And, we had, then, also, the windmill for the top of the house, so that you were going to use your windmill power to pull air over preferred circuits. Now, the mast, then, was preassembled with all this equipment in it very much like assembling an airplane or an automobile, so it was a sort of caisson, and it was my prime, and then all the other things folded up in it in pretty small packages.

May I have the next picture. I'm really quite sorry because I think there was a picture before that earlier that showed the packing crates I had, I designed all my packing crates and everything was good for all the shipping I must be utterly responsible. And, see if you can't find an earlier picture in there showing those packing crates with the mast standing there it is, there it is, there is the mast, and the septic tank base. Then you'll see just to the left of the base of the mast, the ceiling pieces that are hollow ceiling pieces made out of aluminum. Then you'll see to the middle lower left wooden packing cases, and in those are all the space dividers. I said we don't want any partition just as you shunt past I only want something that stops you where you really are having some machinery that is going to really serve you there anyway. It ought to be like, a tree is going to serve you, so you come to a tree and that's fine. These must be very natural stoppings, then between the ends of these pieces of machinery we will have pneumatic sliding doors, and I said you'll always use a light cell to move it, you mustn't get hands I found one where the greatest disease transfer is is on doorknobs and so forth, so I want to get rid of those things. So the packing cases there do contain, for instance, there are coat closets, and the coat closets have a vertical hanging they're hemispherical coat hanger that comes out into the room, the door rotates so that half of the space has a half circle, in a ring, and you have all the clothing hanging from that I've seen clothing stores do that now days, but there was no such thing then. Then there was a shoe rack that went around just hanging below the clothes. Then the things that are horizontal, I had shelves that were mounted on cables, that were Pater-Noster (like shelf) and went up, and the shelves could come to the exact height where there was an opening where the children couldn't get up there until they were the right age to just reach things out, or you could just press a button and watch things go by bookshelves or whatever it is, and then you could take out what you want.

So, those were the kind of things then I had my prefabricated bathroom. This is 1927 and we did get into, there was no such thing as home dish washing, or home launderers, or anything like that at the time. Nor was there such a thing as home air conditioning. But, I really did bring in all that technology, and very much from the ship, just from the submarine and so forth, I would have to do that. So, all the parts of the house are lying there.

Next picture. So now that mast, was opposite I showed you already, and then the six compression struts, there were three that were hung from the ones above now three more had been inserted. And because it had been pulled in like this, they stay in the compression ring very neatly. Then there were some tension plates that have been slung where the floors are going to be.

Next picture. Then the first floor decking has been put in on top of the slings and then the space dividing machinery have all been installed, and so we can see doorways there. We are looking at the present time in a bedroom. Now there are two bedrooms, and this was approximately 40 feet in diameter. I did it on a metric system at the time because I wanted to get metric drawings in such an industry. But, you're looking at one of the two bedrooms and you can see an opening on the wall where the closet, where the shelves come to, and then there was a large utility room which you could call a kitchen, but also the washing machines were in there, and coming through the wall from that was a stove and an icebox and things, where you could get things into the living room out of the far side of it for the table. The living room was a diamond shaped one, was approximately 40 feet diagonal, corner to corner it was a big room, and then there was a library.

Then, down below we have the garage and hangar, large enough to put a light plane in there.

Next picture. This is before those deck plates had been pulled tight. These are not quite the right order.

Next picture. Now the second floor has been put in and those ceiling pieces that do the reflecting of the light from the central mast have been put in place, and there is where they also deliver the air, they are planary chambers for the air and the light into the various rooms.

You can see a reflection on the floor of the blue room towards you there. There is a lady lying naked on the bed, there, because this was all air conditioned and so she would not necessarily need very much clothing, because she could make the warm air come to her any ways you want it. But you can see the reflection of the light from the ceiling there on the floor, because I told you the light is now operative in the center of that thing.

And, next picture. Then they put on the top floor deck for the roof to go on.

Next picture. Then the railing is put in for that.

Next picture. And then the canopy. Now that top deck again was very large and it has central drainage so that any rain that comes in beyond the roof there comes to the central and we catch that back into a cistern, so we catch all the rain and anything that lands on the building. You can see the translucent light at the center. Then I said, if you have opaque walls, it is very difficult to let light through them. You can cut a window through but that takes a lot and it is very expensive. What I can do is have transparent walls and then I can just shutter them, which is the way nature really does with your eye shutter they are very delicate membranes.

When you get down to our only reason for wanting we have something called privacy, and there are four kinds of privacy the olfactory kind of privacy, there's tactile privacy, there is aural privacy, and there is visual privacy. This is the only sensing we have. Therefore, if I can't smell you I have olfactory privacy. If I can't touch you I've got tactile privacy. If I can't hear you I've got aural and if I can't see you then I've got visual. So I saw it really takes a very delicate membrane for not seeing, and I noticed that at garden parties in the outdoors, the acoustical absorptions are so good by the grass and the bushes and so forth a group talking over there you can't hear them over here, really quite a short distance away. The acoustics are so good. So I if we could get the right acoustics operating here, we don't have to get to too very great distances we would then have this occulting, or cutting off of the line of vision.

And so, you'll see in the lower left part of the house, the window there, a triangular so I had little aluminum roller screens, that pull over onto the floor and then came up vertically like a camera shutter, than the other one coming down so that the two came together. So they went up like teeth coming together here. And I found that I could then give you all the opaquing you wanted but when you did want to see out you could have a complete seeing out.

Now, next picture please. I'd like to be out of the picture. Now this is one that I did for, in 1927 the Russian Revolution had been going on for, let's see '27 just ten years. And they were having mobile farming operations. We have mobile farming operations today, but they had then enormous cooperatives they'd move it along to do things and I learned so much from this, dome, rather mast, principle. I saw I could use a tripod base, and a mast coming from the tripod with tensions would be a very stable mast, and some good staking down deeply with that you would have great stability, and then I could hang up a structure around it that would make very possible that truck that you see over there is carrying this I thought it would be possible to develop a really pretty first-class mobile dormitory for mobile farm operating teams. And that is what you are looking at there. I published it in SHELTER MAGAZINE in '30 1930 yes.

Next picture. There are the, you can see the dormitory things, in there is a central area, and a whole lot of living around it, and I used an airplane wing type, really a foil, very strong overlapping the other the horizontals for the closure. And that they could be trucked really very, very effectively, and relatively lightly.

Next picture. Looking there on I have a mast. This is the first one I ever made. I made an aluminum mast of three parts, and then I ran my tensions out to a horizontal compression ring of separate tubes with a little universal joint, and then having tension members triangulated this way and triangulated this way. So this was my first real and then It came back to the base again, but it made a sort of a double wire wheel but it was my first tensegrity. I want you to understand that I had been thinking and feeling tensegrity long before I got to identify it with my energetic geometry. And had really been able to use it quite effectively in the first Dymaxion House. I say this to you because I feel tremendously tender about Ken Snelson, a very extraordinarily beautiful artist. Ken is a did was a real catalyst, and he changed completely my realization of how I could really use that in my energetic geometry. I had been wanting to use tensegrity, but he gave me all the key, and so I feel very greatly indebted to him.

But, I say, he's gone on as an artist, and I think there is a, I know Ken terribly well, there were times when people would say Bucky is stealing your things and so forth, he doesn't think so anymore. He really appreciates what we are doing. But I want to be sure, I've never talked tensegrity without everybody knowing what a part this boy played in this victory.

Next picture. It gives you a little idea of what I looked like in 1928. This is a map of the drawing of the geodesic of the Dymaxion House turned sideways because of our projector being easier to see things that way. And you'll see two prefabricated bathrooms at the center, around the mast, and they had in the mast I had an elevator, and the elevator was in a triangular shaft, and it was a tetrahedron itself, so there was no way it could fall out. You can understand, it was triangulated this way, and then it was coming down the track there was just no way it could cock in the shaft so it was a very safe thing, and I found it really quite easy to actually screw yourself up, and if you wanted to do that, it seemed to me that that would be a very, very, very useful way to carry on.

I also had the center of it also I did have slide-down shafts the way you have in fire houses, which seemed to me to be very desirable way to get out of your house. But here, this whole thing came out three and a half tons. And when I did produce the actual first of the Dymaxion Houses at the Beech Aircraft, and I really followed the same mast principles all it came out three tons. That was in 1943-44-43, from 1927, so that it was a beautiful vindication of the calculations of 1927 for the weights to come out alright.

Next picture please. Will you block me out here? I'm very, very fond of this picture because it was a watercolor done by my wife of the Dymaxion House in those years. We have now been married, we were married in 1917, so we have been married going 57-58 years now. And her support through these years was just incredible, because she had she did not really understand precession and so forth, and I said I'm not going to earn a living, and we just had this beautiful new child that is born after what we had been through, because we almost, due to the enormous pain she went to look out for being the oldest of ten children, she really stayed with her family we were almost apart while I was living around the country working on these houses, and almost separating us, and suddenly this new child, and so that she would go along with me in the experiments was really she, she, it was very, very, extraordinary faith in that I had something. That's the way she felt about it apparently did.

At the time, in 1927, when she made this painting of the house, the models had been made and that I have been talking about, she thought that it should be seen in some kind of a proper setting, so she made this lovely rendering. And, my brother who was an engineer, three years younger than I am, really a very beautiful boy, he died 15 years ago, but he was very, very fond of me, but he also didn't like what, to him, seemed to be a lot of dreaming. And he felt that I got into a lot of trouble, and he felt that I kidded myself a great deal. And he was incredibly precise, I think because he simply was worried about me, he even went out of his way to be even more meticulous in the way he said anything.

The year that this happened I got a telegram from him in Pittsfield where he had gone to work for General Electric and he wrote, he telegraphed me saying, "I'm engaged to be married to the most wonderful girl in Pittsfield." The other people said "in the world" but he could only check out Pittsfield, and this would be typical of my brother. (Bucky really chuckles about this). And so he always felt very, very badly because I said I was going to wave my hands and open the doors in the Dymaxion house, and he said there is no way to do such nonsense absolutely nonsense. And, not long after this, I got a telegram and it didn't say "Thank God", but he indicated that he said "We have discovered and developed the photoelectric cell here, and you can get one of these for 72 dollars, so that I was vindicated about waving your hands and not having door knobs. And, he wrote time and again to say "Bucky, would you please tell me what this Dymaxion House is all about?" And I would tell him what it was all about, and then he would write back and finally my wife saw that I really was quite put out, because he said "I wish you'd stop all that philosophy, and just tell me what it's all about!" And, so Anne Anne wrote a letter to him that we have, if any of you get that little reprint of 4-D, which we have a record of the letter is in there I think, in which she explained to my brother what it was that I was up to.

But the only real proof I have that Anne really she really didn't know what I was talking about but I think that such principles that you would not have to earn a living things like that, she didn't discuss that part, but she just simply said that she knew I was passionately committed, that I really was convinced that I knew what I was doing. She says that, but it is very important that we have been able to we have lived through a great deal together, and she I think, she was born in January and I was born in July, and in every way we opposed like that, and as I say, where you are so really different if you really can get on then it is really great. But it is very productive, because we are so different. And, I don't want to have any such meeting as we are having here without having you all know how moved I am by the backing I've had. (You can really hear it in Bucky's voice, here.)