It had been found that the United States Marines and the Army and so forth, had really no proper air deliverable environment controls, and they had given out contracts to General Motors and they had given out a large number of contracts I think something like 20 or 30 large contracts two year contracts somebody would develop air deliverable environment controls, and they didn't find it. And suddenly, this Colonel Lane who was Head of the Aviation Logistics of the Marine Corps found that I did have the geodesic dome and they went into very, very thorough studies of them. This particular one, this is a place, Orphan's Hill in Raleigh, North Carolina, we had it's 1954 and we had the first lift of my dome. This is the first time I saw one of my buildings really being practically taken somewhere, and

The next picture of it please. In the next one oh we've skipped one. We flew it at 60 knots that's 60 knots is where the hurricane begins, so it was a great test of just the hurricane stability of my building, and then we got into the one that you've just shown.

Can I have that next picture back, that one you just ran, in again it was another marine corps flying an open frame building. Now that's the very first one, the Orphan's Hill lift. Then, then came the one moving at 60 knots of the same dome. But I had to also do my first calculation of how you apply this sling to know how much stress it would be distribution of stresses.

Next picture please. It is the there we are now this is a much later phase of the dome being flown from Quantico, Virginia, at the Marine Corps Headquarters. And this dome was made out of magnesium tubing, and the Marines, a group of Marines assembled it in 135 man minutes, and it was really quite a site to see this thing go together. This was a large dome. This is a 50 footer, and so, in a 50 footer you have about 2,000 square feet of floor space, it was comfortable for really quite a large all kinds of activities, and for small planes. These then were flown, they began flying these from aircraft carriers, and it was quite a site to see them, come up on they assembled them down on a lower deck and came up on the elevator and then the helicopter would pick them up and fly off with them off to the mainland. And to see the skins flapping, they always flew them more than 60 knots, and the helicopter pilots found that they behaved beautifully, there was no yawing around, they actually were very steady a very steady tail. Took the most comfortable aeronautical position.

Next picture. So I just want to go back, then. The idea of what I thought could be done, the air delivery of buildings, for the first time was done in '54 and then we began to use bigger and bigger buildings by air. But during W.W.II in Washington, when I was on the Board of Economic Warfare, I also, as I said, Head Mechanical Engineer, but I also was on an Inner-Agency Committee of different agencies of the government, also other foreign governments who were allies. And I was on the Committee of Alternate Resources. If something was not available, how would you solve the problem with other resources? And, at those meetings, the Chairman knew me well, but when he saw me come in, he'd always say "Please don't ruin our meeting with those houses by air, please." And that was '43, and then by '54, 11 years later, I saw the Marine Corps really flying them. And if the Marines the Marines were suddenly starved on their budget, but they had plans to really get enormous numbers of these things. The ones they did have, they were in typhoons in Okinawa and so forth, they were the only things that stood up time and again. They were very, very stable.

Next picture. The next picture. I just ran those because I want to show oh you have to try that. This is a picture of a Piosekki carrying a dome for the Ford Motor Company of 110 feet in diameter. That is 10,000 square feet of floor space, and that dome, they carried around, and they brought it into all kinds of shows, and finally that dome went to Seattle and became the Ford Company Exhibition Dome at the Seattle World's Fair. And this, then, told me that I could really now we're talking about again, quite a number of years ago by then we are able to deliver 10,000 square feet. The curve of increase of capability , because since then we have had the Vietnam War, and the development of helicopters has just been phenomenal. We are at a point now where it is truly feasible to deliver, we are going to be able to deliver really, stadium covers in a day, by, we're in that magnitude. In other words, houses buildings by air could not be more practical so think about your architecture be sure to be thinking about houses by air, buildings by air, that's the way it's going to go. And we're really going to manufacture them in the aircraft plants.

About, immediately after W.W.II, big aircraft companies trying to find peacetime business, before we started giving the aircraft companies a round of jets, they didn't know jets were coming. They were looking for business, and the Lockheed Company got into what they called General Panels Company and that was, Conrad Voxner was the architect, and Gropius at Harvard designed General Panels. And they found they were simply producing units to go into the tailor-made buildings, and that the people who were designing the buildings themselves, didn't know what they were doing because they were really making parts for something so inefficient that it just was not a good business.

About, it was about six years ago, I had a meeting with the Chairman of the Board and the Vice President in charge of Scientific Research of Lockheed at Burbank, California. And they talked about their ventures into General Panel, and how that was the wrong thing, and that they had, however, they knew all about my house, they could not really accredit it. Though Beech Aircraft had developed a very good prototype, Lockheed didn't think it was going to happen. But Lockheed said to me that their Vice President in Charge of Scientific Research, that, they were now at a point where there were, on the actual drawing boards, and most seriously they were considering the fact that there was a limit to continually building longer and longer runways of airports for bigger and bigger ships taking off horizontally. They were going to have to get to the vertical. And the English had already actually licked the vertical takeoff. So Lockheed was really planning its future on the vertical takeoff. Felt it was the only way to carry on and it might get to the point where you really had vertical tugs and so forth, for your earlier take off and then get your acceleration where you take on the horizontal form of the flight.

At any rate, they had their ways of solving those programs, and so they then were no longer limited to the size of runways. They also then cited to me a law that I will recite to you, a law, that every time you double the linear dimension, you increase the volume, the payload by eight and have only four times as much surface, so that driving the friction of the skin of the ship of the sea, or the skin of the ship of the sky, that friction is the four-fold and the payload is eight. So every time you double the size you have twice the advantage in delivery of the payload. So the bigger, and bigger the ship, the more worthwhile. But the bigger, and bigger the ships then the longer the runway, so they said we would have to go if we want to get into really big ships we were going to have to go into VTOL.

So they were getting into all new, they had it on their drawing boards and in engineering, very complete and serious studies going on for a longtime of their era of the vertical takeoff and the really big ship.

They were designing, and getting into ships designing them up to 10,000 passengers, and when they got into that kind of a size, they said, suddenly the relative size of apparatus for your living and so forth to the totality, the synergetics of the big buildings continually improves in such a way that they said it suddenly would be absolutely practical, they could see, for the aircraft industry really to be in the building business. Because it would be highly feasible to build very large skyscrapers in the aircraft plant horizontally, come out horizontally, fly horizontally, and then up-end at the site. So they said, that they now, for the first time, this was 6 years ago, accredited my that you could really prove it on the in the computer and so forth, it would be terribly worthwhile for the aircraft industry to really get into the building world. This is when I am talking to you about delivering whole cities by air. You will understand this is within the considered feasibility of the serious operators of the aircraft industry today.

I know that it is highly feasible to deliver whole domes, where I could get to l0,000 square feet of floor space like we were doing back at the time of the Seattle World's Fair. I can give you very, very large domes. I gave you yesterday the energy efficiency, that goes up every time you do it, so I have gotten into studies of whole community under one single dome, where you live in the garden, and it's not going to rain on you, and where you're going to conserve all the rain, you're going to catch it all in the gutters so you can have the water, and it doesn't have to go down the storm sewage, you're going to conserve it. And where things work out really very, very economically, and very well. You get to what I call the OLD MAN RIVER PROJECT.