But then I ask engineers today if anybody can tell me where tin is, and I ask you for instance. Are any of you familiar where tin is? What is tin being used for right now? And I find, approximately none of them know. And I find it is a very fascinating matter then, that after W.W.I, ball bearings came along and so much better than these babbit metals, it came right out, and then we learned how to put individual electric motors onto each machine with these ball bearings, so tin was absolutely not wanted any more. In that game. Then we began to learn all other kinds of tricks, there were plastic coatings you could put on the metal cheaper than the tin. Tin was an expensive metal. So that we stopped tinning bathtubs and all of those kinds of things that used to go on, and we suddenly, where did the tin go to?

I said there are no tin mines in America in the United States only in Mexico, and they are very small ones, they are not worth really talking about. And, what happened was, that during W.W.II what the Germans and English both learned, was that a way you could make quick changes in design, particularly in wing forms and things like that, and fuselages great big parts that needed to be done in a hurry, we have something called a drop hammer, and a drop hammer is almost like a guillotine, but the man can control, have it lift really quite rapidly and come down, pounding, pounding, pounding on the lower mandrel.

We have then a material which is called kirksite for the inventor, and kirksite is primarily tin. And tin has such a low melting point that it is very easy, if you want some you can get it with very little heat in a little time and you've got it melted for you. And what happened was that when they designed a new part for the wing form, then the designing engineer got in his pattern man, and the pattern man, and many really, men, craftsmen like sculptors, they could make a clay model very quickly just a really beautiful form, put a caliper on it just right. Then they made a quick plaster cast, and from the plaster cast they then made this kirksite casting where you make a bronze and so forth. And they made only the female form, and then they made the male form by casting it into the female. But then the female being made they then could also change the design and smooth it up because tin you can scrape it really readily, it is easier to scrape than wood, and it held it's shape so beautifully, so you could dress it lovely, and you could get the female all dressed up very fast, and then cast the male in it with a potting compound and you suddenly had, within three or four hours after engineers had finished the design, you could have these dies made, and they might be the size of this table big things. And the big drop hammers were quite wide, staunch, so you could get something big in there so there was the male, and they put in the aluminum and the drop hammer man learned to he was a hammer man before, and he learns how you can move it just a little in there, and it takes a few passings like that and suddenly there is your shape all nice and dressed-out. The tin being soft enough to help a lot of those atoms to really spread themselves. Such a tool is good for about 100 parts and then it's all through, you have to make it over again, so this is called soft tooling.

At any rate, this kirksite then did make possible swift change in the design of the aeronautical parts the ships skins, and really other parts but primarily that. As a consequence, I'll tell you that the largest tin mines in the world today are out back of the airplane plants of America. If you go find any one, say like Burbank, and Lockheed you'll think it's sort of a graveyard out there, these forms like gravestones, sort of strange forms and things like that. These great hunks of tin and they can be melted up just like that. So it's a wonder to me this is a most beautiful picture of the new world, a country that has no tin mines, the largest mine in the world is above grade ready to be melted right up, and makes possible change, swift change. See what powerful things I'm really telling you so when we have just economists looking at world things as the Club of Rome not understanding anything I'm saying to you. And not understanding. There is no book, no paragraph, or sentence in a book of economics about doing more with less. So it has been held, really, as a classified way of looking at things. Economists mustn't talk about that. The politicians want the fact, the economists wouldn't know what it is talking about anyway. He doesn't have really any sense about these metals and performance and efficiencies.

So the economist just looks at the last tool that ever made that thing, that's what it is, and he starts from there and it is always going to take that much.

Now, I hope I've really said enough about evolution in design so that design engineering, I'll tell you things are very different again from what they were, what Donald Douglas did there. So this shift is going on very, very rapidly and to be really competent in playing World Game you have to be really deeply aware of all this kind of facility.

I developed something else which is going to be appropriate to talking about the Wichita House, and the other one which will come up next. That is, back in my beginning with the Dymaxion House, I started something I called the Universal Requirements of A Dwelling Advantage or a Shelter Advantage. And this Universal Requirements of a Dwelling where I said, I'm going to have to think about, I'm going to try to do something on behalf of human beings, giving them some controls of their life, so we are talking about an environment control. I said "Environment" later on, a few years ago, I did this with Sonny Applewhite, I wrote a little poem about it, but this is the way I looked at it back in 1927. "Environment to each must be, all it is excepting me. Universe in turn must be, all it is, including me." The only difference between "environment" and "Universe" is me, the observer. And environment this Universe is all in motion. It's all utterly dynamic, there are no things, physicists have found no things, they have found only events, in pure principle. So all of the environment is a set of events, of different frequencies and magnitudes.

I saw, then, that all, everything that can happen to you that I'm going to try to be competent in designing on your behalf, I would like to be comprehensive anticipatory on your behalf, the needs you are going to have, you are very innocent and young, and so forth, I just want to be sure that I can turn the experience of others through history to your advantage without in anyway impeding you. What can I do on the behalf of my fellow man without trespassing on them. That has to be very important. So, I said, I'll get that out of the way and then I'll come back to these environmental events. I said, if I suddenly jumped up and ran over and grabbed you like that and you said, 'What are you doing?' I saw that a piece of the ceiling was falling and I didn't have time to put my words I just ran and grabbed you and it just goes WHAAM, and boy!, obviously if I hadn't pulled you, and I really didn't have time to get my words right, I just pulled you out of the way, and it goes Whaam, you would have been killed.

So, somebody said "I wish you hadn't done that, I wanted to die," I said, "I didn't know you wanted to die, well, but you're going to have to exercise that option, I can't guess that you want to die. So I do not consider myself having trespassed on you if I give you the option whether you are going to do the dying. So, when I see that things are going to destroy people that they don't see is going to destroy them if I do something about it, I don't think I am trespassing on them.

Then I began to realize that human beings have all kinds of processes that they are really quite unaware of their chemistries and their processes but that the processes are going to take up a lot of their life. So I said, each human being has a capital which is the total amount of days of their life, and I do not think I am trespassing on you if I, then, anticipate some of your copings with the processes and do things that, where it is just repetitive, and I save you having to do that repetitive thing. This is simply going to give you a few more days or hours of your life. And anyway that I can give people a few more hours of their life, I assume that I'm not really trespassing. So I see then there are things they don't know are going to happen, they are not familiar with diseases, they're not aware that this thing is going to infect them and so forth, but I do. Therefore, I have the responsibility of dealing with these things that are going to affect their lives, that they didn't know were going to.

Now, this means then, I think, I saw then, all the things that happened to human beings originate out of the microcosm or the macrocosm. They happen from outside themselves or from inside themselves. So that, then, gave me some pretty good ideas. I began to see that I could sort out, and this is, then, I really did this before I got into the discovering my tetrahedron, you know, getting what is called "a thinkable set" out of Universe. Where, this is probably the beginnings of my tending to sort out my mathematics in the right way, but I came, just in dealing with the environment on behalf of the human being, I saw then, that I could really begin to get things into a set of very important categories.

There were the things that were going to happen to you from outside you, and things inside. The ones that were going to happen to you from the outside, you don't know about, and there are ones that you do know about. And you want to do something about it, to possibly to do so. I would like, then, I'm not ever going to try to insulate you, I'm going to try to give you an environmental control that, we did mention this earlier, that it was going to rain, and you can't drink all the water, so you've got to get the water into a holding pattern to valve into your presence in the magnitudes and frequencies that coincide with the human metabolic processes. So that what we have I developed myself an environmental sieve that lets through what you want when you want it, sieve being sort of an angular valve. So different size sieves, for different occasions, and you have ways of not insulating or stopping anything, but in some way to intercept in a profitable, favorable manner anything that does happen, and to shunt it into it's right position so that the energies can be used wherever it is appropriate.