Nobody has really said, "What do you need for human beings?" Nobody has ever spelled it out. So this, particularly came then, to the weights that I knew of buildings. I saw that man was using incredible amounts of material, and that there was no science in it it was beautiful skilled craftsmen, but the architect had designed the building in various shapes and he had to be fairly well informed, something about corbling and so forth, but he did not have to lay the bricks, the craftsmen made the thing work out there, following his shape. And he was doing shapes that a client says he wants this way. Very, very much. And, so I said, "It is a possibility, in the direction of "livingry" and particularly in the environment controlling, the shells and the equipment that goes in and takes care of our various chemical processes, and energy needs. There is possibility that this could be cut down quite far, and so you can understand then, by great luck, carrying out of the navy which had taught me so much there. First, before W.W.I, I had been also, I went to Harvard, and I was looking forward tremendously to going, and when it all happened, I got into a social nonsense of coming from an expensive preparatory school with very rich boys my family was not rich at all. My mother and I, my father was dead, was really just able to get me there just pay the tuition and rent and a very small allowance. And I found myself not being able to join clubs and things there but at any rate, for one reason or another a love affair that didn't go right, and this and that. I got myself quite unhappy, and I got perfectly good marks no trouble at all. But I was really feeling I was there for athletics and fellowship and things. I had not gone there, really, with the idea of getting education. Because I have already made it fairly clear to you my feelings about the mathematics for instance, while I was still in the preparatory school, and I was working those afternoons when I had to stay in I had really gotten through quite far into college and university mathematics. When I got to Harvard I didn't take mathematics at all, because I, by this time I had really caught onto a lot of patterns, and I was pretty sure that I could just read my own mathematics I didn't really have to go and, I assumed that I didn't take the things that I knew a lot about. I took the things that I didn't know about. So I took musical composition and things like that. At any rate, I took government. I really wasn't interested in, I had never been interested in government, but I took government because I thought it was a good idea but at any rate, in no time at all I found myself in pain, and I cut all my mid-year exams, so they had to expel me. It was just like a little bit of non-sense in here. I had been quarterback on my football team in my preparatory school, and the quarterback just before me became the Harvard quarterback, and the quarterback before him became the Harvard quarterback, so I had a good chance, I thought, of being the quarterback. And I busted my knee and everything went all to pieces on that, I didn't have that to go on. And many other things seemed to keep coming up. I certainly wasn't going to be taken into any clubs, and I certainly didn't want to be outdone by my friends, and my sister had been married the year that I went to Harvard, and she'd gone on her honeymoon. She had a beautiful Russian Wolfhound and she asked me to take care of it in Cambridge instead of a kennel, and I found I could do something wonderful. I could take my Russian Wolfhound and go to the theater where there was some very popular actress, and I could stay outside the theater door with my Russian Wolfhound, and she would always stop and I could get to talking with her, and we'd get somewhere. (the whole audience breaks out in giggles). So, I'd take Mitzi and I went to the stage door of "The Passing Show" in l9l2. And there was a very attractive girl who was called the premier dancer, and her name was Marilyn Miller. She was unknown at that time. And so, I used to take her out, and her hired mother and Mitzi, we'd go with the Russian Wolfhound and her hired mother so we'd have dinner. Not a very cozy affair, but at any rate. Her play had tried out in Boston and it was a success and they were going off to New York, so, this is where the Millers came along, so I simply went down to New York with them and I took my whole second half year's allowance, and I invited the whole chorus at Winter Garden out to dinner. And I didn't know what to do with these girls, I assure you, but at least I had them there, and I could at least say to my classmates, "I'm really outplaying you altogether here." One-upmanship. I say nothing could have been more childish and stupid in a sense, but I was really extraordinarily young and naive at that point in my life.

However, this then got me out and got me in learning to be a millwright. I was sent to Canada to work in the cotton mill with some Lancastershire Englishmen who were putting up the cotton mill machinery for a brand new factory cotton mill. And it was a fascinating experience. And I learned to put up one of each of the cotton mill machines myself, and I kept notebooks and so forth, and everybody said this boy has done so well, Harvard invited me to come back again, so I did go back. And I went through the same thing again, and got out, and went down, this time I worked for the packing house I told you about Armour and Company in New York. I worked in 28 branch houses of Armour and Company, where their markets opened at 3 in the morning and you worked to maybe 5 or 6 at night. It was a very long day. And, I had this experience of pre-morning New York at all the different you know, going way up in Westchester everywhere there were 28 different branch houses all over Jersey City. And I really got to knowing New York and what feeds it, so it was a very extraordinary experience.

And then W.W.I came along and I went off in the war, off to the Navy. Then when the war was over, by then I was regular United States Navy. But then our first child was born just the last year of the war. Just at the time of the armistice and she caught flu and then infantile paralysis and then spinal meningitis and we had a long battle till she died just before her fourth birthday. And, this was a very you can imagine how we felt about this. And, she had been all the more endearing she couldn't move around, her little mind and brain not damaged at all, but unable to move like other children. And she asked we found her demonstrating this extraordinary capability, because she couldn't get out to touch things with her own hands, as every other child wants to, she had to get her information about things through other human beings in the room. And there were we had two trained nurses, first one and then the other, and my wife, one of us would be on duty all the time, and very often two of us were in the room together. And this little child was so sensitive to us that we'd be about to say something to each other that would be to do with our grown up things, not really to do with this little child, and just as you had the words all formed on your lips and she'd say it. And we'd look with astonishment. And I began to really realize that all human beings have something in them, that once and a while you say the only way I can explain that is telepathy. We all have those experiences. But we've also learned to shun things you can't explain, and that's not scientifically accredited, so it's not well looked upon. But I felt, that quite clearly nature has what we can call "fail safe" alternate circuits, all kinds of alternate capabilities so when this thing doesn't work so we all have this telepathic, but don't usually use it very much. But this little child had nothing else to get her information so it was highly developed.

At any rate, this made me accredit telepathy as being something probably in due course to be known exactly as ultra-high frequency electromagnetics. But for the moment it is inexplicable it is said. At any rate my feelings about this little child were incredible. My wife was the oldest of ten children. Her mother died the same year our child died, and one of her brothers was killed. It was a very sad year. She then stayed at home with them looking after, and I went on with an activity I had started in the building world. And both in New York where she was, but mostly I was away, and I had a big operation in Chicago and Boston and Washington and other places.

At any rate, we were five years of this and then, suddenly, our second child was born in 1927, and we had been entrusted with a new life. It was a very extraordinary moment. During those interim years, I drank a lot. I worked fantastically hard on what I was doing, but I lived a very rough life, and I got to know Al Capone, just through stopping at his I had a factory in Joliet, Illinois and I used to go out there everyday from Chicago, and he had a big bar on the way in from Joliet. So I used to stop there. But I did I've had some very extraordinary experiences in my life, and when this new child was born, all this sort of negative, I'd really been trying to bury hurt and feelings and I'd gotten really where I'd gotten, I had quite a lot of people who loved me, and really a lot of rich young friends who wanted to back me when I went into the building world in 1920 when I came out of the I had to resign from the navy because of the imminent death of my first child, and went back in Armour and Company, and at Armour and Company I became Assistant Export Manager for Armour and Company. And that was a very beautiful big pattern experience.

And, incidentally, in the navy I had had this big pattern experience where I had become after a quick short course at the Naval Academy, I became Aide to Admiral Glease who was in command of the Cruise and Transport Full Operation I think I mentioned that 130 ships moving across the Atlantic, but the pattern handling big patterns was very, very important. I'll also connect that with you the fact that I was born very cross eyed. And I mentioned to you the other night about well not, nobody knew why the cross eyed. But they said, we mustn't fool around with eyes, they are very, very delicate. We have to wait till the child is 4 and then there's no chance that the muscle will be strong enough to straighten his eyes out. And so at a little after 4 I was taken to the eye doctor for the first time and they found I was very, very far sighted, and therefore I got my glasses. So I mentioned that to you the other day, that I had 2 almost second birth of seeing with a new set of seeing capability. It was such a high order compared to the first three which I also made clear to you the other day. That is a very, very big jump. And I'm sure that had a lot to do with my life.

At any rate, my father also died when I was very young. And I'm sure that had a lot to do with my life because I was brought up then by my mother and people who would give advise, and all these people saying "Never mind what you think, really listen this is the way the game goes, and everybody saying I'd got to learn to play the game, not to do my own thinking. So we have this moment when, after I, just at the time of the death of our little child I was still at Armour and Company and I, my father in-law had invented a very interesting method of building he was an architect, a very good architect, and I thought this ought to be nobody was producing it, and I felt strongly about doing so, so a lot of my friends backed me going into this building business. And then I did get up I did get five factories going in different parts of the Unites States in those years between 1922 and 1927 when the first child died and the second child was born, and I did get up 240 buildings. They were large residences, small and it might be a very large commercial garage or something relatively small buildings but 240 of them and all through the eastern United States. Nothing west of the Mississippi, but it gave me enormous experience in the building world, and I'd like to talk about that for a minute.

We are going a little late tonight, but I want to get in enough time, so I'm going to finish some of this particular thinking about why I did what I did, and how I organized myself.

In the building world, I found then, in the first place, the method of building we had was very attractive, and absolutely novel, and I might as well tell you what it was. It was a method of making first place I had to develop the manufacturing way to do it. We made fibrous blocks. And these fibrous blocks are used wood excelsior. You've seen packing excelsior. And we, I had an enormous rotating machine and shredder and so forth, and we covered it with a very evenly spreading on the fibers ever so like pulling spaghetti out of a pile or throwing hay up with a hay fork, wetting each of these pieces with what you call magnesium oxychloride cement. And this we'd get all of this just beautifully wetted on the surface, and then I blew them together and felted them together in a mold. And made a block form 16 inches long, 8 inches thick and 4 inches high, with two four-inch holes on eight inch centers. So that when you put a block to the other end the next hole would be eight inches away from the end hole of this block. So the holes, they were four inch holes quite large in an eight inch block. So there was about a two inch wall between the hole and the outer side.

These magnesium oxychloride treated fibers then firmed up and became very, very very rigid, and gradually, they literally petrified. But their very interesting behavior was that they were very light. They might they weighed somewhere between 2 1/2 and 3 pounds each. They were so light and strong like a felt had that you could throw them up to the scaffolding to be laid. And they were laid end to end, and then we had, using wires formed something like croquet wickets, a croquet wicket, but when you came to the foot it went out about 3/4 of an inch. And these croquet wickets were 16 inches this way and four inches across the top of the wicket. These croquet they would go down through the holes joining blocks, but you put them in upside down the other way transversely to the wall so we had four wires, two going longitudinally in the wall and two cross wise like that, and they were put in and then we mixed a very fine concrete with fine gravel and poured the column up to leaving one block open. We laid, we laid every time four courses, but you'd leave one course open so that we laid three courses and the wickets were four courses deep, and so they overlapped at the course below, so the wickets then we left the last top unpoured, then we put the three more blocks, and the wicket from above would lap down into the wicket from below before you poured so that at every the wickets overlapped each other four inches. I found that this was equivalent, the bond of it was equivalent to being continuous wire, so I had reinforcing both in the wall and longitudinally in the wall; and then we didn't, we didn't when we laid up the blocks you didn't put any cement in between them. They were just laid up dry, and then where we poured concrete, when we came to a window we had girth blocks and we poured a beam to cap the columns, and then we had beams above the windows and we had beams above the openings, and then every floor height is a continuous beam heading all the columns. This is another kind of pouring block. And we could lay these up so fast you would lay up a whole floor of a house in a day, and sometime a whole house in a day, and we put a the cement is wet, so we had wooden bracing and so forth so the wall would not move while it was setting up. Then when it was set up, we then plastered the inside and we stuccoed the outside, so that this fibrous block became a beautiful bond for stucco or plaster and the interior plaster and the exterior stucco were only united by completely flexible fibers so the expansion and contraction inside and outside were very different, so the wall didn't tend to crack, it tended to be a very beautiful wall, and we found that the blocks had they were equivalent to 4 inches of cork in their insulation value.

And you could put roll tops on it and all it could do, it would just char away, absolutely just a red top, as I said, gradually these blocks petrified. And I've been to some of the houses in recent years, and it's absolutely just pure stone fibers. So it was a beautiful fireproof, beautiful insulation, a wonderful bond for the plaster and so forth, and you could build very fast. And they were relatively low cost. And so my friends were excited by it, and they all thought they could make lots of money by backing me. And my father was always a prominent architect, and many architects, very great architects thought it was very beautiful. So it did get into a great many very special residences of very rich people, and they made very good houses.

But when I, then, when the architects say I'm going to use your material and the owner said he liked it fine, I would then have to go around to the architects office and show them how they designed their walls, and give them that kind of service. Then came the time when the house was all designed and the architect would then put the drawings out for bids to the contractors, and the contractors would see this, and say, I could lay this up in brick very easily and so forth, I never saw this thing before and I'm just going to lose money on it. And I know how to do this better. So, they didn't like it at all. I would have to go out to probably be five contractors be bidding I'd have to go out to their place and go to the estimators and go over what it would cost, and an extraordinary service you had to give there. And I had to practically promise the contractor I would go out and lay it up for him when the time came to be sure if he ever bid favorably, so sure enough, we got to where now we're going to build it. Alright, the contractor has given his bid.