So then I came then to the things that happen to you, to which you are subjected, and things that you could do objectively. And I began to find these things sorting themselves out more and more and more. And there were things that then went on outside of you that you were too familiar with to notice anymore. You were so used to that tree being there and so forth, you don' t realize that as it grows the roots are getting big, and suddenly your sidewalk comes up because the root has broken it. In other words, there are things that are overlooked, that are going on that could be anticipated, that we know the roots do get bigger, and so forth. I saw that there was a great deal in the design, the more we think about things, there are things that I really can anticipate on your behalf, that is not trespassing, and the test is always how to get you more of your life which you can invest in your own preferred way.

Now, I advise you all to look at the Universal Requirements I have that published in a number of my books, and there is something else Universal Requirements and I continually improve that, and that brings you into the production engineering, and into the service industry, the maintenance, the maintaining and the removal of the product, getting into the service industries. I think you will be really quite surprised when you get to the Universal Requirements. Because having the kind of experience that I've been telling you about, I've had that list all of these years, and I am continually from time to time trying to improve it. And it really has finally gotten to be quite worth-while. When I first started in 1927 on this, I said, if I'm going to do things on behalf of my fellow men, what are all the things that can happen to my friends. So I said, well, the first thing to do is start making a list of anything you can remember. I said I'm afraid this list is going to be very big, but I'm going to start in, and I was surprised that I could only work on it for about a week or so and I couldn't think of anything more. People look at you in an unfriendly way, and somebody throws a stone at you, and there are all the things like that that you can think about. So you start writing them all down. So, I say, after a couple of weeks I couldn't think of anything more that happens to you. Then, in 192 that was '27, in 1929 I was having lunch, this was the year of the Great Crash, with some architectural engineering editors of architectural engineering magazines in New York. They were the leading magazines, and these were their leading editors. And the Crash was there, it had already occurred, and they were all building had stopped pretty much and these editors were very interested that I had a check list of all this all the problems that designers must cope with. It is good to have such a check list. They liked the idea, and so we developed at that time, a little association we called the Structural Study Associates, and they used to come to my place down in Greenwich Village weekly to meet and talk about structural study problems. They were quite taken with my general approach that I had taken in 1927 about the environment etc., so, at the beginning of all of our meetings, people would say, "Do you have any more items that you can add to the list of things that can happen to you, that we have to cope with?" They added a few and then it finally got to where nobody was adding anything anymore, so it was decided I ought to publish it, so I published it in SHELTER MAGAZINE here in Philadelphia, in 1930, and once something is published, again I say this is something strange because there is something mysterious about getting into print, printing machines belong to humanity, you're getting to talk to a lot of people. You could be trespassing, am I doing something wrong by using the capability to speak? And so I'm saying to somebody, personally I find it is very mysterious, if the system you live in, your things really do get into print, at any rate, how it was once it was in print I felt I didn't have the responsibility of having to remember it any more quite the way it was. There were lots of copies out there, and lots of people know about this. So I was very surprised when I happened to look at it a few months later, in my file, and I, the sheets where I had been working on it, the printer's sheets were there, and I suddenly looked at this thing with new eyes. And I said, this thing is-is really quite crazy, because I had mosquitoes along side of tornado. I said, they are really quite incompatible, I think I ought to take this list and sort it out all over again and in the order of relative severity of its effect on the humans. I don't know why I haven't thought about that before, but I haven't. You can understand how I hadn't actually, because the way I came at it was that I needed to have a list.

So, I then said, I am going to try to get each of these into a category, and sure enough, I found that I began to put each of my items into a file, a file cover, regular leather file cover, so I had them labeled there. One was called, the only item that could go in their were novae, the explosion of the stars it was very large. And, I called this, you know "ionistic" or something like that, and then it came to "epochal" something enormous, and then something, the word "enormous", and then something "pretty big", and then "not so big", and so forth and down to finally "innocuous."

So I started sorting the things in these envelopes, and sure enough there wasn't everyone of them had something to do with man or something to do with severity, so they all had an envelope that they would go into. So within those envelopes I then began to see, "is one of these a little more than another?" So making little strips I was able to sort them, and sure enough they did arrange out, every single one of them was easily, this was just a little more severe than that one. You really can think about whether hearing trouble versus a scratch on your face, and so forth, you can find out. So I ranked them all, and when they were finished, the most extraordinary thing happened.

You remember earlier today, I gave you the definition of the word "science" by Sir James Jeans, as "the attempt to set in order the facts of experience." It was not until I did what I just did, that I suddenly realized what an extraordinary statement he had made, because I had these were experiences, and I had suddenly sorted it out the facts of experience, into relative order of magnitude. When it was done, absolutely clearly the most severe was the least frequent. This was absolutely quantum mechanics of Universe. What the Universe does then, you always she has her energy, you don't make energy, there is energy, so anything she wants to do, she can do a few big ones very infrequently, or a whole lot of little ones very frequently. That's the way the Universe is run. That is quantum mechanics. It always adds up to what have you. So I saw then this was pure quantum mechanics, the big ones are the least frequent, and quite clearly mosquitoes are much more frequent than tornadoes. So, boy, I didn't have to have the name tornado or mosquito any more they could have a number on it. I said this is an incredible kind of a capability of a designer to have, because I'm going to because part of my design was also, then, this total responsibility and recognizing the rates of change in design, I always had specific longevity how long did I expect that this was going to be valid. Not something you were trying to sell and get rid of something you were being responsible for, so I 'm going to design this for five years, therefore this is something that only happens only every 300 years, I probably won't have to bother about it. I wouldn't know how to make a house novae-proof. So I don't try. But I see the things that I can do quite well since you and I wouldn't be around anyway if there were a novae, so I saw what I was really responsible for. It was pretty easy with that list, then, to say, what is the total amount of time, then, I really am responsible for?

O.K. Now, but that is the Universal Requirements, so I say if you go look at it today it has gone on and on and been rewritten time and again, to actually incorporate what I have learned a little more from each of my experiences, I get into getting something going reduction of practice working with society to be an absolute reality. And how you then responsible. You can see how I would like to get things withdrawn and get the fresh thing coming and so forth.

So, now we're going to look at some pictures and these will be, the first one is of, that's the grain bin house that the Butler Manufacturing Company in Kansas City. And that's the picture taken in 1940. As W.W.II this is 1940. I had just done, I had left FORTUNE in l940 this is the thing I did next after FORTUNE. And, I had been traveling in the midwest, in Southern Illinois and so forth, with my friend Christopher Morley who was a great writer, and I saw these grain bins of the Butler Manufacturing Company, and the grain bins were all around. They are corrugated steel, horizontally corrugated sheets that are bolted together, and on the top they had a conic roof. And part of the great New Deal coming in and trying to rehabilitate farms as well as mortgages and so forth, was that they began then to credit the farmer with wheat, so grains could be harvested and put the Government would loan they would pay the people for the harvest that was put in the grain bins, so grain bins were where the little farmer could cash in and the government would hold and stabilize the price really look out for him. Grain bins, then, were enormously proliferated and this Butler Manufacturing in Kansas City had THE best grain bin. There was nothing to touch it.

I got to know the old man, Mr. Norquist who was an old Swede, who produced the first one a metal worker, a sheet metal worker. And then, he became then the President of the Company. They had a factory in Galesburg, Illinois and another one in Kansas City, over fairly close to the area where Harry Newman lived there Harry Human And the Harry TRUMAN. The, I worked for two years with Butler getting this thing fixed up, because I saw in that sheet steel, corrugated, getting the most wonderful enclosure, but not something you would live inside. The moisture, the precipitation, it was not good if it was properly insulated, and if it had the right kind of a roof because it was open, just a conic top, corrugated, and airs came in and insects would come in, and so forth. And I saw that if I had some windows in the grain bin and so forth, that I really could convert it into a little dwelling device, that I felt the war coming could be extremely important.

And so, I kept telling Chris Morley, we were on this interesting mission of his, going down to the Mississippi River to a little tiny town on the Mississippi. Chris was visiting Knox college, in Southern Illinois and visiting the English Department and giving a lecture there, and Ralph Sargeant who has been the Head of the English Department at Haverford for a great many years, was the English Professor at the time. We went down to see a little town on the Mississippi that Chris Morley had been following the records of Edgar Allen Poe and so forth, and he found that Edgar Allen Poe had been going down the East Coast of the United States, and he got down to Louisiana, and was going to go up the Mississippi. And he found that Edgar Allen Poe there was a man who owned the first printing press on the Mississippi in a little town that was on the east bank of the Mississippi, not far across from Hannibal, and he had invited Edgar Allen Poe to come out and be his editor, to start a press on the Mississippi there. It was just a little bit below Nauvoo, where the great colony had been of the Mormons and so forth. And so, Edgar Allen Poe was on his way, and he never got out of New Orleans. I'm sorry to say he also drank quite heavily, then. At any rate. I'm not sorry about anything! Everything is great! He had a good time there. (Everybody in the audience really laughed). But at any rate, Chris Morley had a hunch, that he'd like to go and see this press, and he found that the family, the press was still there, and the family of the man who had owned it was still there, and he asked if he could go up and look in their attic. Chris made friends very readily with people, and he went up in the attic, and he found all the correspondence with Edgar Allen Poe of this man who owned the printing press about his arranging for him to come out, so it was an enormous great find.

Well, just at that time, Chris Morley who had also, he had been brought up at Haverford, and he was therefore a Philadelphian and main line, and his, he and his three brothers each one of them became the Rhoades Scholars from Pennsylvania and went to Oxford and Cambridge. And Chris's father was President then of Haverford. So I used to see a lot, Chris and I used to go down to Haverford quite a lot. Chris, at that time wrote a book called KITTY FOYLE, which was about the white-collar girl in Philadelphia, and it was extraordinarily well done book, and it became very, very popular. And for the first time, Chris with forty-five titles, ever made a really large amount of money. And it then went into a moving picture, and, having read Kitty Foyle and being in Philadelphia you might really find it extremely amusing. Really a very pleasant book. And so, he made money, so Chris Morley said to me, "I think Kitty Foyle would like to have you go out to Kansas City and see the President of the Butler Manufacturing, because you have been telling me about all the things, how you might be able to make some nice low-cost shelters, because obviously they don't cost very much money." They were really being stamped out. And so he said Chris said Kitty Foyle would like to pay your fare to get out to Kansas City and back.

I was very penniless at the moment, I assure you, so that was great, and I did go out, and I met the old Mr. Norquist the President of the Butler Company, and he liked me very much and he loved the idea of using grain bins for houses. So he complimented me very much, and I spent two years getting this thing going, and different kind of roof, a compound curvature roof I put a dome on it rather than a cone, because a dome is a cone is simple curvature, a compound curvature very much great strength. So I worked out ways of very simple press work to be done in their shop to make the compound curvature. Then, this is when I said, we now will be having housing and building with so relatively little material, that instead of building from the bottom up, which is the way the buildings have always been built, I think I can, because it is circular and will have structural stiffness of compound curvature, I think I could then, build this from the top down, because I think I see one of the ways in which people one of my responsibilities as a comprehensive designer is not to have a lot of people killed.

In 1927 when I started the Dymaxion House, the most dangerous industry in the world was the building industry, by far, and the second most dangerous thing that happened in accidents, were in bathtubs. It's interesting, number one is the building industry, and to such as things as bathtubs, and then you know, building, something I really wanted to cope with, I saw no reason then for people to have to go on scaffolding. So, I think I told the Butler engineers I was going to want a secret place to put this up. They found this place behind one of the other factories there where nobody could see, and I then did assemble my I put up a mast first, then I had an assembly ring where all the roof pieces came together, and this was going to be used later on to mount a ventilator. So I put my assembly ring on the ground, put my mast through it, and then stayed my mast. Then I could have pulleys and so forth, a block and falter (?) and get with a sling to my ring, and I could lift the ring up. So I could pull the ring up at a good height for the people to work on while they brought the roof pieces together, and then I keep hoisting up and keep adding on the ground.