Buckminster_Fuller_-_Grunch_of_Giants.pdf

Table of Contents

Introduction................................................................................................................................................3

Foreword....................................................................................................................................................4

Fee x fie x fo x fum..................................................................................................................................17

Astro-age David's Sling...........................................................................................................................20

Heads or Tails We Win, Inc......................................................................................................................27

Invisible Know-How, Inc.........................................................................................................................35

Paper into Gold Alchemists......................................................................................................................45

Can't Fool Cosmic Computer...................................................................................................................56

Introduction

I dedicate this book to three women: one of the nineteenth and two of the twentieth centuries. First, to

my great aunt, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, who with Ralph Waldo Emerson co-edited the Transcendentalist

magazine, the Dial, and was the first to publish Thoreau--and herself authored Woman in the

Nineteenth Century.

I am sure Margaret would and probably does join in my enthusiastic support and co-dedication of this

book to Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, and to Barbara Marx Hubbard, founder

of the Committee for the Future, for their effective inspiration to the young world to do its own

thinking and to act in accordance therewith.

Foreword

There exists a realizable,

evolutionary alternative

to our being

either atom-bombed into extinction

or crowding ourselves off the planet.

The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business

from its weaponry fixation

to accommodation of all humanity

at an aerospace level of technology,

with the vastly larger,

far more enduringly profitable for all,

entirely new

World Livingry Service Industry.

It is statistically evident

that the more advanced

the living standard,

the lower the birth rate.

It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that

the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most

fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.

Nineteen twentyseven was the year when a human first flew alone across

an ocean in one day.(In 1944, the DC-4 started flying secret war-

ferryings across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1961, jet

airliners put the ocean passenger ships out of business. In 1981, the

world-around airlines flew over a billion and a half scheduled passenger

miles and carried hundreds of millions of ton-miles of freight.) This

was the obvious beginning of the swift integration of all humanity,

groups of whose members for all their previous millions of years on

planet Earth had been so remotely deployed from one another that they

existed as separate nations with ways of life approximately unknown to

one another. It was obvious that the integration would require enormous

amounts of energy. It was obvious that the fossil fuels were

exhaustible. It was obvious that a minority of selfish humans would

organize themselves to exploit the majority's transitional dilemmas. I

was convinced that within the twentieth century, all of humanity on our

planet would enter a period of total crisis. I could see that there was

an alternative to politics and its ever more wasteful, warring, and

inherently vain attempts to solve one-sidedly all humanity's basic

economic and social problems.

That alternative was through invention, development, and reduction to

the physically working stages of massproduction prototypes of each

member of a complete family of intercomplementary artifacts,

structurally, mechanically, chemically, metallurgically,

electromagnetically, and cybernetically designed to provide so much

performance per each erg of energy, pound of material, and second of

time invested as to make it eminently feasible and practicable to

provide a sustainable standard of living for all humanity--more

advanced, pleasing, and increasingly productive than any ever

experienced or dreamed of by anyone in all history. It was clear that

this advanced level could be entirely sustained by the many derivatives

of our daily income of Sun energy. It was clear that it could be

attained and maintained by artifacts that would emancipate humans from

piped, wired, and metered exploitation of the many by the few. This

family of artifacts leading to such comprehensive human success I

identified as livingry in contradistinction to politics' weaponry. I

called it technologically reforming the environment instead of trying

politically to reform the people. (I explain that concept in great

detail in the latter part of this book. I also elucidated it in my book

Critical Path, published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press.)

Equally important, I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what

a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and

newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all

humanity in realistically developing such an alternative program.

Being human, I made all the mistakes there were to be made, but I

learned to learn by realistic recognition of the constituent facts of

the mistake-making and attempted to understand what the uncovered

truths were trying to teach me.

In my Philadelphia archives there are approximately forty thousand

articles published during the last sixty years which successively

document my progressive completions of the whole intercomplementary

family of scheduled artifacts. These livingry items include the

following:

Tensegrity: The continuous-tension/discontinuous-compression structuring

principle of Universe (i.e., stars not touching planets, electrons not

touching their atomic nuclei) introduced to planet Earth to replace the

continuously compressioned, secondarily tensioned structuring in present

world-around engineering theory. Designed, 1929; prototyped, 1929.

The Dymaxion House: The autonomous, mass-producible, air-deliverable

dwelling machine weighing only 3 percent of its equivolumed and

equipped, conventional counterpart, single-family dwelling. Designed,

1927; modeled, 1928; helicopter-delivered, 1954.

The one-piece, 250-pound bathroom: Designed, 1928; prototyped, 1936; mass-

produced in polyester fiberglass in West Germany, 1970.

Synergetics: Exploration and publishing of the fourdimensional

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