So finally I got it up to where, there is still another ring to be put on where you can see here, but at any rate, I had it up off the ground by quite a little. Later on I was going to let this down, and what I had done was to build a, draw a dig a trench, a circular trench which was very easy to do just strike a circle and then take the earth out of it and put it up into the center of the circle, so that you would get a little plateau above the water water, any sort of drainage problem, and then I got a bunch of brick, and enough to lay the brick side by side, it was four inch this way flat and make a complete ring where the grain bin would sit down on that ring of bricks they'd act like little snow shoes and distribute the load, and then we'd have to find some way of fastening the grain bin tightly, and it did have, the bottom of the grain bin had a turn angular skirt like this so with holes in it so you could fasten it down, staple it down, or put any kinds of stakes I wanted, down.

But I had, in this picture, if you will remove me from the picture please, have then, this dome is on its mast and hoisted up and underneath inside there was a pile of sand which I am going, later on, to flatten down evenly inside the brick to act as a basis for the floor. And this pile of sand was inside there. I called the engineers and the President of the company and said, would they stop when they came out to lunch, and come see the dome, which they did. Now, it was August, 1940, and it was noontime, and on that day it was well over 100 in the shade. It was fantastically hot day. Kansas City can be one of the very, very hot spots. And so, they came out and they really were astonished to see a grain bin hung from a mast, they had no idea you could do such a thing. It really once you see something like that it looks pretty easy, but it had just not occurred to them, they had always been going up on ladders, and some of them were built really quite high, and the ladder work was really very uncomfortable. And suddenly, saw you could do this masting.

So, the President of the Company, said "I'm going to go inside." You could not touch the metal with your hand, it would absolutely burn you. There was, on one side, where the doorway was going to be that you go in, and so he went through the door, and he called out to everybody, "hey, it's air conditioned in here, just like the Kansas City Club, and so everybody thought he was kidding, and went in, and absolutely astonished said it was really cold inside, truly cold, and over 100 in the shade and it was cold. Everybody wondered what was going on in here, so they lit cigarettes to see what would happen to the air, and sure enough, the most extraordinary thing, the air was coming down at the center. There was an opening, you see, around this great big ring, 3 1/2 ft 40" ring in diameter, and the air was coming just down like that and going out underneath the edge of the dome. So you see the smoke would come right down and go right out. This is then where I was getting into very important aerodynamics of buildings where I found that we have concave and convex. And I have spoken about concave and about convex not being the same the radiation impinging on the convex is defused, and the radiation impinging on the concave is concentrated, so the sun is shining on a convex surface, and the convex surface then defuses the sun's radiation into the atmosphere, and this atmosphere is then heated. And the heated atmosphere means the molecules are becoming a little more active, taking up a little more room, there is no confinement of them now, so they take up more room, so they weigh less, and therefore they start a thermal it starts rising, and the, to take the place of the ones that are rising, air has to rush in from below. Now what was going on here is really a fascinating matter.

And then I got into this more and more the big pattern studies that then there is a thermal rising from this thing, and this then having to get air to satisfy it from all around the base here to come rushing in. I found then that as the dome was up like this in the air, the there is also with every thermal, also a second down thermal coming like this. At any rate, the airs were being pulled out from underneath of the dome by the opposite column it pulled it out. It was pulling the air in through the hole in the top.

Now we have the Bernouilli principle this is pressure differential. And just go over the study of the Bernouilli principle in your physics book and you'll find that we have "peto tubes" and so forth. In the Bernouilli principle when you pull the air through a small opening, it takes a good deal of energy to do it, and it takes the energy out of the as heat out of the air to do this work of concentrating it. If any of you have ever flown a light plane, if you learn, if any of you learn to fly, you'll know as you start learning your flying, as you then are coming in for a landing you want to approach the field you are going to then make a leg you get to a point where you cut your motor and start your first glide, like this, and back down. As you cut where you cut, you have your prop fastened to your engine, so there is not a clutch, and you don't take the key and shut the engine off. What you do is you push-in the throttle, you simply starve it of gas, and as you do that then, the prop still goes around, the engine is always connected, so the pistons are going up and down like that, and the engine the ship is slowing down, and by the time you make a landing you want to be where you get to a nice stalling speed. So you had to start this slowing down. You then learn that the air being pulled through the carburetor, gets pulled through a fine little hole in the needle valve, by an enormous pull, and you have to put on what you call "carburetor heat" before you force your throttle back you put on "carburetor heat" where they take all the heat possible from the manifold and concentrate it around that carburetor, because otherwise it will freeze up with you, because it gets so cold, so that when you are going to make your landing, now, you have made your glide, and now you're coming in, and suddenly you need you're going to hit some wires, the wires you're not high enough need a little more engine no engine. So carburetor heat. This is the Bernouilli principle pulling air through a small opening, makes cold.

So what was happening was this enormous amount of air being pulled out, you must look at the edges there, they were good and high, and so it's been pulling out in all those directions, and being pulled though the small opening of the top and it is absolutely a cold down current. Now this was very exciting to me to really learn that a building could be an air conditioning machine in its own right, aerodynamically.

All of my geodesic domes I then realized this was there, and as I built any of the ones that are large enough, that are going to have really quite a large occupancy in it, and that the patrons like my dome and so forth, when I tell them about what I tell you, the air conditioning salesmen are much better than I am, so they always put in air conditioning, because everybody knows that heat rises inside buildings, and don't tell me this nonsense. So that they, what they would do is put a fan inside of my thing and try to pull it the other way, completely frustrating what Nature is trying to do. I told my Ghanaian students in the University of Science and Technology in Kamasi about this and they were really interested, and they didn't have the, they didn't like the idea of that air conditioning salesman anyway, so that they also had this great Volta Damn, and all this big electricity going to be, and the enormous amounts of Bauxite so in Ghana you would be able to make aluminum, so I said, let's get into a big aluminum dome, so we designed a really beautiful big aluminum dome, and it took them a couple of years to produce it to make the "chilling machine." This is a picture of it. It is an unusually lovely to me it is the most beautiful of all the geodesic domes that have ever been built.

And this is made of first they worked two years on the mathematics it is a twelve-frequency truncatable into the same mathematics we used for the 72 footer I told you about of tensegrity at S.I.U. And they had plenty of big openings, at the bottom as you see. But putting lovely little hoods for the rain. And they had just a nice small opening at the top. This was put up at the fairgrounds in Accra. The government decided they'd like to have it there, and it went through several international shows and sure enough, the minute it was up, the Ghanians called it the "chilling machine," and the hotter the sun shone the colder is was in there. It was just a lovely thing. So it was ideal for the tropics.

I'm astonished how little listening-to I get about what I'm saying to you, though, and how people keep right on. So talking about our energy needs, this would be one of the typical things you could really do a lot. It doesn't do it for you at night. That's one of the reasons they say, "What are you going to do during the nighttime, and so forth, but the point is you have it good and cool during the sunny times it's going to stay fairly cool but we do have hot nights, and there are other things you're going to have to do then, but the point is, it works while the sun is shining. Anyway, I learned about that from the Wichita from the Kansas City 1940 deal. And I also learned a whole lot more which was that I could hoist buildings on a mast, and I've used that ever since. It has been extremely, extremely useful. Next picture please.

Back to the grain bin. This is down in Washington, D. C. There is a little called Hains Point. It runs down between there is the Potomac River coming down, and this Hains Point doubles back and makes a great harbor, that was the Washington Harbor. Such a harbor that she had the steamers that used to go down to Norfolk came to this little harbor. So Hains Point is really an island, almost an island in the Potomac, and it is pretty close to where the airport is. You cross the bridge over Hains Point and then turn to the left, and at no time you are at the airport, the Washington Airport. And this is in they used to have on Hains Point, a tourist camp, this was before W.W.II. The picture is in 1940. And a great many people who, the Representatives in Washington liked the people from home to come there and see them at work in Washington, you'd have a it was easy to help get them reelected, and so they had this great tourist park on Hains Point, and they had it so people could come in buses. And sure enough, in the Spring, the graduating class win the right to go in a bus all the way across the country, to Washington, to see Washington.

So the park had all kinds of bathing facilities, and certain little houses where people could live in Dormitories and things. And the housing people in Washington, with the War coming, became terribly interested in this grain bin, and they asked me if I would bring one to Washington and put it up at Hains Park. So it was over there at the corner of Hains Park and I see that there are three people and myself out there in front. But, Wally Saunders who worked with me on the design, a wonderful architect of the University of Michigan who is now dead, and his wife Carol. And you can see the car in the background and get a little sense, this is 1940 car there. So that the grain bin really worked like a dream, and we were able to produce this whole thing for $315, and inside,

Next picture. It had lovely cooling door on it, a screen door, and it had curtains, which like theater curtains could be pulled up with a chain at the bottom so it would be weighted and wants to come down to the center, and then theater curtains, in a circle, as a semi-circle, pull it up, you would just let go of the chord and the whole thing would shoot to the center the way you see there on the lower right-hand side going in. And the walls were everywhere, the inside the beautiful insulation, and used fiberglass insulation in them, and the wall board holding the fiberglass in there. And the runners that held the wallboard, the vertical runners had key holes in them so that you could put shelves or anything like that you wanted, and we had a ring going around a, first, what you call plug-in strips. Wire plug-in strips going completely around so you could plug any electrical current wire in and come down with any fixture, then, you had.