Afghanistan couldn't be a more strategic position in relation to the great pressures of Russia, China, and the enormous numbers of people in India. And the, in the British Empire, that I spoke about, rather, the great East India Company monopoly of the oceans, they wanted to be sure there would never be any overland competition. And Sinkiang Pass, the Khyber pass, is one of the real challenges to the water route. And so the English master they mastered Afghanistan, kept it as a block they blocked the overland traffic to be sure their water traffic would work. It was, this kind of thing became so obsolete in the terms of the air age, that in 1954, the British, who had been more or less, this is one of the things they had not pulled out of with their sovereignty, still had an Ambassador there in Afghanistan, and he was supposed to be looking out for their interest and be sure that there were no this is an obsolete thing, no longer do you have to stop that over the pass route but the Ambassador was there, it was a poor post and he was a drunk.

And it suddenly turned out in the strategic information that the Russians were very much courting Afghanistan and were about to take Afghanistan over. The Afghans have an annual, every-other-year, the Jessian Fair which is of very great importance, and the people come in for this fair. And it was discovered that the Russians were putting in an enormous pavilion and the Chinese were putting in a big pavilion and everybody all the Communist countries were coming in there, and the western world was putting in nothing. And it looked like this strategic state would no longer stay a neutral middle state would go Communist.

The Americans were suddenly appraised of this and they needed very badly to have some kind of an exhibition, but there was only one month to go 30 days to go. The United States got in touch with us, and asked if we could produce a geodesic dome. They only wanted the geodesic dome, however, to house their show. Their show, they had gotten up a big show already the show of the Borden talking cow and the bouncing ball bearings and the Lionel Trains and so forth. It was rather a poor bunch of junk, but at any rate, they needed an enclosure for it, and they didn't have anytime to build a building, so they asked if we could produce the dome and deliver it and erect it in Afghanistan in 30 days. We did produce it, and we produced it in I made the State Department, the government officer come down, we erected it at the airport at Raleigh to be sure they wouldn't say after they got there that they didn't know how to put it up and they wouldn't pay us, so I found you have to be pretty tough with our government now days. And so it did work. And so we erected it. The picture you just saw they were putting it into the airplane. It had to go in one DC-3 DC-4, it had to have one of our engineers go with it and that was all.

And so, if did get to Afghanistan and it did go up in 48 hours, it would have gone up in 24 except that there was a holiday.

May I have the picture back again because I would like to talk about it a little more. And as the dome, then, was put up, the men the Afghans all worked on it, putting it together, just led by the American engineer. May I have that picture back again of the dome. No well, this'll be fine. The men putting it up, we simply had color coding the red end went to the red part on the hub and the green end to the green part and so forth, so red to red, green to green, just so. And the Afghans put it together. They didn't know whether they were putting up a quadrangular rectilinear, they didn't know what they were doing, just putting it together, put the ends together, and suddenly there was this big dome, so all of the Afghans were parading around, they said to the Afghans putting it up, "You're pretty good dome builders, aren't you?" So the workmen had been up to this time it was assumed that the way the thing goes together is the way the workmen are putting it together. In that country, and so forth, whether you can do things with wood or the craftsman is responsible for the shape. Maybe someone has designed it for him, so he has to make it that shape. At any rate, it was assumed then that the Afghans that were putting it up were apparently great dome builders, so they felt very proud about it, and they began to call it "Afghan Architecture." It was simply a big yurt a very large yurt obviously, straight Afghan. So the King of Afghanistan became very excited about it, and he was down there driving around. Meanwhile, the workers, then had found out that they had got the skin on it that you could jump up and down on the skin. All they had to do at the top was jump on the skin and lay like this and they would slide all the way down beautifully going under the bars, so they were all cascading down all over it. And the King felt they were defiling his Afghan architecture, so he ordered them to stop doing that. Well the King wanted it to be given to him. It was really a very, very great hit. And it actually, completely, stymied the efforts of the others. In fact the Russians, then, asked if they could come over and measure drawings, and they came over then and made moving pictures of the whole operation, very, very carefully.

And, this particular dome went on then, was taken apart. The King of Afghanistan wanted it. I think America made an extraordinary error in not giving it to him, because very shortly the Russians gave him a jet plane and he felt great about that. And the Russians wanted to build a highway in, so the Russians put down a mile strip of asphalt road they had never had anything like that there before, particularly the civilians. This was going to be an extension. I think the Americans did not parry the Russians very well. They should have given him that dome.

At any rate, the dome was taken apart and went from there to Ceylon and then came back to New Delhi. It went from there to Burma. It went from Burma to Bangkok. It went to Fair after Fair. And from there it went to Japan, was put up in Tokyo, and the Emperor came to see it. This then went to Peru. This dome has been around the world. My last check up on it, it has been around twice completely, and it was up in Alaska at the time they had an earthquake, and it was one of the buildings that was in very good shape, it was not at all bothered by that.

Next picture please. This is that same dome.

Next picture. No, this is in Tokyo that's where. No that was the same dome in Osaka. This is a dome in Italy for the Triennale in Milan, and won their grand premio. Another one of the paperboard domes in 1954 also went to Milan and won the grand premio at the Design Fair.

Next picture. This is that dome you were just looking at before in Milan.

Next picture. This is in South Africa with the students at the put together by students of the three universities the one at Durban, and the students from Capetown, and from the where the Raderstrand in the these three students' projects, what we did, what I wanted to do, I talked to you about the African tribes. These African tribes had never been slaves. The blacks came in from the north about the same time that the English were coming in from the east coast and the Dutch were coming in from Capetown going north to settle. And the blacks went into areas that were of no interest to the English looking for metals for the industry, nor to the they were not interested in places where the good farming that the Dutch were looking for. They loved the very deep valleys and prominent promontories in the valleys for their corrals. But I had talked to you about their using their cows for money. And they were getting so prosperous that their cows were eating up all their thatching grass, and they lived in domes of thatching grass. And there was really a great deal of problem about thatching grass, so, an aluminum factory had just been opened up in a place, Pietermaritzburg pretty close to Durban, and so I found I could get corrugated aluminum. And I developed, then, a dome which those are the corrals I was talking about, the thatching grass, superbly, beautifully designed.

Next picture. There are all kinds of ways in which they are woven. At any rate, I developed this dome with the corrugated aluminum sheets and there you simply are using this pattern here that you are getting familiar with. And we had lovely little hoods coming out, eyebrows and there were windows of a stretched polyethylene sheet below them. This dome was very well engineered, and the students from all those Universities at great distances in South Africa, one from the other, came to put this up finally on the Durban campus. And the night they put it up, the number of the students inside, we finished at about 2:00 in the morning, they were going to spend the rest of the night there sleeping under it. I used the same kind of floor, incidentally, that I told you about, that I used for the Butler Grain Bin and that worked very nicely. This was a fantastically economical building, I assure you, this aluminum one, and it did not need to be painted.