in industry and is seemingly bound to ultimate use of all the ninety-two situated over the whole surface of the globe; and while industry finds it expedient to decentralize toward energy sources or toward meting points between energy sources and elementary sources, it must also go forth from manufacturing centrals to serve eventually all people of the carth – of whom it has as yet come to service but thirty-seven per cent, with about a thirty per cent industrial menu which, with the industrialization of flying and finally of a world housing industry, will attain a ninety per cent menu. Thus man developed need of decentralizing rapidly to his work, and is now in precipitous need of so doing.

He has increasing frequency of need of changing his geographical relationships to the fluctuating industrial pattern, yet he has been building his house under a philosophy of fixedness. Thus it becomes evident that the number one performance characteristic of the dwelling prototype of the industrial mass production must be ability to adiust its occupants to this increasingly dynamic world picture, vet without compromise of quality or standard of excellence.

To comprehend that new relationship of man’s housing needs I made measurements of the history of man’s motion, and the measurements that I made at that time I have since amplified and charted into clearly defined trend curves as the data became increasingly available. These figures on the motion of man serve as the basis of appraising our cconomy and its direction. Here is the net information:

Up to 1913 the average motion of man about his environment was limited essentially to his locomotion by his own two feet. That was his primary means of getting around and it tended to confine most men’s lives to survival within the original geographical horizon of their birth. Many measurements have been made of the average distances that people walk in their various occupations. ‘The annual average walking of the United States citizen, including all kinds of special occupational walking, plus average home or leisure to-and-froing, and ranging from the soldier to housewife to man in prison, is thirteen hundred miles per capita per annum.

Thirteen hundred miles was probably the world average as well and had probably been the average throughout the ages. The first years of the industrial revolution did not add much to man’s annual travels beyond the distance accomplished on foot. In addition, in 1913 he was traveling by some mode of vehicle other than his legs less than four hundred miles per capita per annum, totalling in all 1,700 miles per capita per annum of U.S. travel. So primary luco-motion was as yet that of man’s own legs and his economic horizon the original fixed horizon and his home was logically safe and fixed at the center of the scene and of the universe about it. With the beginning of the World War I we began to see man increasing his motion to a degree greater than previously demonstrated in all history. He was being transported across the Atlantic Occan in enormous numbers. Men from all over the world were being moved by the millions. But just taking the case of the United States man will suffice vividly to plot the trend. By 1919 as man came out of the war we discovered that he had suddenly attained 1600 miles per capita per annum by vehicle in the United States in addition to his 1300 miles to and fro travel by leg.

As he came out of the last war he began to buy cars that were left over from the army as well as the first crop of privately owned life-time’ automobiles that were being secondhanded to little man because World War I technology had obsoleted them.

Suddenly little man began to joy ride around in those cars continuing to increase the degree of per capita motion previously set up during wartime mobilization. The result showed up measurably to the extent that for the first time in all known history (U.S.) man (bespeaking ultimately all men) had moved further in one year by mechanical means than he had moved on his feet. That was certainly as abrupt a change in evolution of specics as can be anywhere dis-covered. Man was by performance characteristics an entirely new species, though the change had been long in the process—through all ages of scientific and intellectual and technical pioneering. This was only the pay-off moment—the emancipation of society from its shackled environment.

Since that turning point in 1919 the curve of annual motion per capita in the United States has increased constantly, that is to say: the over-all motion has never decreased with all the pressure of depression. In 1939, he was going over 6,000 miles per capita per annum in the United States and that is the average of all people including prisoners and invalids. The special categories were going, of course, greater distances than the average. The housewife was averaging ten thousand; the salesman thirty thousand; the airplane hostess one hundred thousand. People were mobilizing to a degree wherein it was preposterous to use the old economic saw of “the rolling stone gathers no moss’, implying that anybody who moved around was a good for nothing, a hobo, a gypsy. In fact your industrial community leaders were the most traveled people, and the least traveled were the imprisoned miscreants.

The motion was so great that the whole political system based on static communities (states) was proving a fundamental disadvantage, a disadvantage that democracy had soon to throw off through emergency measure by world-wide mobilization and full-scale mechanization in order to survive, and so sure as democracy attempts complete demobilization again so will mortal world emergency occur again. The people staying at home to exploit the old political state became the political machine, staying at home in the outworn boroughs while the more able and wise moved away. Thus the local political machines were able to get away with more and more dirty work.

It became serious economically as well as politically. When our forefathers came together and developed the Constitution of the first Continental Congress, etc., they were not only the representatives of their districts, but also the news gatherers and they came home by horse bearing the news of the last letter from Europe, of the events in other towns and states, and explained those new economic situations and received people’s direct reaction to the news. They then went back and acted upon the freshly digested news. This was a direct democracy in effect. The frequency of travel and communication was actually in synchronization with the speed of expression, reaction and action. Thus union of states became a successful system.

But we now have attained a degree of disynchronization wherein economically speaking we still have a static and statutory state; and though news goes around the world in split seconds, people must still vote on the preposterously untrue basis of federal and world news received by the individual once in four years. Every two or four years citizens attempt to express by ballot some kind of appropriate reaction to what has been done meanwhile by their national and state representatives. That over-all reaction is almost valueless as a guide to specific constructive action, for it must confine its expression almost entirely to NEGATION of the least desirable forces and there it stops.

None can remember all their day-by-day reactions to vital events that they would have liked to have expressed at the time. Thus the phenomenon, a static base democracy (as with a static base house) is becoming an enormous disadvantage to happy survival due to the lack of synchronization between the relative velocities of news and political action. This is typical of the cffects of the acceleration of communication and personal travel. In fact the curve of increase in motion of man has been so rapid that it is seen to be an accelerating or ski-shaped curve. In 1936, the curve indicated that the average motion of men in the United States, by 1941, 1942 and 1943, would be going up way beyond ten thousand miles per capita per annum and that such magnitude of increase could only be achieved by mobilization for another World War. That was also the only way I could figure how U.S. man could possibly attain the indicated degree of foreign travel as well. Also the enormous growth of the curve of flying trends per capita could only indicate world war—importantly in the air—because there was no comparable increase in the individual private plane industry curves.

Another characteristic of man’s world mobilization trend as spearhcaded first within the United States economy reveals that man’s motion is accomplished intermittently. He changes his home base with moderately increasing frequency in years and from the newer base he increases his range and frequency of going out and back in all directions. That is a trend factor to which most housers have paid little attention.

They have thought of man as possibly moving his base from Chicago to Wichita but that was the end of that motion factor. They had not thought about what happens when he begins to increase his one base range and frequency. He suddenly begins to cruise to overnight ranges in his daily work and on vacation to go to Florida in the winter or to Colorado in the summer, and as he goes he stays in two or three houses on the way.

So you find more and more roofs per annum per capita are required within this increase in range and frequency of travel-—because the home base absences are too short to warrant subleased occupation to others.

This multiple roof factor was one of the big factors that was commonly overlooked. Economists were paying some attention to the annual losses of houses by catastrophe such as fire, flood and earthquake and tornado, which incidentally were very large-around seventy thousand houses a year lost. The catastrophe factor was a very large figure as pitted against the low records of building, such as in 1932 when we only turned out thirty thousand dwellings in one year. In 1932, forty thousand more houses were lost by catastrophe than were built. Economists also paid some attention to the increasing number of new families caused by marriages. There were a million annual weddings in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. But marriages began to decrease with continued depression until World War II, because there were really no desirable new homes to go to within the economic means of the newlyweds. The concept of being able to get away and have your own new home had diminished considerably.

The war prospect of separations suddenly accelerated marriages again and inevitably babies. There was more money in circulation and people were moving even more rapidly. Young marrieds dreamed that they might be able to get together after the war. Now we discover that two million G.I.s with new familics are returning from war to no prospect of obtaining their own house and home and that is scrious political stuff. Though the new marriage curve was obviously the best indicator of housing need trends, the factor of multiplication of roofs occupied annually by increasing frequency and ranging of a mobilized people (which space became permanently filled by a war expanded economy) is possibly more responsible for drying up available living space than any other factor. It dried it up across the farming countryside and into the suburbs of toured towns.

I am going to digress one bit more and go back to the measurable performance characteristics of houses.

I would like to digress to the point of saying that it was lack of inclusion of enough factors in the building prediction that let us be as blind as we are to the enormous shortage of housing which was developing not only throughout the United States but throughout the whole world, particularly over the whole world, as the world population began to ascend that curve of annual motion per capita. As we entered this World War II the world averaged an annual motion of four hundred vehicular miles per capita, somewhere near the critical point where the United States was in 1013 when it suddenly took the great upswing to a mechanized economic mobilization.

We have in the suburbs and cities many large houses, one: because men who made money in the early days of the great industrial advantage were inclined to build ostentatiously large mansions, and two: because of the fact that there were very large families. (The numbers of children per family starts back in the 1Goos around ten children per family average and has slowly lowered until it is now one and one-half children per average family today. The mortality rate was very high and people did not live to a great age, and life scemed to solve that problem by producing more children per marriage.)

When we first started into this highly industrialized society and the great increase in motion of man occurred we at first dealt with the increasing population by subdividing large housing into apart-ments. This temporary solution seemed to be satisfactory, but the many new dwelling units recorded in the annual building figures frequently represented subdivided structures that already existed and did not properly represent new construction. This made the record highly deceptive and obscured the disaster magnitude of ultimate housing shortage—and as a result ignorance suppressed interim development of an industrial mass production technique of scientific era dwelling facilities.

If you add all those curves together plus the increase in the number of roofs that must be occupied by the individual, vou find it is not at all surprising that society has now suddenly come to a dead end of available dwelling space.

During the last quarter century less than five per cent of all single family dwellings were erected by union labor. Due to the low economic return to the building trades involved in the field manufacture and assembly of single family houses, there has been a generation’s lapse in craft apprenticeship which has reduced the ranks of the building trades to a very few who are actually skilled. Those who are left now have an average age of sixty vears. The best amongst them have drifted into steady annual employment in the development and tooling activities of industrial establishments. This is another reason why none should be surprised to be suddenly faced with a twelve-million United States house shortage.

Nor need any be surprised at the shortage emergency if they observe the preposterous rate of housing obsolescence financially accepted in a mobilizing world. The average age of all houses in the United States is now forty years. But the average expectancy of economic uscfulness of housing has been predicted upon traditional obsolescence data which gains its average of one hundred and forty years longevity from the pre-industrial birth of a minority of expensively built houses. One hundred and forty years is a slow rate of obsolescence compared to our industrial ccle rates of seven years in automobiles and fifteen years in railroad equipment, etc.

When we realize that people are moving up from the old housing standards and that the standards are improving rapidly in all other technologies we can concede that the obsolescence rate will be suddenly contracted by the coming of mass production in a new housing phase of industry. When industrial mass production gains speed all old houses will become obsolete and we will need new housing for everybody. That is the final practical analysis.

This condition of shortage has been enormously increased at the present time by the war itself and the amount of great destruction over the rest of the world. The war didn’t hit South America or North Amcrica but in Europe, where you had twenty-nine per cent of the human family, the total number of bombed-out families whose houses are gone is so great that if every house in the United States were destroyed tonight the condition would be caual to that in Europe this minute. A condition in which ten per cent of the human family is in such mortal distress is a condition that is going to affect us all intimately within a world in which we are suddenly going across our own country in four hours and where we are not more than five hours away from that condition of families out under the sky, or sleeping in the cellars or in barns. You can assume that that is going to be a highly important economic fact in precipitating the gret changes that we are talking about.

I will leave these figures which I have been reciting and which surely indicate to you the necessity of talking about mass production of housing by industry and come back to the standards of house performance that we were talking about when I digressed.

It is evident that we must talk now about a very important factor in performance, that of quick installation and removal of housing at places where people need them or want them. We have also discovered that in attaining this high speed of installation we must also kcep the dwelling facilitics highly desirable through development of unprecedentedly high standards of performance. We are not then talking about giving them trailers and we must not talk about giving them things that they consider a lower standard.

So, in discussing the new world-wide dwelling service you are talking about a phenomenon that is as new as the telephone, something that is installed where you need it, but you don’t consider as secondhand, second rate, temporary, or compromise. It must be a very desirable dwelling and you use it as long as you are there and when you move away you simply notify the service office that vou are through or moving. You move to Florida and they simply install another telephone instrument or dwelling for you down there. They probably do not ship the instrument down to you from Wichita, but you do not consider the one you et in Florida secondhand either even though occupied by others before you. It is a service and the instrument improves constantly and the word ‘secondhand’ does not occur relative to any part of either of these rapidly improving services of communication or dwelling.

Though developed first as a number of independent company operations, the telephone network of communication services was a transcendental industry—born anew out of science and superimposed upon the economic geograph as a comprehensive system in which the telephone sets were only the contact points for the customer. The telephone system was transcendental because it did not grow out of an earlier business as a reform. In the same way we are now developing a transcendental industry of dwelling service whose high standards must be completely convincing to the human family.

When you go about reducing the weight of a house ninety-eight per cent, i.e. from 150 tons to 3 tons while at the same time increasing the standard of performance to ensure a thousand-fold production increase, it becomes quickly evident that just thinning down the walls and cutting off the corners or decreasing the dimensions and cheapening quality will not come near hitting the mark. To halve exterior dimension decreases volume by eight: thus the required increment is not found by diminishing dimension. In fact, weight per usable cubic foot increases with such superficial attempts at savings.

Furthermore, standards of high performance require determination of optimum dimension. Man needs a certain amount of space under his control in order not to have claustrophobia and in order to maintain his sense of dignity. In 1927 that space looked larger to me than it seems to me now. I started with over generous assumption and brought it down slowly to the space that we have now put under enclosure down in our shop. It now has 12,000 cubic feet and 1,017 square fect of floor space. That volume includes the space in the dome and ventilator as well.

Now it was a great temptation when we dimensioned the first prototype house for our mass reproduction scheduling to make the radius a little bigger, because as you increase radius your weight per cubic foot decreases. You could surely make a fine weight performance showing if vou forgot optimum size. But we diciplined ourselves to hold to what seemed to prove an optimum one family space which would not incur the disadvantages of too much house to take care of.

Reviewing many of the principles with which you are familiar as engincers, I will retrace for you my own 1927 mental processes while initiating the complex family of assumptions upon which to realize a first trial prototype of the scientific dwelling machine -the public contact instrument of a world-wide service industry.

In the first place, I said, ‘I think I will immediately inspect the degrees to which science has developed to date in improving fundamentals of structural mechanical, and mensuration advantages.’

This was not as bad as it sounds. Science is the antithesis of chaos. Science is obscure only to cultivated momentum of ignorance. Employment of science involves disciplines only in the arts of simplification—arrived at by separation of constituent factors of the problem for isolated observation of each respectively, therefrom to deduce and classify the fundamental principles involved.

Certainly geometry would be the first art of potential advantage to warrant inspection in approaching the problem of house. The advantage, for instance, of circle over square was evident in the relative proportions of space, enclosed by the perimeter of each respectively. The shorter the perimeter per unit of enclosed space the shorter the wall built upon such a plan, and therefore the less the weight per unit of space enclosed—a typical performance per pound concept. We, however, live in three dimensions so we would have to think realistically of hemispherical space advantage over rectilinear box space as built upon the square and circle plans.

Let us inspect the dimensional factors of a 650-square-foot house, which is the minimum standard F.HA. or N.H.A. ‘permanent dwelling’, as compared with those of a ‘circle’ structure enclosing the square and approximately tangent to its corners. 

That 650-square-foot house with twenty-five and a half feet on a side would require 102 feet of wall to surround it—the 36-foot circle requires a wall 113 feet long to surround it; that is only 11 feet farther around the circle than around the square requiring approximately eleven per cent more wall, and the circle encloses 1,017 square feet and the square 650, so eleven per cent more wall encloses fifty-six per cent more area.

But, since we live in three dimensions you have to inspect the volume rather than the plan of the house to ascertain the relative space aspects of these geometrical forms. You will find the one story N.H.A. house to contain 6,500 cubic feet and our one story cylinder hemisphere combination to contain 12,000 feet, so there is approximately a one hundred per cent spacial increase to be had for cleven per cent more of running wall. That seems to indicate such an enormous performance per unit of weight advantage that we must pay attention to it unless some other factor of measurably greater advantage can be discovered to displace this initial argument for a circular shape assumption.

In 1927 the curvature of structural materials in gencral was an expensive operation whether simple or compound. We did not have stainless steel and aluminums were very poor tensilely, flexorally and in hardness. ‘Though desirous of ultimatelv attaining an efficient circular structure, I decided for the time being to use the hexagon which represented the vector or force diagram of the circle, and to stretch walls in tension chords to form a six-sided dwelling enclosure. I was thus obtaining the nearest approximation to a circle in a straight line form. However, I hoped and assumed from the alloy trend curves that the technology of materials would soon improve so that I could fashion stiff circles of thin but stable skin section. That has now happened as those of you who have inspected the prototype know.

In 1927 I talked to aluminum company engineers about the use of aluminum in housing and they thought that was funny. In those days they had only two kinds of aluminum products, ‘soft and ‘softer’. Two years later aluminum was used architecturally for the first time as a decoration in the Chrysler Building. Though the aluminum company engineers thought I was being funny or ‘stunty’ in 1927 I had come to consider aluminum because I was interested in looking at every light clement and because aluminum was amongst the most abundant of all the world’s inventory of chemical elements and because I was thinking immediately of potential performance per pound, that would pay off so handsomely and widely as to justify complete readjustment of economic fucus, toward, for instance, development of high tensile aluminum alloys and mass production of that new product. (This has now happened.) But I didn’t find any sympathy amongst industrial engineers of 1927 because the automobile world which then paced industry was not educated to performance per pound economics as was the shipbuilding industry and the then infant aircraft industry.

In the assembly of these complicated inventions which have gone into mass production, we observed earlier that almost all of them were assembled on some kind of track. The first complex invention to be built by man was a ship, which embodied practically all technology then known to man. Ships were the great focus for development of invention as they were key to empire building and original source exploration for industrial materials of premium performance.

Shipping and shipbuilding embodied the first general activity identifiable as full-scale ‘industry’ in iuxtaposition to ‘agriculture’ as a basic economic system of commonwealth making-‘industry’ coming to burst the perennial and static bonds which circumscribed agriculture, thus challenging agriculture as economic and political pacemaker.

The complex invention assembly—ship—had short feeder lines, constituting component parts manufacturies alongside of the assembly way, a forging shop, a wood-working shop, a foundry, a rope walk, and a sail loft, etc. These short feeder lines were little specialized pre-forming and pre-assembling industries which fed up to the main assembly line on a marine railway and were the precursors of our modern component parts vendors who supply the assemblv lines of the auto or aircraft assembly lines. The assembly line did not move until the ship was completed enough to float, but thereafter it was floated to the fitting-out dock where it received a temporary set of spars—thereafter many subsequent assemblies were applied at successive stations with special tools and jigs. A British ship, for instance, would sail to America with cargo-receiving her permanent spars and riggings from the ‘Royal Pines’ at Wiscasset, Maine—taking a cargo of ice from there to Charleston, South Carolina, where she drydocked to receive a copper sheathing on her bottom and a load of cotton to be made into her permanent sails upon return to England—thus the first assembly line was some eight thousand miles long.

There was usually only one ship up on the (rail) ways at a time, and they finally moved the ship and put up another. But this was the industrial beginning for the moving line production.

It is to be noted that all of the ‘moving lines’ products are designed fur dynamic life. The ship was proven dynamically by the seas. Ships served to advance technology very rapidly due to the accelerated test of great stress and great strain. As the ship slipped down the ‘ways’ to be waterborne it could afford to be of considerable tonnage and enormously complex. Man did not have to move it; he let gravity move it. Being both complex and tested by dynamic life yet more or less unlimited in size, ships early provided a direct outlet for original scientific ingenuity. 

The ship as the pioneer of advanced technology throughout centuries became also the first logical place for the application of steam

However, no sooner did man start to build steam boilers and engines into ships as they went up on the ‘ways than he also discovered he could use the same steam engine while still up on the ‘ways to do assembly work on the ship. It didn’t take man long to think of extending the rail ‘ways’ in the opposite direction from the sea up on to the land and of running the boiler off on wheels about the yards on the marine rail ‘way’, first to move materials from yard to ship and then further inland for materials for the ship, and later and further for cargoes for the ship, thus starting the land railway system. Thus railroads came to be built. So the technology of the sea went up on the land, not only to build the railroad but to carry the industrial principles themselves and imported industrial equipment inland to establish an entirely new scientific way of producing and assembling wealth and of linking the internal wealth of the many lands to each other by the seven seas, thus to establish the primary network of a dynamic world system of progressively advantaged industrial survival

Railroads went out upon the land in the established technology of very heavy tonnage characterizing the dynamic necessities of great ships and mountainous seas. Thus the basic principle of land-borne tonnage—that is the principle of maintaining high proportion of sprung weight to unsprung weight—was incepted. You had a hard track and you had a hard wheel and that called for great weight on the locomotive to get traction on the driver wheels, and increased weight seemed to be also the best way of insulating the rider and cargo against shattering road shocks. Because the engines and cars were heavy and had great inertia it was necessary to insert springs between the wheels and the carriages. This scheme took advantage only of the inherent inertia of a heavy sprung portion and unfortunately lent undue emphasis to advantage obtained only by increasing weight.

Thus also the concept of springing a large proportion of weight was immediately adopted from heavy-minded railroad engineering by the automobile manufacturer when he began to try to produce a nice luxurious ride in order to make his cars highly salable. Unfortunately he did not know or realize that he could achieve advantageous spring ratios by reducing the unsprung wheel weight proportion instead of accomplishing the same ratio of sprung and unsprung weight by adding to the weight of the sprung portion. Thus the auto manufacturer as well as the railroads set in evolution a chain of increasingly inefficient general assembly events of the complex invention automobile—which inefficiency was progressively offset, despite the general assembler’s error, by the improved technology of the component parts manufacturers who embraced the world of individual mechanical ingenuity and primary industrial enterprise.

The first automobile inventors did not go in for that high portion of sprung weight or try to increase the weight of the whole vehicle in order to kcep the proportion of sprung weight high over unsprung to gain the luxury of inertia. It was the manufacturers who did so. I am tracing this initial weight building error of the two great industries, railroads and autos, in order that we may see clearly why we must recapture for our housing industry the increased performance pound advantages of the original shipbuilding and modern aircraft industry.

What happened with autos was as follows: the first automobile inventors went in for and were really interested in the relationship of the power plant and the transmission of the power into traction at the driving wheel and they accomplished some light and beautiful engineering as can still be witnessed in museums. But then their backers began to try to sell the cars on the bumpy old carriage roads. They were using old carriage springs and carriage wheels and didn’t know much about spring frequency or snubbing and three-point landings and (with certain exceptions) went along on four wheels which were bound to be redundant—because first one and then another and then another and another of four possible triangles fought for predominant three-point contact.

The ride was so bad that the quick and lazy solution for immediate success was to increase the weight and relative inviolability of momentum of the sprung portion. The automobile world did secure a reasonably smooth ride, but at a cost of a very high amount of pounds per unit of performance. And the first group of automobile companies to fail were the automobile manufacturers who produced very heavy cars despite unquestionably luxurious riding. There was nothing the matter with those cars in overall performance, outside of the enormous amount of weight they took to give that performance and the overall energy in efficiency. They realized in developed transportation and comfort only five to fifteen per cent of the efficiency potential to input of original energy in fuel burned.

Some leading manufacturers of autos used so much weight that another manufacturer could make two cars of the same quantity of materials they used making one, and so the pound cost per unit of end performance was so high that they failed. That was not usually given by Wall Street as the factor of failure and I never heard that argument given during the ‘twenties. But as engineers we know it must have been one of the prime reasons and it fits the record of auto industry mortality very well.

You will find that the automobile world was not thinking of cars in terms of pounds, nor did it then or now sell its cars by the pound. So far as the public knew they were being sold for smooth ride, for name prestige or higher and higher speed or best trade-in terms. Nevertheless, behind the doors of its accounting and purchasing departments the automobile industry was competing strictly on a pound basis, and the Chevrolet, the Ford, and the Plymouth all got down to around 22½c a pound and a very strict weight class level.

Buicks with less production and more prestige were selling for 34c a pound, and in the high price group, Cadillacs for 50c a pound, while Rolls Royce jumped its snob class 5,000-pound equipage to $5.00 a pound (but nonetheless failed).

With the coming of the industrial era, the economic advantages attained by application of scientific principles were so enormously and widely beneficial and opened up so many new surprise sources of wealth that luck and ignorance were constant bedfellows.

Ignorantly steel manufacturers promoted the few inflicient outlets which used high and wasteful tons of easy-to-make mild steels instead of promoting the higher efficiency requirements of far more numerous small specialists who, despite big steel policy, found ways to make progress which uitimately and indirectly made the big money for big steel.

So lacking was the performance per pound language from the psychology of automobile selling that the automobile engincer found his boss uninterested in weight-saving performance designs which the engineer annually demonstrated in new racing cars. These racing cars nevertheless continually decreased in weight per unit of performance. Finally the racing cars weighed about one third (1,200 pounds) of the weight of production cars. At this level the manufacturers exercised their big business prerogatives and arbitrarily set new racing rules calling for the addition of a half ton of useless weight and a subsequent minimum 2,200 pounds per car. Unperturbed, the auto racers and inventors started a new racing class that satisfied the trend of efficiency. This was the ‘midget auto-racing’.

As the auto manufacturer favored the smooth heavy ride, he saw no good reason for cutting weight down; for which big steel applauded him. Furthermore. the automobile didn’t fall out of the sky if the engine stopped. Therefore, the mortality factor wasn’t directly evident in excessive weight in autos as it was distinctly evident later in the performance of airplanes. The mortality factor was there, however, in the weight which helped to kill in peacetime at wartime rates. It is not surprising that as we came into World War II automobile motors weighed thirteen pounds per horsepower against airplane motor weights of one pound per horsepower. How-ever, this differential pretty well bespoke the difference in quality of engineering and in the consideration of relative performance per pound of the respective industries.

In 1927 when I was looking around for high technical advantages serve the new housing industry, I discovered that I could obtain little help from the automobile industry. I learned that I need not expect it to be useful in helping to get houses into mass production, due primarily to the auto industry’s preoccupation with the wonders of an induced mass market through psychological manipulation of the public mind and its consequent lack of awareness of, or attention to, underlying performance per pound importance.

I knew there were only two production groups who would under-stand: the shipbuilders (but there they were tooled to use heavy plates for heavy seas for heavy cargoes and the aeronautical world. There were in 1927 only a handful of airplane manufacturers, yet the art was nonetheless beginning to accelerate and to attract broad public financial support. I had had enough experience with flying airplanes and subsequent building of planes to know how vitally important performance per pound was. Therefore, it looked, in 1927, as though our new industry of housing would have to wait until the airplane had become important enough in man’s affairs for him to establish a full-fledged industrial phase of manufacture. Not until then could we hope for a general technology that would make possible the building of sheer weight houses in mass production.

All the curves that I could measure in 1927 to 1928—whether of comparative rates of contraction or obsolescence in the various arts: or of invention gestation lags; or of alloyed tension improvement in metals; or of factors of housing crisis approach; or of annual increase in range and frequency of per capita travel—seemed to indicate that somewhere around twenty-one or twenty-two years would elapse before inception of the industrial phase of man’s preoccupation with the advantage of mass production and world-wide distribution of a science-designed dwelling service would occur. That meant miss production housing by 1948 to 1949. Interim acceleration may have advanced these dates slightly. We in this room have tangible reason for hoping this is so.

However in 1927 I made many assumptions based on twenty-one year interim gains to be reasonably expected, for instance, in aluminum metallurgy, and the scheduled gains began to show up only a few vears later to confirm validity of the original assumptions. Thus also, i planned in the terms of plastic materials being available for windows in 1948, though ‘plastics’ was an industry which by record only starts in 1926 and no such windows were then known to exist. I planned an electronic means for opening doors by a wave of the hand to break the No. 1 microbe train via the doorknob. A year later General Electric announced the photo-electric cell. As the many assumptions proved progressively correct I renewed my vigor in the scientific approach to housing.

With the establishment of these assumptions of a twenty-year lag, and scheduled advantage characteristics of interim improvement in available materials, we came to another important consideration, that of classification of the appropriate structural and mechanical principles that I must separate out and employ, not only in the end product but in the producing and distributing and servicing phases of the industrial scheme.

Here are some of the most important principles in the biology of structure; there are two fundamental types of stress, those of push and pull.

Structural systems represent equilibrium of compression and tension components in triangular convergence, acted upon and rendered cohesive by employment of constant external forces operating upon the system (primarily the force of gravity and secondarily thermo, and aero, and gyro dynamic variables, etc.). In the terms of push and pull, we find that the materials available to man throughout his whole past history up to three-quarters of a century ago favored a compressive emphasis in his structures.

His top ability in compression was 50,000 pounds per square inch (in stone) and his top tensile ability 5,000 pounds per square inch (in wood) that was, ten-to-one, in favor of compression. The ratio held from the stone age to 1858. Masonry joints provided a tensile strength of only so pounds per square inch — 1/1000 masonry’s compressive strength. Man had an enormous advantage compressively is far as stone itself went. Masonry, as against his best other materials, had a ten-to-one advantage (though from wood he could average 5,000 pounds per square inch initial performance. Today we have learned in wood technology of the hard, special sections in wood where 21,000 tensile occur—but rarely. Then in addition to the fact that the advantage in compression over tension was at least ten-to-one, wood rotted, and he couldn’t count on it. Its longevity was slight.

Therefore when man planned a permanent building, his advantage in compression was so enormous as to dictate its use exclusively. Churches often took centuries to build and therefore were fashioned almost entirely of compressivelv excellent stones. Practical man thought logically in terms of ‘might makes right’ and ‘weight and width’ for stability. The pyramid was a very good demonstration of that kind of thinking and ability. In the pyramid days he knew little even of compression arches which were developed later by the Romans. The Egyptians, Grecks and Romans learned something about tensile components in ships’ riggings from the Phoenician mariners, but they didn’t think much about tension in buildings because they used the tensile components of the earth’s crust to provide that requisite of structural systems.

When we come to 1861, it is not surprising that we had a Civil War in the United States—in terms of the basic economics—because man’s ability to structure changed completely. Production steel methods were invented in 1858, and the dynamo in 186o. Suddenly tensile ability in structures jumped to parity with compressibility through use of steel, and tensile ability in prime movers jumped to better than parity with compression prime movers as the magnet and coil of the dynamo came by electronic tension to challenge the efficiency of compression mechanics in over-all weight per unit of developed power. That was an enormous change. 

Mild steel got up to 50,000 pounds per square inch tensile strength. Steel had the same compressive strength as stone, and while steel didn’t gain in compressive ability over stone, stone and steel were used increasingly in composition together, first using only a tension rod between walls, as in the early Philadelphia warehouses where the star-tipped rods were used to kcep the walls from collapsing outwardly thus doing away with buttressing to some extent on the outside and allowing the buildings to go higher as well.

Then man begins to substitute steel for wood beams. Most of the original structural forms of steel are substitutions for carlier wood forms. Steel was at first employed only in the horizontal members of buildings where gravity operated at right angles to the structural axis and tensile ability was brought into full play.

Man could count on steel lasting much longer than wood, and steel was therefore used in bigger and more important buildings, and by the time we arrive at this century, we begin to see buildings substituting steel for stone in main vertical compression members as well, and not because of superior compressive strength but because of the improved ability to fasten horizontal tension members to the stcel verticals making it possible to build to considerable heights. However, the new ‘skyscrapers’ used the quadrangular framing forms first employed in wood framing, which as we pointed out earlier were fundamentally unstable. Only triangles are fundamentally stable.

In substituting steel for wood and stone, men could build higher due to the improved structural performance per pound—of total structure resting on the foundations—and in withstanding tensile stresses of earth motions and of windage. Though structural steel engincers dealt in this factor of increasing advantage of strength per unit of weight and turned the increment into greater heights, despite the architects’ quadrangles, the principles were a mystery to architects and public alike who still thought erroncously of excessive weight as providing additional security in buildings.

By the end of the World War I you see stone and steel being intermingled pretty freely in skyscrapers where steel and stone were used alternately in compression, and steel alone for high tensile strength, with stone gradually losing to steel even in compression as the cost of stone’s shaping and the distance of its sources became constantly greater, with the Empire State Building as the last great quadrangu-lar framing monument showing much steel in its exterior.

With the coming of World War I, another great basic change in structural and mechanical ability of man occurred: that was the change of metallurgy itself from a craft brew to a high scientific art. 1917 saw the beginning of general industrial uses of alloy steels. The 1914-18 British ordnance, a product of the new industrial warfare, majored in steel products. Suddenly the British guns and other weapons were beginning to wear out and the ships were beginning to be sunk faster than they could make them. So they said, ‘At least the guns that are wearing out faster than they are made can be made to last longer.’ That caused a great deal of searching in the desk drawers of dusty laboratories and the bringing out of alloy steel formulas filed awav as nuisances to casy exploitation of the status quo. Chrome-nickel steel, for instance, which had been invented in 1854, was brought into production to make guns last longer in 1916.

At that time a peace-minded American industrialist, who first tried to stop world warring, decided that the only way to stop it was to accelerate it to its finish. So it came about that Henry Ford lent an enormously productive hand and the British were pleased. They asked him to come over there and he spent a lot of time with the British and became tremendously interested in steel alloying. He brought steel alloying back in American industry in a big way and introduced it, not lust into his own machinery set-up to make it last longer, but into his end product. He took up the theory ‘I won’t have to change my models so frequently to court public use if I can make my models last longer. They will sell therselves by the improved wear and service.’ So he began putting steel alloys into the models, and by the time he produced the last multi-millionth Model Tin 1927, it had fifty-four different types of steels that were far less alike than rubies and diamonds.

To such an extent had Ford gone into the steel alloys that he decided he could not afford to buy primary shapes from steel com-panics for remelting and alloying – he would have to make his own special steel. Thus Ford entered into the steel and coal business and then into his own railroads and ore ships and mines. Later on, when he could persuade the steel companics to meet his special alloy requirements in order to regain the enormous Ford business, Ford got rid of his steel and coal mines and railroads as far as he could because, going deply into the industrial principles, he was discovering that I must not be dictated to by inventories of material, otherwise I cannot afford to initiate improvement’ which may abandon old materials.

For the same reasons of industrial logic that persuaded Ford that cost was very high if he had to take the original steel and melt it up arain to make himself some new alloys, he also said, ‘I must not be embarrassed by any over-buying; the material must not run me. I must not have commitments beyond immediate visible needs.’ He was in revolution against the idea that we had discovered as paralyzing the evolution of improvement in housing, wherein the material was available before design and you made the best house you could—but only out of the materials ‘on hand’—a proposition made ludicrous if we think of trying to make airplanes of limestone and oak because these are in abundance near the aircraft plant. Ford said, ‘The material must not run me, therefore I am not going to make long commitments. I will encourage and if necessary force other people to make alloy steels for me and on “short order”. I must not put materials or things in warehouses, because material in a warehouse is just like a mine above ground and represents compromise of evolution capital.’ Ford worked over into an entirely new industrial phase in the late ‘twenties, which he demonstrated to a high degree when he came out with Model A. He got into something way beyond his famous moving production line, it was his new world-wide timing plan – his mobile inventory flow control.

He decided the thing to do was to buy directly from the ground, and to make spot commitments only and clear out at the original world source in direct relationship to the special number of orders he was to reproduce, off any one prototype, against direct dealer purchase schedules, submitted annually and corrected monthly and weekly in advance.

With firm commitments from his distributors, he got to the point where he was ordering a ship of nitrate out of Iqueque, Chile, South America, and a carload of limestone out of Joliet, Illinois, U.S.A., and that ship had to start loading and the carload had to start rolling that same day. He paid cash in advance to the seller at his local bank and had Ford men follow up in Joliet and Iqueque to see that the shipment rolled, and Ford checkers rode the trains and ships.

Thus Ford made an enormous investment in world-wide motion—in having his entire inventory in motion with ‘follow up’ as his prime control. His constantly rolling inventory of materials averaged seventy million dollars-worth. His animated maps pictured the positions at all times. This was a ‘first in world-wide industrial logistics. It was a pattern adopted for World War II by enemy and ally alike, which came to be known as ‘mechanized opcrations’, and even as it eventuated in parachute armies and landing on unprotected shores it foretells extraordinarily direct methods of industrial service strategy for our new worldwide industry, in which harbors and even shorelines are losing significance.

The only place where the Ford materials stopped moving in his 1928 scheme was at the point where inventory was visible along the assembly line—the stacks of mudguards or tires were his visible check on inventory. He used no warehouses. He could really see the stack getting low and if the stacks were too low he was ordering another ship out of Iqueque and the other remote world source points. It was really history’s most extraordinary time-motion picture articulated out of the human imagination. It is the picture we have to consider critically ourselves in arranging for a constantly improving version of it adapted to the industrialization of housing. We are launching a completely mobile industry, which must be radio-controlled to fingertip sensitivity that can arrange instant correction of any service ‘friction’.

Reviewing briefly: Ford’s initiative obviously threw a great change into the whole industrial world, the repercussions of which we certainly felt in the terms of this war, wherein you were mobilized to world-wide ranging and frequency of mechanical evolution accelerated to daily and hourly changes affording performance gains immeasurable by any historical yardsticks:—wherein sea technology went right up on the land and the whole world picture reached a concept of landing wherever you wanted—never mind harbors, go up on the beach, come out of the sky wherever you want. This was the direct approach -the mobile approach, entirely mechanized approach which meant enormous magnitudes of technical advantage which meant that science and intellect were hoisted into the con-mand saddle for keeps.

In that alloying of steel industrially pioneered by Ford, the measurement of the improved performance of steel indicated very rapid improvements in the tensile properties—in ultimate yield levels; but slow increase in the compressive performance.

“Right rocketed over might’, compressive performance went only from 50,000 to 70,000 pounds while tensile strengths went from 50,000 pounds per square inch in rapid succession tu 70,000; 90,000; 120,000; 150,000; 200,000; 300,000; 450,000.

With compression improving so slowly and tension improving so rapidly, it was natural that man’s industrial preoccupation was with tension. Ile knows a great deal about the metals in tension, but knows very little about them in direct compression. It is a fairly obscure phase of his advantage. But tensile strength and knowledge jumped.

While there were limited quantities of high tensile strength materials produced since the Gay ‘Ninctics, for instance in piano steel wires, such as Roebling used in the Brooklyn Bridge, very little of such high tensile steel was commercially available – production was miniscule, prices were high. Few capitalists would risk turning out material for such a highly specialized field. But suddenly with Ford’s 1928 revolution, industry was supplied with new production steels and light metal alloys of increasing variety and improved per-formance, most dramatized by the tension improvement, but of broadside improvement as well; for instance, rust was vanishing.

Taking over the outer industrial frontier in 1927 and 1028 when Ford gave us the Model A and the new time controls and alloys the airplane design and manufacturing world suddenly went into new alloy metals in a big way. The art of alloying and giving improved tensile strength suddenly produced aluminums and stecks switable for zircraft construction because their weight strength performance exceeded wood and fabric. Both came along almost simultaneouslv—about 1929 through 1930.

In fact, your whole economic change, precipitating a world economic crash of old static mortgages seems to be coincident. The historic shift was over to a dynamic economy paced by aircraft industrialization which forever severed the tie-up with security won primarily with more pounds and less intellect and took up with security maintained by constantly accomplishing more performance with less pounds.

There were a number of other important technical events that not only coincided with these dates but made the dates historically pivotal.

For instance, we ‘filled our technical hand’ with the ninety-two chemical elements which had been entering into man’s industrial advantage world at the rate of one every two years during the two hundred vears since the beginning of modern chemistry. Technically speaking, this curious 1930-32 turning-point—smoke-screened only by a forest fire consuming the dried-up old world—is characterized by a sudden increase of availability of high performance materials and an enormously widened range in characteristics of the respective improvement.

Along with chrome-nickel steel’s high tensile properties came its rustless properties; non-oxidizing metals of many types were becoming popularly available. That was an enormous change. Up to 1927—not many of you in this room will remember—but in my boyhood one of the most common sights was rust—rust was everywhere. One rarely sees it now.

The incrensed tensile strength looked very good to me as a young man engineering-minded about housing. I said, “That looks like one of the ways I’m going to gain great advantage in effecting a ninety-eight per cent weight reduction while upping performance of houses. I’d better pay very strict attention to the new advantages in tension, and so I think I will get myself together a primer of the principles of tension and compression, so I cannot only think of them myself, but also get other people thinking about them.’

It seemed to me the first thing I observed about tension and compression was that, outside of their being plus and minus, they had no other directlv alternate characteristics. They were utterly dissimilar. Compression was very limited in length relative to cross section, while tension members were relativelv unlimited in length relative to cross section. Compression members must have the working loads applied to them at their terminals, as close as possible to their neutral axis, or they tend to fail. If you apply your working load at the outside (indicating), it tends to fail. You could not flex a compression member when it was under stress, it would tend to fail. Compression members tended to focus all stress at one point thus to accelerate failure. Compression members were very limited in useful alternatives—and the limitation wasn’t just a matter of the change of historical advantage and the gradual increase in the ability of tension over compression caused by alloying.

No matter how high the per square inch compressive strength of the material the ratio of length to diameter of a column could not be improved. Columns could only be lengthened relative to diameter by increasing the tension strength of the column’s surface. Compression members mere inherently limited.

As I had need of increasing the length of a tension member without increasing diameter, I was limited alone to the sheer weight of the material itself and the effect of gravity on the tension member at the point of support of its ends. Ultimate yield was the only limita-tion. If I increased tensile strength by alloying I obtained greater and greater length without increasing diameter. It seemed as though tension was the important stress factor to be explored in gaining the advantages that were required. You could apply working loads at any point on a tension member; the load tended to increase over-all length and therefore to contract the diameter of the tension member throughout its whole length and it therefore became more cohesive—actually gaining strength with initial stressing.

It was a wonderful principle. Not only could working loads be applied at any point on tension members but tension members could be flexed at many points while under stress—only tending to become more cohesive throughout. Tension members tended then to distribute stress throughout their whole dimension thus averting failure until ultimate cohesive strength limits were attained throughout the whole organization of the member. The principles of tension were everywhere demonstrated as providing ever increasing superiority over compressive ability, as man learned the design principles of the universe and applied them to his own design.

We find in the mechanical structuring of the universe that compressive organization is limited to the dimensional confines of the heavenly spheres themselves, and that far vaster structural integrity of the universe is maintained within the infinite limits of tensile stress principles only, which we identify as gravitational—attraction. Any heavenly sphere could be independently revolved. Attraction delimited its cyclic behavior. It was free to perform dynamically any geometrical behavior pattern so long as the center of the cyclic behavior pattern maintained precisely its net attractive position in the comprehensive system, or firmament. So I said, ‘This is truth. I am going to pursue this truth into demonstrated technical advantage by man. These are principles I must employ in a big way in putting environment under man’s direct control.’

It was obvious that the history of discovery and separation of universal tension and compression and principles of their weight efficient structural association by man sprang from the Orient. It emerged in the maritime life and marginal life—from the small raft homes and boats along the Indo-China Coast. The first rafts with their branches sticking out and the leaves blowing them along must have proven a surprise. Men then began to plait the leaves and they began to design masts more suitable than the random branches and to make sails of greater area and stability than the random leaves, but the sail copied the rib or spines of a leaf to shape the tension web. Men Iearned what they could do with fiber in keeping the mast from blowing over, and they began to develop segregation of stress members into pure compression and pure tension functioning.

That segregation constituted an enormous victory for man, structurally speaking, and seems to have come, as best we can discover, out of his dynamic experience with the sea.

Reviewing: segregated compression and tension design first appeared in the Orient. You find it there in a big way, whether it was first in the ships themselves and later up on the land in the tightrope walker’s frame with the pure compression masts and the tension walking line – with tension guys to hold the two masts vertical- that design grows later into the suspension bridge. The principle is purely demonstrated in the oriental lantern with its horizontal arches of infirely short compression chords held together by the tension webs of the lantern’s skin. The whole is an amazingly lightweight thing to enclose flame so it wouldn’t blow out. It was a wonderful thing, this development of the pure tension and compression inven-fions China’s A.D. 1200 invention of the hot-air balloon, world’s first airbornc device, was only the oriental lantern turned upside down and deribbed as the heat of the convection imprisoned air within provided enough compression to tense the enclosing web outwardly.

This balloon was man’s first pneumatic compressioned structure and the forerunner of the modern auto and plane tire, in which all tension is in the casing and all compression within the internal gas, except at the point of tire contact at which the stress is instantly distributed to the whole system.

We find the coolie walking along with his shoulder-yoke or spreader-truss, and two tension hangers supporting buckets of water with far greater cfliciency than by use of his arms. You find tension and compression segregated from one another evidenced everywhere in the ‘East’, where civilization for a long time has had heavy things to carry and has learned to do it with the least amount of material and effort by using the intellect to obtain high performance per pound, per unit of time. Therefore it may be said that this fundamental principle of time, weight and effort advantage now unique to engineering in the maritime and airborne industries was derived from the Orient—via Europe.

That same principle was adopted by the Wright Brothers, who separated their structure into pure compression struts and pure tension stays to keep their struts in the position they wanted. They triangulated the tension and compression assembly, and the con-prehensive structure, because such segregation of stresses eliminated redundancy, became so light that it was light enough to fly.

I said, ‘That certainly is the kind of approach that I must employ with the house. I am limited by weight efficiency to use of a minimum of compression members. And I have two main forces which apply to the house: one is gravity and the other is wind. The gravitational force is always vertical and usually greater than wind, and it seems as though I might be able to satisfy that gravitational force by one primary compression member and a few secondary web spreaders.’

I had either to go down in the earth and dig a hole for the enclosure for my dwelling—that might be a new way of doing it, now that people are dropping bombs around—or I could go up an enclose space above the ground.

Above or below? is decided as follows: in view of the fact that the ‘performance’ item of house to which we have given priority over all others is to ‘render man’s house in his initial means of gaining advantage in a ceasclessly evoluting world-wide industrial process.’ We are concerned with mooring first-class habitation to the earth’s surface. Staying above carth’s surface seems, at the present, to be the more practical method of organizing that adaptation. We may assume that we can provide man with far greater security by (a) placing him in comfortable proximity to the point where his service can be turned into wealth; (b) by coincidently deploying his housing to a ‘no target’ degree of deconcentration of population and industrial inventory; (c) by rendering him more economically adroit, healthy and informed through his housing service.

In view of these basic assumptions of the housing requirements I had better satisfy primary compression within the shortest, most compact geometrical unit required to oppose gravity to sufficient height to afford easy advantage in enclosing the preferred volume of space above ground. That analysis of necessity seemed to indicate one compression member, or a mast, at the center of the structure which would attain the maximum height of the composition at once cen-trally. A single central mast provides the shortest possible member, and you could thereby attain your maximum advantage of altitude with the least weight of material and effort. A single compression member at right angles, or perpendicular to the earth’s surface affords gravity no disruptive leverage and the more preciscly vertical the less the tendency to failure.

But you would thus occupy the one perpendicular to the earth’s surface at an one given point and everything that you append to the mast thereafterward would seek the preoccupied vertical axis. There-fore, everything thercto and thereafter appended must cluster about the mast and thus become naturally cohesive as an assembly. Gravity tends thus to induce cohesion. It would then take very little force to lock the assemblv into the position it already seeks. It was apparent that the assumption of one single main compression member would provide great initial advantage.

I said right away, ‘How heavy is the house going to be: How much weight is to be hung on the mast: How big a compression member is involved?’ Am I safe? Is it even reasonable to assume a structure of 12,000 cubic feet to weigh only 3 tons—6,000 pounds? It seemed to be reasonable because zeppelins had been constructed that enclosed 12,000 cubic feet with 6,000 pounds, so if you used as good engineering as the zeppelin builders you could probably enclose that much space with the same or less weight for housing purposes—without, of course, copying the shape of the zeppelin arising from its unique performance requirements.

Therefore, I could at least assume that the house would weigh 6,000 pounds. ‘That is the deadload stress. How big and heavy would the rest of my load be? I said, ‘Let us assume a maximum of 100 people at 150 pounds cach weighing 15,000 pounds in all, and a snow load of 4,000 pounds or a live load of 19,000 pounds, somewhere around 25,000 pounds would seemingly be the total live and dead load, which with a safety factor of five-to-one would indicate 125,000 pounds as the assumed maximum gravity stress.’ Two square inches of steel in direct compression could casily handle this total load of 125,000 pounds if the two-squarc-inch section was properly disposed. This could be done by disposing the two square inches in horizontal cross section of the mast in a thin enough mast with a big enough diameter of my mast, so that it came within a reasonable column formula of length relative to diameter. It looked as though it was perfectly practical to make such a house on a mast. The steels indicated they could do it, and the weight was not great. It would take, for instance, two square inches in section of mild steel to make an eighteen-foot-high by ten-inch-diameter mast with a wall thickness of 1/32 of an inch.

Then having attained that maximum height by compression, I wanted to enclose space in tension. I had either to make the mast very high and hang things at a very mild sling pitch to enclose the desired space of 1,000 square feet in a cone or else to make the mast short and go out at a fairly sharp angle with the tension cables, in order to enclose the desired space. In order to do the latter without spreading the tension anchors far beyond the desired space I had to strut the tension members in some way. If we employed the clothes poles kind of strutting out, i.e. the application of loads to compression members at other than terminal axis, that seemed to violate the first principle of compression. That brought me to adopt the earlier principle of the oriental lantern, of the horizontal compression arches with very short compression sections between tension leads, to be covered by a tensed skin.

The first house I designed in 1927 was a hanging one, but I had to keep my sling pitch very sharp because the tensile strength of the materials available was then so inferior. My mast and tension members therefore had to protrude out beyond the enclosure as those who have seen pictures of the 1927 Dymaxion House will remember.

However, as I started this new house in Wichita in 1944, the increase in tensile strength of the materials available was so great, it became very practical to enclose the tension members by having them at relatively flat sling pitch, so you didn’t even see those tension members because they could be enclosed within the roof. I didn’t do it for looks, though. I did it because as we increased the angle of sling from vertical toward horizontal the stress was increased very rapidly, and as we increase the stress, we increase the rigidity.

I wanted to have a relatively rigid affair, a composition of tension and compression that would not give like a bed spring. The rigidity advantage was gained by positioning a compression ring, ic. a horizontal arch, at a considerable distance outward from the mast and at as flat an angle as was reasonable within the limitation of tension metallurgy. So that is what we did here in Wichita in 1944 and 1945. By this method we can enclose a large space very rapidly, that is why circuses and armies employ tents. However, we think of tent not as a principle but in association with the relatively flimsy materials with which the armies and circuses have occasion to build them. Golden Gate Bridge and a wirc-spoked auto wheel layed horizontally are tent structures in principle. We don’t think of them as flimsy nor is our house flimsy. It is designed to withstand fire, tornado, hurricane, and earthquake.

It was next important to develop a structure from the top of the mast downward which would be triangulated all the way for rigidity—thus we criss-crossed our tension members, as are the spokes of the wire wheel, out from the mast head to the first horizontal compression arch and downward again criss-crossing to the successive horizontal compression rings and finally all the way to the ground, anchoring to the ground and using the inertia of the earth. We obtain enormous strength and stability by simplv boring holes deeply enough and lowering the right kind of folding anchors into the holes, or anchoring into rock if such occurs. Anchor rods must be both vertical and diagonal in order to avoid swing or torque of the whole building.

We come now to a second argument about circle. As the steel world took over progressively from the old wood world by providing stronger structural shapes it went on also to provide rolled steel to replace boards. At first they rolled steel thinly enough to make steel plate which was used for ship siding and for trains, but they were able to roll the steel much thinner than plate, which at minimum is one eighth of an inch thick. Below one eighth of an inch steel is called sheet, and steel sheet, if thin enough, was as light as board per square foot. Plate was however no substitute for wooden boards in their function as sheathing, siding, boxing or partitioning, for if thick enough to equal a board in stiffness it was much too heavy and if not too expensive as bulk, it was much too expensive to handle and to support structurally because of the great weight. Though the steel shect as sheathing had enormously high tensile strength, it was unsuitable as a substitute for wood sheathing in the rectilincar spaces between frames with which we were building by tradition.

In framing a conventional house two steel uprights could replace twenty wooden uprights on sixteen-inch centers, but in sheathing up the space the flat steel sheet was extremely unstable and you had to stiffen it with corrugations which were difficult to keep air and water tight at the ends, or it could be stiffened with all kinds of compression members and frames so that you were punished weight-wise in your attempt to use that otherwise seemingly desirable light sheet. This resulting wavy, thin sheet looked unattractive. It wrinkled. Also the carly steel rusted and even the galvanised variety rusted at cut edges, was soft and bent and tore. It was far from desirable as a dwelling component.

However, theoretically the thin sheet principle could be made desirable if properly employed and provided the material itself was of good alloy of heat-treated, tough stock such as is now made in quantity for the aircraft and other modern industries, either of stainless steel or of alloy aluminum.

Prices of these grades are prohibitive for housing unless their strength and allied propertics are all taken advantage of to reduce weight in enough other ways to make them pay for themselves, which is what we have accomplished in our prototype.

The sheet principle can be used when curved into an arc. In curving the sheet it is made to fail as a column which throws the outer side of the arc skin into tension, which in effect is wrapped about the inner surfice which represents a compression arch composed of the individual molecules of the material acting separately as do stones in an arch. Such a curved sheet then presents a strong, stiff, cylindrical form; strong against the exterior pressure of wind and enormously strong against interior pressures which explode conventional struc tures by hurricane’s or bomb’s or tornado’s relative low pressure outside.

Try this with a piece of paper. The paper as a sheet cannot support its own weight on edge in the flat condition; curved into a cylindrical section or are it can carry a goodly load. As a cylinder it becomes a true structural member. As an arc, sheet becomes suitable to form an exterior skin to enclose our tension cage of the tent construction. Thus we have come to enclose our 1944, 1945, and 1946 prototype of the Fuller House for industrial mass production. Here the circular geometry of our original assumption proves itself of additional value in making this super-strong, lightweight and imperishable sheathing available to small structures in its most attractive and efficient form

Then we discover additional mutual advantage to our house inherent in combination of the geometry of circle and the curving of sheet, not by virtue of the respective unique properties but by their interactive virtue when associated for purposes of housing. This new advantage is discovered as we consider the second major stress applied to house by nature. Second to gravity is wind stress.

The average wind speed over the United States as computed by widely reported recordings is approximately 12 miles an hour. Houses may be considered aerodynamically as little ships whose standard cruising speed is 12 miles an hour, but which suddenly are accelerated to 30 miles an hour, and then suddenly again have to go 50 miles an hour, and sometimes suddenly they have to go yo miles in hour and then the flat planking begins to fly off as flat boards develop lift in parallel with the wind, which lift is opposed only by the friction of the nails amounting to but a few pounds in tension as nail pulling experience confirms.

Designed to look secure by guess and by prayer to the gods of inertia, conventional houses are not engineered from measured dat to cope with the greater wind speeds which they sometimes encounter.

Looking for chances to take advantage of high tensile ability of the new sheet, I became interested in the effects of wind stresses on houses and discovered in wind tunnel tests that a cube and hemisphere of equal volume indicate a drag advantage of ten to one in favor of the hemisphere, that is the drag is ten times greater on the cube. That indicates that we might either cut down the size and weight of our original structural members in the hemisphere to maintain equivalent wind strength to that of the cube or we might take part of the increment and turn it to greater strength advantage. Thus we might build a hemisphere structure that could take enormous wind stresses many fold those which a cube of an equal weight of structural members could withstand.

Another interesting discovery in the wind tunnel was that the heat losses were in direct proportion to the drag. It was indicated that you might be able to reduce your amount of heat necessary to heat the building, to a very high degree, by employing efficient acrodynamic shape. Shape factors are used very little today in heating and ventilating, they have been toyed with to date only by higher mathematics, which concludes that there are great potential efficiences to be had by measured evolution of shape control. In our own tests we had discovered the relative degree of that shape importance to heat savings in the coincidence of the drag and heat loss curves.

Having been in the building business in the ‘twenties, I was particularly interested in heat losses because my material, as I told you, was a very good insulating material. Insulation was a brand new selling word, in 1922, something I could talk about in trying to sell my building system despite the traditional handicaps. I frequently had heat loss tests made at different laboratories. We discovered that we had an advantageous heat loss ‘factor’ in our material, almost as favorable as in an 8-inch cork wall.

However, in 1926 some of the weather stripping people had tests made to see what savings they could make with their material, and they suddenly shocked the whole insulation world by proving that savings two to three times as great could be obtained by putting weatherstripping in the window and door cracks as could be effected by an 8-inch cork wall. The wall insulation people had to kind of shut up.

The ebb tide in the structural boom of the ‘twenties happened to coincide with this new heat loss information, and in the sudden diminishing of the building activity news of it was not heard of by the public, but anybody in the insulation business on a scientific basis had to be interested in WHY weatherstripping was so much more effective in heat saving than the insulation provided by a thick cork wall.

The phenomenon seemed well explained when ie discovered that heat losses in buildings of comparable tolerance of joint fittings was directly proportioned to the drag. Houses represented very large obstacles, and the low-pressure tails on buildings are very long. They stream out two to three hundred yards in relatively mild winds. Houses are usually surrounded by trees and other houses and those tails get mixed up with each other, but if you discover a house out in the open you can observe this 300-yard pattern in the snow shaping as scen from an airplane.

Air being highly compressible as it goes around large objects like houses you get a fairly high degree of compression at the widest beam of the obstacle to the wind. The result is a very long low-pressure tail because the pressured air shoulders dissipate their pressure outwardly as well as into the wakc. You have a long lag in the rate of re-establishment of pressure equilibrium in the wake, and much energy is required from somewhere in the form of high pressure to satisfy the long low-pressure streamer. ‘This wind wake is mildly dissimilar in behavior to the water wake of ships in that water is approximately non-compressible and such low pressure as enters a ship’s wake must take place in the form of air bubble expansions which whiten the ship’s wake for great distances.

The heating energy inside buildings is converted in the air of rooms into the work of expanding air, and expanding it within enclosed chambers necessarily develops an increase in pressure. So you have a high pressure on this side of your house wall and an enormous low-pressure tail on the outside to be satisfied, and your high pressure inside the house simply is extracted by successive energy conversions right through a masonry wall to satisfy the low pressure as docs gravity pull the water down Niagra Falls. The high pressure is drafted dircctly through chinks or cracks, ergo the fine showing of weather-stripping.

I made measurements during 1930 on houses to check this theory of explanations and found that it was correct. However, people still sav that cold comes into houses. I went into their houses (we will review the case of the cubical house which was easiest to study), they would say, “The cold is coming in and chilling the radiators upstairs on the north-west side so rapidly that we can’t keep any heat in.’ I’d go up and the radiators were cold. I went around in front of the building and even with a fairly good wind on that north-west side, it was almost still air; it was just the ideal place to light your cigarette. I had learned in the Navy that when we wanted to light a cigarette on board ship, you would go up in front of the nearest housing to discover almost still air. The wind disturbance against that north-west side of the house was so slight as to fail to explain why the radiators were cold. If vou followed the radiator pipes down through the wall and floors vou found that they were cold all the way down to the cellar. In fact no heat was going up on the north-west side, and the pips going to the south-east side were very hot, even when you shut off the valves. The heat scemed to be working towards the leeside and creating high pressure there to satisfy the low pressure. The balancing between high pressure and low pressure was using up all your fuel. We changed the pipes around from the furnace down in the cellar so that the pipes that started north-west were turned around and lead south-east, but the heat still went out into the lee side so it was very clear that the chain of energy exchange events worked to provide a high pressure in closest proximity to the low-pressure side of the house and employed further energy to eflect the energy release through the wall by various energy conversion principles to stabilize energy balance in the wake of the house.

When pioneers had to build their houses on the unprotected plains they planted tres around them to protect them from the wind, but the whole tree clump with the house in it only provided a greater wind obstacle and a larger low-pressure tail to vacuumize the whole clump with the house at the center wherein energy was making high pressure out of fuel to be drawn outward to satisfy that low pressure willy-nilly.

One way you ought to talk about the phenomena house and cold is that cold and vacuum are in physics almost identical- that is you have energy in the presence of cold and in the presence of vacuum and when your energy—either as heat of kinetically accelerated gas molecules or as radiation—is eliminated, cold or vacuum alone remain. That is the best way for you to look at it. You see, when they say, ‘cold is coming in’, it is because energy as heat is dissipating so fast as to leave cold gases in your presence. Air that is cold because low in energy content moves to you so you seem to feel cold draft but there is no physical entity ‘cold’. Temperature should be thought of as relative heat concentrations or dissipations.

Now when we came to the studving of winds, and of wind relative to house it becomes evident that there was the possibility of shaping house so that we might diminish the amount of drag. It seemed impractical to consider a streamlined house that would revolve around. Therefore I made a number of wind tunnel tests with streamlined shields around buildings, and I was able to reduce the drag on those syuare skyscrapers by wind stress by at least eighty-seven per cent by placing streamlined shields around their models, which also reduced their heat loss by eighty-seven per cent.

That gain on knowledge brought us the idea of also inspecting the character of the motion of the wind on houses as affected by the proximity to the earth—a factor not affecting wind tunnel tests of planes.

We discovered that the motion of wind along the surface of the earth is a turbulent affair, rising here and hitting the earth’s surface there and rising again. We discover that the wind, instead of being considered as blown horizontally along the earth from a god’s mouth or by a mysteriously hidden blower, should be recognized as an enormous system of many up or down drafts (similar in picture to many water spouts) converging to form bigger single up and down drafts. We discovered then, that these columns should be recognized 15 enormous convection columns in the thin atmospheric layer surrounding the earth and caused by a warm earth in the presence of a cold outer space, so that earth continually heats the atmosphere at its lowest point, thus expanding it, which causes it to be of lesser specific gravity and therefore to be less attractive to gravity, which pulls the top layer of chilled and concentrated air downward and causes the heated air to rise in columns somewhat as water boils upward in expanded bubbles and draws downward in concentrated pinpointed bubbles. There are predominant heat points on earth caused by less insulation or color variations of surface. There was a stronger column here and more of a tendency to have that column go here than there.

As a net result of these convection column tests it was discovered that the rising winds tend to greater velocity than that of the lowering air moving in from the outer reaches to satisfy the concentrated columns, and therefore that the resultant of focus of wind stress near the earth’s surface is in an upward direction in the lee of an obstruction -such as a house at the earth’s surface. The large low-pressure area in the lee of the house, of course, tends to float upward thus adding to the upward angle.

Trees are also aerodynamic design structures to permit a large frontal area necessary to the functioning of the trees.

Trees tend to avoid destruction by the wind by rounding their lower frontal branches to the approaching air and by coning their upper branches to point in the direction of the leeward and upward draft, thus reducing drag to a vital degree.

In the same way it became evident that a large ventilator could be designed to rotate upon the top of the house in such a manner as to focus the low pressure—caused by the air passage about the building—at a point about 45 degrees leeward and upward from the center of the house. The ventilator was developed through a series of assumptions and tests in the wind tunnel, until a successful design was arrived at which reduces drag to a minimum and prevents oscillation of the ventilator, while at the same time putting the focused low pressure to work in pulling a draft out of the building through a duct system that induces the draft to create an air condi-toning circuit, as well as to remove dust from sweeping traps in the floor and odors from the kitchen and bathroom, etc.

Certainly air conditioning is a requirement of housing which attempts to raise the standard of living and to serve men over wide geographical ranges. It makes possible comfortable conditions for man in the atmospheric extremes of arctic and tropical zones from which he has been previously excluded by the inability of housing to provide atmospheric -thermal and humidity -balances with man’s precise requirements: to complement, for instance, his unique temperature of 98.6° F., whether black, white, or yellow, whether at pole or equator.

Another function served by the large, rotating, 18-foot diameter ventilator, which we have employed for this air conditioning purpose, is that of proofing the house against the explosion effect created in houses – by the relative drop in pressure of the outside atmosphere which causes the previous level of atmosphere contained within the house to be so relatively high as to explode the house-when it is engulfed by the low-pressure area of tornados, hurricanes, typhoons and major explosions. The ventilator is mounted not only rotatively but on a splined shaft which allows it to rise three feet above the house thus to release the pressure then to fall back in place, as does the safety valve in a steam boiler, while the high tensile strength of the structure—fifty times that of previous houses—prevents the structural collapse of the wall.

The ventilator’s efficiency brings us to consideration of additional means for operating our new structure in a manner so efficiently energy wise as to provide all measurably desirable performance common to men’s needs at a minimum of expense in pounds of material and foot-pounds of energy and units of time. If for the same units of pounds, energy and time formerly incorporated in a coal burning furnace, I can at once design and fabricate air-conditioning apparatus, and dish and clothes washing apparatus, and a deep freeze and cold storage apparatus, then all of the latter costs no more than one poor furnace cost previously. This conversion of advantage is entirely an engineering responsibility to socicty. The total weight, energy, and time cost of the best engineering arrangements inherent in the advancing level of industrial technology necessary to provide man with initial advantage in life in exchange for the wage hour input advantage, represents the net formula for deriving the potential living standard of society at any one moment in time. So it becomes profitable to explore the advantage of the circle in terms of the efficient placement of energy units for the service it is desirable to provide.

Placement of energy exchange units at the center of the circular aren at once affords the shortest possible service distances in all directions and the greatest possible isolation in all directions for conservation of energy potential. The energy loss as light, or heat, or work per unit of distance of delivery of service is very great, so that a circle advantage is important. It seemed to fulfill those requirements very nicely and indicates a maximum of service for least weight.

With the central vantage point for generating air, light, sound and work services, we discover that those services when in operation describe fountain-like flows upward, outward, downward in all directions with concentric flow for recycling below. We discover also that this fountain flow can be reversed, but in either case, maximum coverage with least distance is effected.

The fountain flow is appropriate for maintaining relatively warm atmospheric flow in winter, and reverse fountain is most efficient in maintaining relatively cool atmospheric flow in summer. In neither of these fountain flow cases does energy set up a chaotic echo system as we find it doing in the indiscriminate, cubical squash racquet court shaped chambers in which we now live; i.e., as light bounces rapidly in uncontrolled and high cost concentration patterns to be absorbed at the wrong spots and to reflect brilliantly at the wrong places relative to human sight requirements, or as sound echoes rapidlv from surface to surface in uncontrolled relav concentration to be absorbed at the wrong point or to high point out at the wrong place, or as heat convects rapidly to concentrate and dissipate at the wrong point or to highpoint at the wrong place, or as does oxygen to surge uncontrollable (as smoke revcals) to concentrate at the wrong points or to be lost or diffused in dust and obnoxious gases and to be unavailable at the preferred breathing levels, etc.

As a fountain of water is seen to operate freely in space as a system, or as a light outdoors in the night creates a hemispherical system of illuminated space by atmospheric refraction of the light, so also do these other dynamic functions of heat, light, air, sound and smell constitute natural systems of physical phenomena so that our hemispherical house is seen to afford only an isolating enclosure which complements the flow and systematic refraction angles and protects them from disturbance by dynamic conditions exterior to the house—as does a lamp chimney protect the flame or an electronic tube protect the free-functioning of its central clement. The principle demonstrated by the boomerang is only a tracer device to demonstrate the boomerang refractions in all directions articulated by our coincident energy systems of light, heat, air, sound, smell, etc., positioned at the center of our house. In this way our house is as dynamically faired (if not more so) as is an airplane, in order to induce a little parasite drag internally and externally to all the slip streams of dynamics as can be measurably arranged. Thus a minimum of energy provides a maximum of controlled service performance.

Complementary handling of dynamic flows teaches that the same principles control the structuring of energy flows as controlled the structuring of our building members: that in effect the principles of push and pull and their unique characteristics of distinctly limited compression behavior and almost unlimited tension behavior hold true also in hydraulics, pneumatics, sonics and electronics. You can pull or draft air over vast distances but you can push it only a few fect by blowing. Winds are drafted and not blown; we should speak of the south-cast draft instead of the north-west wind. Air may be drafted into every window of a house and through every room and upward and outward through an attic window by a relatively small fan; but any number of large fans in each of the rooms will only contrive to stir the air around in those rooms, bouncing it off the opposite walls back into their own ‘faces’, while failing to provide an over-all draft sistem to take in new air and expel old. In the same way, visible light is a pushed phase of radiation and is limited to relatively short distances through atmosphere and requires enormous power to push it, while what we call electricity is tensed or pulled radiation and the distances over which radiation can be drawn by wire is very great compared to searchlight beaming, but, drawn by wireless tension control the limit of distance is unpredictably great.

Even as a tension-controlled lasso can be gyrated and thrown and wave impulses can be sent out controllably over it, as a snake whip may receive a wave by the wrist to hit an object and return the wave as a tension circuit again to the sender, so does radio and radar ten-sively induce circuits to pull radiation phenomena over almost unlimited distances.

By simple attention to and comparison of this phenomena of push-pull, enormous advantages can be gained by man over his environment through the initial advantage provided him by our dwelling machine.

We associate the idea of air conditioning with very large apparatus and when anybody talked about air conditioning for small houses they found it way out of their price range, because of the apparatus and expensive quantities of energy needed to accomplish that task. Now with our ventilator employing outside air motion to accelerate interior dvnamic fountain motion it becomes an inexpensive feat to provide excellent air conditioning.

The aluminum duct sub-floor makes a very good energy exchanger and recirculates enough warm air through it to keep your energy poised at the ankle level by the counter convection fountain motion, thus to retain the heat units in the house and to run the air through them, thus using very little heat.

The designs which I have described are typical of application of the principles we set out to convert to man’s advantage. The things that we have talked about tonight are the principles that we have captured in the house. I think that it is very important for all of us to know that not a single thing has been done in our house because it iust looked pretty. Everything has been done relative to obtaining the highest performance per pound. We could go on to describe the accessories and equipment, but already too much stress has been put on exciting the human heart over the trivial aspects to obscure the fundamental inefficiencies of the house. We prefer, therefore, to leave out of our discussion tonight these less important phases of the design, pointing out only our principle, which is to give major technical advantage to man’s sensory apparatus and to instrument all of his articulate faculties.

In the matter of distribution the house seems, at first inspection, to lack the ability to employ one great advantage which had accrued in mass production to all other complex inventions, that is, moving line assembly. Cars could roll away, ships float away, and planes fly away but houses could not walk away.

The autos, planes and ships could take advantage of very complicated assembly techniques along that line because you could make up special jigs and you could segregate every act permitting use of the right tool for each simple motion and you could thus perform enormously complicated assemblies economically, all because of the dynamic means of removal of the large product at the end of the line.

But that didn’t seem to apply to the house which was designed to stand still; nevertheless, we had the problem of making houses available that could be used any place in the world. House in motion was an integral requirement of our house service industry. It was an integral condition of the design, but in motion it had to be highly concentrated because there was an optimum in volume and weight ratio which favored severe concentration of bulk during transit. For concentration or assembly for motion you certainly didn’t want to assemble any parts. You would be licked if you did. Therefore all expanded assembly must be accomplished at the site, and you must arrange to provide the greatest accuracy in the alignment of holes in parts to be assembled.

It became evident that whereas an automotive or acronautical engineer usually had to design only for the in-place-use of a part, that here we had to design parts for efficiency and its assembly as well. No part should be over ten pounds. All holes or shaping for assembly must be manufactured into the parts, and the holes color-coded to identify the fastening with the hole. For instance we have resolved our fastenings down to: (a) Bolts, all of one diameter, and of six lengths; and (b) Rivets, all of one diameter and of five lengths. All the big holes are Bolt Holes, and all the little holes are for rivets. The assembly crew wear aprons that come in the packing case and that are equipped with colored pockets, and each pocket is filled with bolts and rivets. They simply put the blue bolt from the blue pocket into the big blue hole, or the yellow rivet from the vellow pocket into the small yellow hole.

All parts are designed so that one man can apply them and fasten them. But although one man could assemble the house from direc-tions, as he assembles a radio set, the whole assembly is designed to take advantare of trained service crews and mechanized equipment, i.e., a rolling or flying complex assembly jig with a large boom from which the whole house can be suspended while being assembled, and rotated by universal joint at the housc’s mast hend so that its section can be progressively assembled at the jig. When the house is complete it is lowered to the earth and anchored.

As far as possible all skin sections are blanked to shape with color-coded holes and are shipped flat to be bent and fastened into place. Precurvature of parts is confined to simple or compound joints and ribs. In addition, struts are primarily tubular, and tension members are cables or rods; both tubes and rods bundle tightly, while flat sheets stack tightly. Channels or double right angles must be avoided as they will not nest in shipping. Z sections are used instead of channels. Due to the geometrical simplicity of a circle, the number of types of parts are comparatively few in our house as compared with angular houses. Arcs, chords, radial sections repeat constantly, making for great mass production economy. Only special openings such as doors cause an always unwelcome increase in the number of types of parts having few reproductions per type.

From our engineering viewpoint of parts type economy, it is preferable to have our houses elevated to provide a garage or storage area below and to allow for entry by circular stair from below at the center. This eliminates many types of parts and provides an additional advantage in pounds per unit of performance—as floor area under enclosure is doubled while employing only a few hundred pounds additional mast, cable and side cylinder skin. Pounds per cubic foot can be reduced forty per cent by this arrangement; there-fore, standard of house per dollar goes up.

Reviewing this phase of design approach we discover that our housing problem varies from other problems of industrial advantage routine in that the house, like an umbrella or a metal fishing rod, has two phases of assembly to be considered as of equal importance: the transport assembly phase, compacted, and the use assembly phase, expanded. We discover that the house does not lose the advantage of complex assembly on the moving line because it is precision jig assembled for compactness in transport.

We discover that the segregation of house from any integral mechanical means of locomotion gives it considerable advantage cost-wise over those other moving line assembly products that do have to include integral means of locomotion, such as the auto, or plane, or ship. Elimination of the articulation locomotion parts of the latter, in the case of our house, results in house being simplified to such a degree that its main structure and enclosure and foundation are comprised of onlv one hundred types of parts. The interior mechanics of bathroom and standard storage partitions add, at mini-mum, another 100 types of parts for a total of 200 types in the minimum standard house. Assuming great acceleration in new accessory inclusions invented by the dwellers and the industry during the next two years, the maximum of mechanical accessories that now must be contemplated on that score for the one hundred per cent autonomous house of 1948, will total in types of parts less than 1,000. These figures are to be compared with 5,000 types of parts in an automobile and 25,000 to 50,000 typcs of parts in a fighting airplane.

Because of the parts’ simplicity and the elimination of partial and wholly expanded assemblies along the line, many expensive line jigs are eliminated and the total man hours of manufacture are greatly reduced. The complete general assembly parts list is so simple that its 100 types can be classified in very simple sub-assembly groups such as mast, cage(horizontal compression arches and tension frame), deck, skin, ventilator, anchorage, etc., with but a dozen or so parts respectively, each single part easy to remember because self-explicit in shape.

You can sit here in this room and think of that house, scanning it with your mind’s eye from the top down, and write out the parts list from memory. This simplicity makes it relatively simple to train crews for good routines in the field. The advantage of simplicity is even greater. It tends to excite the crews and all others who work with the house to invent improved parts which can be easily inserted because of the elimination of complex expanded assembly at the plant and the resolution of design to an elementary biology of parts. Because of the simplicity of parts and the ease of simple field assembly, over-all design improvement does not have to wait upon yearly models. Completely interchangeable new parts can be in-roduced at the manufacturing lines as often as becomes desirable, without interruption of the subsequent flow. Those are the tactical design aspects of the types of parts that are undergoing study in the tooling department out at Beech.

There are so few types of parts that you can afford to consider making all your component general assembly parts—through smashing, pushing, shaping in feeder lines—right up to your main precision compacting assembly line. Thus you can concentrate the manufacturing operation controls with concomitant efficiency.

What do you do for assembly? The parts precision concentration design is the most difficult problem -a reverse ‘jack straws’ game. The packing assembly moves right down the line. As suggested before, that becomes a very exquisite concentration: for instead of shipping any partially assembled parts and sending them out to a shipping dock and crating them up with a lot of space wasted, a lot of paper wasted, a lot of wood wasted, an enormously expensive scientific investment is made in concentration routine, which pays off at a hundredth of a per cent in final mass production costs.

This will not be a big wooden packing case. In order to obtain the most cfficient kind of concentration, the moving assembly cradle unit will consist of racks and spindles on a reel revolving to allow easy concentration of the parts around the center, thus packing up all the available space. The bundle of locked-in parts is finally encased in a tightly wrapped metal cylinder for shipping.

It is now indicated that we can ship eight houses in a freight car. By this packing method the volume of the expanded house is reduced from 12,000 cubic feet to 256 cubic feet. That 256 cubic feet includes the whole house as you see it out there; that is, without the partitions and the bathroom. You are going to see some changes in the bathroom from the way you see it out there now, but we will figure out how to concentrate the bathroom as well. It looks like the total will be 256 to 300 cubic feet.

Even at 300 cubic feet we can get eight packaged houses into a freight car and we can ship by rail to the seaboard – the farthermost point in the United States from Wichita, Kansas – for $75 a house. We can ship economically to any place in the world, because when we get to seaboard the ocean rates are so cheap we can ship to any place in the world for a few hundred dollars total from Wichita

We have now actually met the original theoretical requirements of the physical problem. We have gotten down to the proper weight. We are down, not including the bathroom and the partitions, to 5,400 pounds. The copper bathroom now in the house weighs 430 pounds—but in aluminum with plastic finish, as we are going to manufacture it, the bathroom will weigh around 250 pounds. The partitions, two bathrooms, kitchen, laundry and energy unit will probably come to not more than 2,000 pounds. We will be right on our curve of the size of things man can mass produce in 1946. In other words, due to the development of the airplane industry, the house has become an extremely practical and now very real affair.

Overnight the necessity of democracy was for a great number of planes to accommodate the increasing mobility of man brought about by war, because man had not provided ways of developing that air technology expansion through peaceful means. This was because man was not living in a preventive pathology, as I pointed out carlics, but in curative pathology, which has to have war to bring about the inevitable and major economic changes. Industry as preoccupied with the airplane overnight became four times as large as industry preoccupied with the automobile. People do not seem to realize it, but that is what happened.

You must now realize this evolution was simply the principle which we have defined carlier this evening as constituting industry itself being comprehensively tuned up through its inherent self-improving advantages, which had been accumulating increment for a generation, to demonstrate dramatically a new range and degree of abilitv. Therefore the airplane industry should not be thought of as a species of industry apart, for instance from the automobile industry or the hat industry. It should be thought of as the phenomenon industry itself, simply mobilized to its best ability or to its most recent record high in standards of performance.

In industry, as preoccupied with aircraft manufacture and maintenance during the World War II, the standards and tolerances of precision that could be maintained, the size of units, the relative strength, the degree of complexity control all represent a sum total of somewhere around a ten-to-one magnitude increase in technical advantages over industry as we know it before this war idling along on 1917 standards.

For us now, as composite proprietors, workers, and consumers, to give up the standards of industry as recently preoccupied with the technical necessities of world-wide flight of man in order to assist him to establish ultimate worldwide democracy, and to go back instead to the phase of industry as we knew it in its earlier preoccupation with exploitation of man’s innate tendency to mobilize for security, by tentative adaptation of the automobile to his paralysed domiciling, would be to actually deflate our whole economic ability by ninety per cent. To deflate our economic ability minety per cent is to decrease our potential ability ninety per cent, which as viewed from old-fashioned static economics simply means a nine hundred per cent inflation of prices, relative to wage-hour dollars. It is an unthinkable thing. I don’t think it is going to happen.

I think our house is going to have an important part in helping us to keep on upward instead of downward in historical degree of technical advantage that was developed during World War II. I don’t have to talk to you much about that. You have heard about the possibility of using the aircraft plants. Last year the president of your company delivered an excellent address to the National Convention of the International Association of Machinists. Printed copies are available; I commend it to you. It covers the subject of the aircraft industry’s inclusion of the manufacture of airframe dwellings, the name we have given to that portion of dwelling machines to be manufactured by the airframe industry. Wright Field calls our dwelling machines ‘stationary airplanes’. The power plant and electrical manufacturing and many other areas of the older industry’s component parts manufacturers will provide the organic apparatus of our dwelling service.

The big fact that confronts us is that you of the aircraft industry have suddenly developed a whole new world which has recently been operating four times as much technology as was ever operated before—which happened to represent precisely the level of technology for which I had been waiting to get my house realized. We had suddenly broken through into a world where young architects who didn’t have building design jobs, and who couldn’t find building design jobs because building technology had stalemated, suddenly found the aircraft world a very good place to go. In this welcoming world of aircraft they matriculated rapidly into the performance-per-pound language. They now think that way irrevocably. Everybody throughout the whole aircraft industry thinks that way. It is no longer a hard mental job for us to sit down and talk, as we have talked tonight, about how much housing weighs, too.

Here is one more thing on the economics side I would like you to think about. Housing, as you have known it up to now, used the wood or stone or clay which was at hand. These component materials were not understood scientifically to any important degree. Wood might be considered pretty as oak, or pretty as maple. One was a little harder or softer to work and suited a man better than another. But it was little understood what a tree was. Despite academic study, man’s understanding of trees was popularly vague. Then trees began to be used industrially by the chemical industry. It began to develop wood pulps and other by-products of wood. To some extent this began to affect the ‘scarcity’ or ‘quantity’ of wood relative to its availability for house building. These new industries, particularly newsprint pulp, exhausted a lot of it. Builders had to take greener and greener lumber as stock-piling dwindled.

During World War II one of the most extraordinary things that happened, in its broad effects on technology and on economics, is what the Germans were forced to accomplish in wood chemistry in order to plan on how to survive during this extraordinary industrial warfare, which they introduced and in which energy played such an important role. The Germans had to plan in advance on being bombed out of their oil fields. It was obvious that they could plan to use oil to a certain extent but that eventually their most vulnerable position was their oil supply. This was an ‘oil warfare’ in a big way.Therefore the Germans set about finding other important sources of energy. They went to wood technology. The chemistry of wood developed in many directions in Germany. They suddenly discovered that here was Nature’s most important trick in impounding sun energy—and in a most useful way, for therefrom you could release energy in many useful directions. They immedintely brought it to the one great ‘Grand Central Station’ of energy, in its most stable storage form, which was alcohol. From alcohol of various kinds you could make foods—first for cattle, then for people. You could make high-octane gas or synthetic rubber or plastics. The chemistry of wood began playing such an important part that the scientists in Washington were talking about it constantly and there was a book published called The Nigger in the Woodpile, which was what Germany had.

Wood technology has advanced the basic economic case for wood to such an important position in the advancing technical world that we no longer can afford to use wood in the careless way we have in the past—to put it in houses for termites to eat up, or a possible fire to consume. Even if we could, world-wide technology forces our technical hand as it never has before, the rest of the world is now industrializing and is starting at the most advanced World War II levels of technology and not at our 1861 or 1890 or 1917 level. Industrial technology is born of latent knowledge and is not an inventory of obsolete machinery, so wood is in a very new historical position. How does that affect the historical wooden house picture?

As children of the pioneers also came along to build a house—or their grandchildren wanted to—there was no longer much wood on the farm. They had to go increasing distances for it. Finally they went out of the state for it. Today they have to send 1,000 to 5,000 miles for most of their building wood.

They were using it simply by habit because it was originally handy and suddenly they had exhausted that supply. Long ago wood boxes disappeared from our cellars. In the war’s great motion, packing cases went all over the world. That broke the wood supply equilibrium altogether. World increased paper needs and the new chemistry of wood-energy conversion makes it unthinkable that wood will ever again be available in any large way for building it into houses, even into prefabs which average seventy per cent wood. Wood is suddenly going from ‘for free’ as it sat stacked on the farm because it had to be cleared away, to a rapidly inflating price structure—owing not so much to its scarcity, as to its newly recognized inherent wealth.

On the other hand, there are now the many by-products of the soil and by-products of the wood, which chemistry is developing, whether it is cellulose as plastics, or the metals developed from the clay, etc., which were just kicking around unrecognized on the early farm. These by-products, however, were very expensive to extract in the beginning and called for a large energy expenditure and fancy and complicated mammoth plants with giant stills and ovens such as required millions of dollars to install and develop. Few industrics could afford to buy the orginal speciality by-products of high performance characteristic.

However, in developing the aircraft industry, we had to have high performance per pound, so for a military plane the Federal Government could afford to pay for special alloys of aluminium and steel. Then we suddenly called for an enormous war-time application of industry to produce those same materials and they were brought into relatively low cost brackets. They could be extremely low for they came from sands, clay, coal, air, water, etc. Producers however held up their prices during the war because of the enormous amount of inspection necessary. In order to amplify industry to the ability to mass produce planes which meant withstanding terrific stresses with minimum of weight and bulk, it was necessary to be super-careful of the quality of the materials. So the cost of inspection pyramided upon inspection all along the line was reflected in the high price structure of those materials, despite quantity production have occurred

We now have enough 24ST aluminum in war surplus and scrap to make it worthwhile to segregate 24ST scrap so that the Aluminum Company will say, ‘We will give you 24ST – because we can now re-circulate scrap, and it is better scrap, actually having a little higher alloy content and preferable qualities- at a much lower price than you have been paying.’ Just within a couple of post-war months I am beginning to see price structure of aircraft metals and other high performance materials on the way down. As you study the basic economics of the plastics or aluminum industry, you find the price structure has got to go down as we employ their mass production by our less stringent standards and large mass outlet. Why?—Because we have alternate materials for every parts design.

In the materials we are dealing with in our new airframe houses, we are in a deflating price structure, while wood of the conventional house is in a very rapidly inflating price structure.

Those are some of the really outstanding trend data for you. If you would like to have in mind before you go away some of the absolutes in the old building world, so you can see where you are situated as you enter our endeavor with us, I will read these figures. I gave you the all-time high in housing which was in 1925, when 827,000 dwelling units were built, of which 572,000 were single family dwellings, and of which 270,000 had some interior plumbing. The top wartime total of dwelling units in one year was 575,000. That was 300,000 less than 1925, despite very much larger population and despite very much increased technology in all other directions. That was 1943 and was in all classes of dwellings.

We find that during the war a lot of other kinds of dwellings or shelters were developed, in which Quonsets were among those with which to reckon. In case authorities determine that Our standard of living will have to go down during this 1946-47-48 housing emergency, and two million G.Is who have made the mistake of getting married and are looking for some place to live will have to live in Quonsets and prefabs’, what would be the projected production of Quonset huts and other prefabs? 60,000 Quonsets in one year is that industry’s reported top capacity. The prefabricated house industry indicated in a recent government survey that it hoped to double its production from the best production year during the war to a new total of 142,050 units. That is the capacity they dreamed about. Their best war capacity rate, which was never sustained, amounted to a potential 71,475 houses per year. That doesn’t come anwwhere near your need this coming year just for 2,000,000 homeless G.I.s and their brides, paying no attention at all to the rest of the housing shortage, which is somewhere around 12,000,000 in the United States. Those are important figures for you to have in mind to know whether you are on the right track in joining up with us here in the airframe dwelling machine industry.

I must caution you that you will be confronted constantly by the statement that mass production of houses eliminates the aspect of individuality which is so cherished by humans and without which they are afraid they will lose the identity of their personality, there-fore, mass production houses will never gain popular acceptance.

My answer to that is that reproduction or regeneration of form is a fundamental of nature and that it is neither good nor bad in itself. However, reproduction of originally inadequate or awkward forms, or poor mechanics or wasteful structures, either by the hand of man or by the regeneration of the biological species, tends to amplify the original characteristic. If the original is annoying, reproductions become increasingly annoying; if the original is highly adequate to its designed purpose, reproductions become increasingly pleasing in that confirmation of adequacy. In the latter light, we continuously admire a fine species of cultivated rose or nature’s wildflowers—the more frequently repeated, the more beautiful. Conversely, the more frequently we sce a maimed soldicr, the more disheartening becomes the repetition. There would be even less virtue of the so-called individuality in discovery of soldiers’ sons born with half a face blown away, or with three legs.

Individuality goes far deeper than these surface manifestations with which people have sought to deceive one another as to the relative importance of their status in the bitter struggle to validate one’s right to live. Those who were powerful but ugly and lazy paid for fine clothes and fine surface architecture, and a superstition has persisted that people who could afford to pay must be superior individuals. The powerful have whipped the weak for centuries on end to instill that superstition. As long as might excelled over right that superstition had to continue. Now that we propose housing to be produced by an industry in which right makes might at less than a pound per horse power the superstition is obsolete.

There is no individuality in conventional houses. They are all four-square boxes with varying lengths of rotting wood Greck column, nailed on to the front, every house so similar and the streets so similar that without sign boards the stranger cannot tell the difference between one American town and another, let alone detect individuality in the separate and pathetic homes.

On the other hand, it has been discovered that the more uniform and simple the surfaces with which the individual is graced, the more does the individuality, which is the abstract life, come through. Trained nurses in uniform working in a hospital are notoriously more attractive as individuals than the same girls in their street clothes when off duty.

To somebody who says ‘What are your houses going to cost?’ we are not yet able to reply very accurately, but the indications are the cost will be relatively low. “That’, we say, ‘is very unimportant.’ My argument—and I hope yours—is going to be that costs are entirely relative. Your wage structure is going up fairly fast. If your wage structure is different, your price will be different. Houses that cost $5,000 before the war are now costing $8,000. Houses reflect relative prices. Suppose we are somewhere around or below the $5,000 mark—I think that is pretty good.

What is much more important, however, I think, is for us all to reglize the actual picture of production potential of our houses in terms of the capacity of the metals produced for the aircraft industry during this war. Not going outside of the aircraft capacity—not infringing at all on the old building world, leaving it to build as best it ca—we can get set up in the aircraft plants and be producing two million houses a year just as fast as we can get ready. Just as fast as you boys can get out good production drawings and complete your calculations, and get this house tooled up, we can produce two million houses a vear.

That is talking entirely new figures and we can amplify the aluminum capacity and amplify the aircraft capacity and get up to five million houses and approach the automobile figures. That is perfectly reasonable. There is nothing fantastic about that number of units. We are talking about something we know is really practical.

As it is practical and as we really need two million houses right now for G.I.s, and need twelve million for people in substandard and crowded houses in the United States, and need thirty million houses for one hundred per cent bombed-out families in the war-torn countrics, I say the cost of NoT having our houses is not only enor-mous, it is history’s tragedy. It leads rapidly into lawlessness and ill-health, to an enormous cost to society. I would ask a Senatorial Committee or a Congressional Committee asking me what houses cost, ‘How much is it going to cost not to have our houses? That is what is important and I really look at the accumulating national debt as the accumulation of the cost of maintaining curative pathology instead of investing a few billions in establishing a preventive pathology through a scientific world-wide housing service industry. We have already come a long way downhill from the industrial peak in the face of an enormous ability to create wealth and put our environment under control. The initial cost is very unimportant. If we can get the thing rolling, we can make houses available to everyone who wants houses, and very rapidly obsolete all old standards of living. We will set up a new industry that promises to go on to re-house the whole world and employ the whole world in the continuous wealth-making of improving living advantages.

That is clear enough as a simple picture to the building trades. Some of the building trades people I talk to understand this, and it is very clear to mechanics that we are talking about starting up a new industry and not a new house. They are not going to be so concerned about whether the building trades are employed in crecting those houses. The building trades men tell me they have participated in the building of less than four per cent of single family dwellings. It is not a very important item to them. When you talk to them about giving them a now industry, the new industry, like the telephone, would cause a great deal of bricklaying of the industrial plants, the power stations, etc. Therefore, you want to say, all of you, that you are designing an additional industry which is going to get everybody busy. Your labor man doesn’t mind the idea of short man-hours, or better working conditions or steady year-round work.

Beech figures show way less than 100 man-hours per house to manufacture. Our indications are that in the field we will start with 150 man-hours and before we get through with developing the boom jig upon which we are going to hang the house as we assemble it and feed the parts off the tailboard to give a very fast assembly, we will be down to relatively few man-hours—forty man-hours or something like that—in the field. (That of course is not what we are going to do out here in the early days.)

I will prophesy however that within two years we will be down to somewhere under 100 man-hours from raw material as delivered to the aircraft industry (that is, as sheet aluminum in rolls, steel in rods and tubes, etc.), to finished house – under 100 man-hours. So your living cost is going to be low and your standards high and rapidly rising.

Obviously, boys, the thing is now reasonably good enough to dare to put it out on the world, and the world will be reasonably tolerant enough with it to ‘take’ all the bugs that are still in it. It is full of them. But we have harnessed out there now in our prototypes the right principles within the right weight and the right dimensions, so that’s where you boys have to take over.

Thank you very much.