W.W.I, we had only burlap bags, and burlap was used a great deal and an enormous amount of wooden crating. And they were fairly light orange fruit type boxes of wooden crating and others, but W.W.II saw the paperboard paper box, and paper boxes were used for dumping goods all over the world on beaches, and they stand up great this is Kraft paper, and Kraft paper then turned out to be it didn't bother it at all when it was wet, so that you could have cement in it and all kinds of things it used to be in jute, suddenly were in paper very much more beautifully contained, and not fuzzy and making powders off the sea, jute bags allowed things to powder off, and so we found then that craft paper has very high wet tensile strength, but very poor wet compressive strength, so if you had a container then, full of cans, the cans act as a compressing unit, so it doesn't collapse, all it needs is really good tension, because it is already closest packed with the cans inside, so it doesn't find any preferred shape to take. So it holds its shape.

But it would be possible to get high, wet, compressive strength in paper so far as fundamentals would go, but it was found that these were the studies that were made at MIT at the Forest Products Laboratory, and at the Wisconsin Paper Institute. And we found that if you could you could introduce at the "beater" stage of making the paper, you could introduce the chemical ingredients that would bring about the stiffness. At the time that we were making these studies at MIT and other Universities, and these were very popular at the Universities, I assure you, the desirability was in evidence, but the paperboard manufacturers were making so very much money, all their mills were just going full. And they didn't have any back log time, and so nobody was willing to go to stop any paper mill at the beater stage to make the changes necessary to give us a high wet compressive strength. They could realize it was possible, but it was a multi-million dollar operation in tooling, and nobody was going to stop down for it, so that nothing happened about that. But the point was that we found it was highly feasible.

But what I found I could do, incidentally, the laminates, the glues they used to use in the paperboard were really very poor about coming apart, when they were wet. And the got the resource and all that it got to be pretty good. They made the flutings, these flutings are brought together in double and triple and so forth to give varying degrees of stiffness and where the little fluting just touched and the flat piece of paper then, that's where you would need then the glues, and be sure you don't have them deteriorate. And, they did then get to some that would really not come apart and I did have one project at Cornell University where we built really incredibly beautiful paperboard hyperbolic parabola diamond dome, and got the whole and we were assured by the paper company that we bought it from that this was "resourced" and it would not come apart in the wet. But, what we did then, we covered all the outside of all these pieces. They were carefully painted with polyester resin, so they were very, very stiff and strong, and seemingly completely waterproof.

But there were leaks in the thing and so forth, and we got up on the roof, that same roof that you saw the miniature earth on about five-years later. We had this very beautiful hyperbolic parabola diamond dome assembled and came a very great rainstorm, and she just wilted. It was not the water-proof, and they de-laminate internally which was a very shocking thing to the students. The work we put in this, there was over a month of work to get this lovely thing up there, and it just came apart on misrepresentation of the manufacturer there. Those things did not often happen we found, I'm glad to say the manufacturers are usually really very, very thoughtful with our projects, but this was a sad one.

The dome that you were looking at, at Tulane, then, was made using the polyester and painting them, and they were very stiff. That was made for the Marine Corps. And the one you are looking at now was made for the Marine Corps because we found then, that you these are made out of continuous strips, which strips come together to make one of those big diamonds, because you have the parallel lines, and this comes through a roller and printed, and it prints windows into them. And it was double-walled, double thickness. It was a very, very stiff dome.

Next picture. That dome went up in I'm sorry we don't have the completed dome. The Marine Corps dome did go up in a great hurry, and this is not this is another one in, excuse me, I take it back, that is the Marine Corps dome, this is at Quantico, Virginia. And very interesting things happened with that dome. The Marines liked it alright, and it went together readily. We had one opaque, didn't open the windows. Those windows you could fold open or not as you liked, and we had it on a out in the parade ground where the grass was all gone, it was just dirt, and the dome was up there and in a few days, apparently the paper let light through so grass would grow, but kept it from scorching. There was the most beautiful circular carpet of green grass came up. And after a while we removed it, there was this lovely circle. At any rate, the paperboard seemed to have a favorable effect that way.

Next picture. This is one at the University of Michigan. Again paperboard.

Next picture. This is the first of the Radomes, polyester fiberglass radomes. The one that I told you the President of MIT, Jerome Weisner was Head of the Physics Project for the Defense Early Warning System and this is the dome that he purchased from me, and which he was advised by the engineers at MIT, the structural engineers, would disintegrate in the 14 mile an hour wind. And this is the one that went then, he had it on his radar out at Lexington at the Lincoln Project and it didn't come down in the Hurricane Carol, so they then decided to move it this is a picture then, on the top of Mount Washington where it went through two winters two winds of 150 miles an hour and one of 180. And they had prepared, you see this ladder up to the top, and they had prepared a method of cleaning this dome, because they were sure it was going to pile up get so much ice and snow on it that it would hurt the radar signals. They didn't need to. Apparently, the membrane of our triangles are very stiff edges, they seemed somehow or other like ice box making ice cubes and so forth. It seemed to hold it kept breaking away all the time. They never had to use the cleaning apparatus.

Next picture. This is the beginning then of the big Radomes, getting up to the 55 footers. That first one you were looking at I think was only a 20 footer. This is getting into the big 55 footers.

Next picture. And they went through, this is getting ready for a test of this dome at Huntington, Long Island, where the engineers of the Air Force, then, were going to set about to find out where the strength of this dome was. They wanted to know they were terribly puzzled by the strength. So they set up this dome and when it was finished they put ball bearing shivs all around on all the vertexes for a large zone at the top. And then they ran a continuous cable through the ball bearing shivs down to an enormous composite pulley, go through the cable here, and then through these back and forth. And all those were brought into this one great-big pulley group, and there was an enormous hook on it, and it was hooked into a forged steel ring coming out of a concrete block that they put there.

They hung round from all these vertexes plumb bobs, they had surveyor's transits, then, lined up watching each one of these plumb bobs and so forth, and watching vertexes, and they put electric strain gauges on the joints all over it. So then they got their electrical readings on the strains that go on these gauges. They then started loading, I asked the Lincoln Project engineers in advance, if they could tell me what they thought it was going to do, and they said, yes, they thought it would stand the tests, they were going to load it to the equivalent of the stress of 120 mile an hour wind, but they said, it was going to deflect on the top like any beam, the whole thing was just going to bend inwardly.

Well, the test went on and Shoji, my partner, and I took a moving picture camera on the roof of the building, right there, so that we could really look at what went on in each of the joints. What happened was that it did not come evenly in at the top like a beam at all. The whole dome contracted symmetrically. You could see as we got up to very high stresses, you could see rotations and so forth almost ripple around the vertexes. Each began to twist locally, very much like our jitterbug. And to contract symmetrically. Well, when they got to 120 miles an hour the concrete blocks came out of the ground. The dome hadn't gotten into any trouble, so. That was very annoying, so they built then a concrete block twice the size, and then this time the forged steel ring, was just a triangle a triangular ring coming from the block about this thick. It parted at 150 miles an hour. So then they shifted from that base and moved up to the Lincoln Project in Lexington and they then put down at the strength, they finally took it up to over 200 miles an hour winds, and the apparatus again broke. They never did they never brought that dome to destruction, and unless you brought it to a point of failure, you would not really with the electric strain gauge readings, really know how to turn this into a formula, so they never did get a structural formula, I assure you.