The average American every time he just flushes the toilet may just use it for a little liquid, he is using, we're averaging about 5 gallons to get rid of a pint of the same water just a little polluted water, polluting water at that kind of a rate nonsense kind of things go on in that bathroom. Water being so extraordinarily valuable. We don't know of any other planet with any on it. Boy!

Now, that bathroom, between the two then, there is a lot of space where that saddle is, where you step in, where the pipes ran through. And so that near the wash basin end and the tub, the two ovals are going away from each other, there was really a large space. And I had on the side as you stand in front of the wash basin the way I'm facing now, and up on your left then there was a door, and you opened the door, because there was always a cabinet, the large space between the two sections, and it was a very big cabinet. It was so big that you could put in a full bucket on the bottom shelf. Then I had my, it hinged open this door, the things you'd like to have in the cabinet. So you opened the cabinet because you want something out of it, and as you did the mirror is on the inside of the door so it opened, the mirror is now in front of you and the wash basis and the shelves were opened to get the things you wanted, so you're not continually opening and closing and when you want you close the mirror off and all the room is nice and neat again.

So that, in every way, it was designed for the air conditioning below the wash basin you can see a little, on the lower right hand side there a little space there, there was a hook up, there was a large ventilator outlet, and the airs came in through the sides of the doorway up near the top the fresh air was brought in through there, and was pulled out by fan below the wash basin so all the steams and all the smells went down away from you. Now all I had to do, everything was so complete, that we had all of the manifold of plumbing, all the wiring, the heating, the lighting was all built in, and all you had to do was to hook up to the fresh water, the hot water and the cold water, the waste and the air vent. That's all you had to do, and so this really got to be a very, very good unit.

Now, I had a very interesting experience with this, because at the time of the Dymaxion House, 1927-1928, coming to New York in 1929, there was a man, quite a rich man in New York, and he got quite interested in my Dymaxion House, and he asked me to come give a lecture on it at his house, and Frank Vanderlip, and he invited a lot of people like Clarence Wooley was the President of American Radiator Standards Sanitary who he thought would be interested in my house, and old Owen D. Young was President of General Electric, he was a very influential man, and he brought all these influential people to see this house. These people were full of really considerable consternation.

It was the Dymaxion House was a problem poser for these human beings. I had one of my classmates was Fred Ecker and his father was the President of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company at the time I designed the Dymaxion House, and I got a hold wrote to Fred Ecker and then I saw him when he came down to New York, and I said the life insurance companies were betting on the people were going to live longer, and people were betting that they were going to live shorter. So I think that anything that I might design that eliminated accidents and the probability of human beings having trouble in a house, ought to then really improve the life insurance companies bets, so I think that Metropolitan Life ought to be tremendously interested in my house. And that did turn out to be the case. Fred Ecker was absolutely exited in love with it. He was one of the young junior officers of the company. His father was President at the time, so he introduced me, then to the Controller, and then finally I met all of the officers, and we had a number of very enthusiastic meetings they were going to back this thing.

When suddenly, we got to their Board of Directors, and it turns out that the, in the life insurance companies at that time, were only allowed to invest in municipal, state or federal bonds or in mortgages. And so that Metropolitan Life found that all of its capital was in mortgages, and they said, if we let the Dymaxion House get going, it is going to make all of our mortgages lower all their values so we can't do it. The Board of Directors said, you just can't back it. This really was a very frustrating sense that I had about that. People could see, yes it is very desirable, and yes, they had all very good business reasons why they wouldn't do it.

At any rate, Clarence Wooley, Head of Standard Sanitary became very excited when Frank Vanderlip had me show this thing to him, so he wanted to have something done about those bathrooms and my kitchen and things like that. And so I did, then, do work for the Standard Sanitary, used to be called the Pierce Foundation was their research department up in Buffalo. And there I developed what I had also had in the earliest patterns of this thing, the kitchen and the bathroom plumbings would be back to back so you would only have to bring the water to one point. You can understand that was very logical, so that I developed for the up in Buffalo in their research department a back to back bathroom and kitchen which had never been done before, and that has become very standard in housing to use those things.

At any rate, I made the bathroom in panel forms, and I may just as well tell you this because it is a good production and DESIGN ENGINEERING kind of way. What I did was to develop, in that case, a frame construction where I used tubular, just pipes, and you could take a piece of channel iron, it'll nest up against a pipe beautiful friction very tight. I made channel iron frames, quadrangular frames, which then sat in between vertical pipes, and as you put it up then a pipe in place, then it was possible to lock a number of panels and get into the wall side had each one of these panels were about let's see they were 3 feet by 2 feet so that I'd have, for an 8 foot wall you might have 4 of them, one above the other, and they were panels which I used sheet metal, and you made a pan, and the pan, then would receive a piece of Masonite, or celotex insulation it would fit neatly in the piece of pan. We, then, one of the things that the Standard Sanitary and the plumbing people have a lot of is ferrous enamel work, beautiful enameling where they take literally glass and melt it up, and melt it onto a surface of steel, and makes it a very, very fine surface. So that I learned a great deal about the radius you have to use on your metal in order to have it not crack at the edges and things like that, so I developed these panels, and they could be in lovely colors, and they would fasten into your walls, so, but I could have panels which the panel also turned out to be a wash basin, or the panel could be the seat so that the walls could spout. You could have interchangeable ones just a plain panel, various fixtures that did various things in the bathroom. It really worked out extremely nicely with these back-to-back plumbing manifold behind that wall.

So the bathroom fitted into the panel system, and everything fitted very nicely. The bathroom was really a very charming looking bathroom and it was not as full as the bathroom I have developed here with all one piece at all, but it began to be part of that where things were coming off the wall instead of coming off the floor, and it was easy to keep the floor nice and clean at least. The Standard Sanitary and American Radial Standard Sanitary suddenly stopped this whole thing. And they just clamped down on me, and we must not talk about it. Because the Plumbers Union, which is really it is an employers union, because the plumber is a master plumber himself, he is the employer. But the plumber's union had a national plumbers magazine called THE LADLE, for pouring your lead and so forth, for joints. And the LADLE published an article saying that Standard Sanitary they heard was working on a bathroom and they were never going to install these things, and they were going to stop buying anything from Standard Sanitary. So Standard Sanitary was sickened by this thing, and so they must absolutely keep it quiet. Because there would be no really very little work for them, just installing this thing very rapidly.

Then, I told you about Phelps Dodge, and Phelps Dodge having the Phelps Dodge Copper Products. And I've told you then that the in Phelps Dodge I was trying to get things that would really help them, so I, this was a good chance to try out my bathroom unit, and I'll do it a little better this time, and so I did get out that good bathroom that I told you about, and I found that the President of the National Plumbers Union was also the borough President of the Bronx, and one of the great Franklin Roosevelt supporters, and so they were having an annual banquet of the Union in New York, and I asked if I could present my bathroom at the time of the banquet, so they said "Yes," so I put it up in the dining room, and they were fascinated with it. And I said, "I have looked into this matter very thoroughly, and I find that the electrical fixtures people, the electricians, make a great deal of money that you boys do not make because as part of the law of America that the land is it, and anything that is fastened to the land belongs to the land. This is, incidentally, why lunch wagons began you begin to see a lot of lunch wagons, and you wonder why there are lunch wagons, and it was because they were brought on wheels, and as long as they could go away on the wheels again, they did not belong to the land. They were able, then, to get out much fancier equipment that would not then be claimed by the land owner.

But if you put a bathroom into a house in America it belongs to the owner if you are renting. So people were not putting bathrooms, there were so many people who were renting, they would not put bathrooms in because they were going to belong to the owner, and what was the use in doing that?

But the electrical equipment belonged, because it could be taken away, then belonged to the owner, so people bought lots and lots of electrical equipment. I got into all the figures of the marketing of the electrical equipment, and showing how much the electricians made out so I said I have now a bathroom which you as a plumber can sell as a bathroom, get a nice profit on it as a bathroom, you can get paid for installing these things, and you're going to install many more of them. So, at the dinner they decided that was so.