So their magazine, then, published a very laudatory piece about my bathrooms. Suddenly in Phelps Dodge, the Phelps Dodge copper products people were in great competition with the mining President, the Cates, and Cates had backed my bathroom. So that the Phelps Dodge Company said, "Our biggest customer is Standard Sanitary, and they" the Standard Sanitary people didn't know about what I'd done at the Plumbers Union and so forth they notified Phelps Dodge that if they kept on with my bathroom, they were going to stop buying copper from them, so Phelps Dodge dropped it. I had not designed it to be in copper, you see, I designed it to be in polyester fiberglass, which was in the laboratories. But the setting temperatures were at that time, where you had the temperatures 2,3-400 degrees, not room setting, and so forth. But I was assuming that we'd get to where we could. So it would have been ideal in it. And I had to put a kind of surface on it which was made of antimony and tin, it was a very lovely thing, it would not tarnish, and it would not oxidize.

At any rate, I want you to understand the kind of history that you do go through and the interplay you have with big business and the idea of the money, where people can see the logic of something, support you on it, and then suddenly they turn very sharply because they find it is putting they are in jeopardy, their incomes and so forth.

So now we come to, I have been using a lot of time already, and actually we have not gotten to open up these pictures of the Wichita House, but if you don't mind we'll go on a little while and if it is alright for me to go on with you? O.K.

We have then, there is Wichita House, and it is called it is Beech Aircraft and you'd like to know how I happened to be doing Beech Aircraft. It happened then, I told you, I was on the Board of Economic Warfare, and we had in Washington before W.W.II, the War Production Board, and the War Production Board was run by, to start off with, by the Vice President in Charge of Manufacturing at General Motors. He knew the most about production.

And, the War Production Board had a number of departments like Aeronautical Production Boards, and so forth, and there were Labor Departments of the War Production Board, and so forth. It got to the very interesting point in the moving of the manufacture of airplanes west of the Mississippi, I just gave you. Absolutely overnight. And they moved into Wichita, Kansas, a city of 100,000, and within weeks there were 200,000 people there. Everybody was sleeping in shifts. Actually three shifts, in beds. And they ran the moving picture all night long, on a 24 hour basis so that people on the 12-4 shift, and so forth, you went to the movies at 6:00 in the morning or whatever it was. The place was run on a 24 hour basis, but extremely uncomfortable.

There were a great many people then, this was in all the places they moved into Oklahoma and so forth, same kind of thing, but particularly Wichita, Kansas, which is where the Boeing B-29 the big bomber had to be done there, and it was very critical. So the War Production Board became very concerned, because the people going to Wichita war worker after war worker went there and they found conditions so uncomfortable, and they said the aeronautical world doesn't have any future after the war, nobody could think of seeing anything like that. These airplanes were just for the war, so we'd better get a job someplace else where things are a little more comfortable, so the quits began to exceed the hiring by an alarming amount. To such that they said we will never be able to get our airplane program through.

This became great consternation to war manpower, the War Production Board, particularly Aeronautical Engineering, and so there was a Labor Section of the War Production Board. That's where Herman and Greg Bartecki were, and they told me that the labor unions were very interested in this situation. In the Labor Unions the Aeronauticals these are called the, what's the matter with me? the National Association of Machinists, and Aerospace Workers today, this is the full name, and the National Association of Machinists is the oldest Union in America, they have really the original master craftsmen of the machine tools and so forth, real machinists, and so the machinists union said they would like to help about this production. They knew of this really troubled because labor was leaving, therefore everybody was saying to labor, "What are you going to do about this?" And the machinists said "We think something could be done." They said, "We have heard about Fuller has a house designed that can only be produced in an aircraft plant, and maybe that would be something, this would mean then, that after the war you are going to need houses and not airplanes, so that we might be able to get to where these might be appropriate for an aircraft plant. And that seemed to appeal very much to all the people in war production who were concerned, and Grover Learning was head of the Aeronautical Production, and he was a friend of mine, and so it was decided that it could be a good idea, and so the labor unions said to me, "Would you like to pick the very best labor union in Wichita, the one we consider the fairest to labor and the most favorable to business, to try to really get things going, and not really being destructionary, so I said "Of course."

So the National Association of Machinists, then, picked out, because they were in all the factories out there, they picked Beech Aircraft, they said they have by far the best labor relations in Wichita. And so, I was asked then to go out with the labor men, and the War Manpower, and the War Aeronautical people we made a trip to Wichita for me to talk then to the Vice President, the Operating Manager of Beech Aircraft, a man named Jack Gaty. And I went over my design of the Dymaxion House, but a modification I had made to it by virtue of a great many changes that had occurred in technology since 1927. I updated it very much to the design you saw there, and for the moment, it is still on the mast, but it is not up in the air so you don't realize it is on the mast. Because, for various reasons, I thought were valid, you could have it either way, you could have it up, or down, either a garage or a hangar.

Now, I showed this whole thing to Beech Aircraft. Jack Gaty himself was a production engineering man, and very astute, but also a very hard operator executive, and he said this really is suitable. He thought I might be an industrial designer, that I simply was just going to but he saw that I really was using aircraft technology, that everything I had there was very suitable, and that he could see it could really be very economical, so he was really game to go ahead and do something.

The labor unions then had me go and give a lecture at their labor headquarters to all the shop stewards of all the aircraft companies there, and they decided that this would be very, very favorable they were all interested in housing. And I was really amazed at that labor, because they did not look at it in the way architectural esthetic might be thought of in some cities, they really looked at it as a sailor would about a boat. They could see this kind of a boat would work, and they knew their aircraft technology, they knew that it was beautiful materials and it was going to be very strong, and they said "That's great!" So they were very much for it.

So then the deal was made with Jack Gaty where I said I will only do this, then, if you, Beech Aircraft, let me have top mechanics for I don't need so many. You have thousands of men employed here, but I would like to have he asked how many, and I think I said "eight of the very best mechanics you have" superb craftsmen who I then used for several months to do this job. And they were to loan us the tools from Beech Aircraft, it was to be under their auspices. They decided at first it was going to be in their factory. They then hired another building downtown, they decided it ought to be conducted, it might be disruptive in the actual practice, but I did get these best mechanics, they said all the tools I needed, whether I wanted big power brakes or whatever it was, they came right over and installed them.

So, you see what I really learned in lessons about this. Now, the, it is a fascinating matter, that the, having talked to all those shop stewards, within a week after this agreement was made, they had the curves in Wichita the aircraft, of quits over hiring, the thing just going off like that, and it stopped absolutely abruptly it went absolutely vertically like that, and went just exactly the other way. The hirings began to so apparently it was just what the human beings there felt it was worthwhile living under the tough conditions in Wichita and so forth, and it was everything that Board of War Manpower wants so War Manpower then said, they accredited my having anything I wanted.