May I have the next picture. We really have seen that before.

Next picture. Now we are coming to the development of the Dymaxion Cars, because underneath my house I had a Dymaxion vehicle, and I was planning to deliver it by air. Therefore it could be delivered to very remote places, and yet it had to have it's own autonomous equipment so that it would operate where it got to, so it didn't have to have its methane tanks, and it did have to generate its own energy and gas, and it did have to use the local wind and sun and so forth. But I, if she were going to be delivered by air, then there would be no roadway to get there, therefore I'd have to have some kind of a vehicle that would get me there and make spot landings the way a bird can land, without prepared landing fields and so forth. I'd have to have something that could go possibly overland if I could, if I could go on the highway it would be fine, but I also had to be able to go by air and water. So I wanted to develop an amphibious kind of a vehicle. If you could remove my face from in front of the screen, because I would like to be able to look at what you're looking at here. I then came to went through the following thoughts, and what I'm going to talk to you about, you will a good many things have happened, really happened quite beautifully.

I want you to remember I was in the Navy and I was also involved with the early flying of the Navy, and Pat Bellinger who was Commander of my first operation down, when in the Navy I was in charge of all the boats that were patrolling and looking out for the first of the naval aviators who were practicing at Hampton Roads, and where we had our main Naval Air Base station, and we were losing an aviator a day where these single pontoon, or other boats where they would trip and the aviator, belted in, would be head down in the water. The ship upside down.

And I developed a way of developing very fast boats that had a boom to grapple and pull it up, out into the air, so the water could be gone, so everybody could get underneath and get him out. And that's what got me sent to the Naval Academy. Well the Pat Bellinger, the Commander of that operation there is the one who did send me to the Naval Academy, was one of the first four fliers of the United States Navy. And he then later on was one of the great Admirals. And, Bellinger and I talked a great deal about propulsion for the airplane, and he would like very much to have seen a turbine, and he was very interested in my idea of a using liquid oxygen to produce, then, very enormous pressures of air. If you let one single drop of liquid oxygen expand in a pre-expansion chamber it would give you extraordinary pressures it would make turbines operate very, very powerfully but they would be cold he wanted something that was not subject to the freezing condition. Because as you got into the sky, in those days they had a lot of trouble about freezing. We had many water-cooled engines, and as we went up, you would get up and put rags on as we got in it got cold as you were getting into great altitude you sat up in your cockpit and put rags on the radiator so it wouldn't get too cold. Lots of problems about the freezing and getting up going up 45 degrees below so he was very eager to get into, and he liked the idea of steam. But that would get you into freezable water, and so forth. So the idea of liquid oxygen he thought was very good, and I did get into a great deal of inventing and thinking about liquid oxygen propulsion in 1917.

And so, coming back then to a vehicle which would get you from here to there where there would be no prepared landings, and no highways, and, you might just be able to come down by air, but you might be able to come by water, you might be able to come by highways some other time an omni-medium vehicle. And I saw that there were two kinds of fundamental flying. There is the soaring bird, the gull. But there is also the faster flying bird, the duck. And the duck cannot soar. It has really very small wings. And I saw that what happened with the duck is that in the first place I'm going to point out to you, everything in the Universe is in motion, and everything in the Universe is in motion moving in the directions of least resistance.

I saw it is possible, then, to improve the directions of a preferred a direction you'd like things to go by making it easier to go in that direction. This was something quite different from the propulsion. So that the shape you gave to a boat or an airplane was very important in relation to its having a preferred direction, and you can control that preferred direction and go in that direction the easiest way.

So I saw that birds are fantastically beautifully streamlined that way and the ship the fish was beautifully designed in this preferred direction. But a lot of things you may not have thought of as having that, I saw did have. As, for instance, I want you to think about a carrot, or various, think of fruits falling from a tree, and it is very necessary to get the seed very deep. And if you'll look at the shape of the fruit itself, it is streamlined to go in a preferred direction, and the apple drops in such a way, that the seeds get definitely aimed it splatters and it aims those seeds the right direction, so, with force they will keep working down into the earth. You find many of these things, the tubers and so forth, then, are designed to streamlined the carrots, streamlined to come out at the right time. It moves out of the land and suddenly breaks away it's little hair root, like letting a balloon go, and then it's streamlined and will come right out.

So I saw Nature used an enormous amount of preferred direction streamlining. So I said, I'm going to think then about how this duck flies. I find what the duck does as you know, we can build up momentum as I gave you just the hammer thrower. So the same way, a pole vaulter, can then, with his pole incidentally, a man a naked man who is a good athlete can high jump to a little bit over the height of the man. But the same man with a pole making him weight more than just the naked man, can then start running towards his bar, and using his momentum, putting the pole in the ground, then it carries him up where he goes and jumps, sometimes three times the height of a man. So, seemingly he has been weighted. With a pole he weighs more than he did when he was going to just high jump by himself so, but he makes up for that by running and building energy into the situation with the momentum. So, with the momentum he's going to go in this direction. When I saw then he could get up, and supposing you gave as he went up over the bar, you had another bar waiting there, because he has the motion going this way then he'd keep going along, he might go along on one pole after another quite a way. And this would tip and then he would grab another and keep on going. So he might carry that momentum quite a long way.

Now, I saw that what happened with a duck is that the duck starts running on the water literally running on the water really running very hard, he gets up on the surface and scooping his feet right along like that beautifully. And, meantime flapping it's wings very hard. It builds up enough momentum forwardly and its streamlining is so superb in the direction of least resistance. It is going really fast, then suddenly where a little bit of air like this like the pole vault gives him a little vertical height. And then with this little vertical extension he now then falls in the direction of least resistance as he leans his head a little more like this gets another pump so he keeps giving himself a new pole vault and he keeps falling in the direction of so you watch the duck going on and he is continually falling and getting new lift and falling, and he gradually builds it up into a little more altitude. Anyone who is a flyer knows, for instance just taking off of the aircraft carrier, that the first thing you do is to nose down towards the water and build up a little more speed by getting gravity to help you, so we're getting off you always do this. So that is all the duck is it is continually using gravity to accelerate him a little more. Having built altitude, and the gravity is pulling on him but he has the direction of least resistance and enormous forward momentums, therefore, you see, he simply gravity is going to help to pull him this way. So he keeps building that up. So I saw then, when the duck came in for a landing, as he finally got up to a good altitude good speed, he now no longer has to have rather vertical these are what I call air stilts jet stilts. These are jets, he propels, he really propels the air out from under his wing like that, it's a jet. So he has two jets and those jets are controllable in that direction, so to start off they are quite vertical then, as he gets building up his speed, begins to get them going backward a little more so that they begin to push him forward at the same time. And he finally gets to where he builds up a little lift on his own head and his back, because he is designed that way also, a little longer distance of air over the top of him so he actually begins to build up lift. They do that actually, the blimp flyer, people who fly these rather slow balloon things, then they can put an attitude and begin to get lift on it and then they can really get much more forward out of it. So, I saw then that the designing of this duck indicated that we might be able to develop a vehicle without any wings, because the duck was not using wings for soaring, that's the only reason we had wings on the airplane it is really a soaring device.

And so, I said, if you do that, then the vehicle will weigh very much less. In order to have wings you have to have very powerful spars and the weight of the airplane is very greatly increased over what it would have to be if you didn't have wings. Therefore I could have a vehicle weighing very, very little superbly streamlined, and which would, then, have what I called "twin jet stilts." And they are twin controllable angle jet stilts so that I could start off then running forwardly, and then giving myself a little "jet." But my jet would be a turbine jet so that there could be more or less of a continuous jet effect, and I was planning on using the liquid hydrogen for my propulsion here. So that your vehicle would have wheels, and you could run along on the ground, build up some and then suddenly give open up the vertical so it would give you some altitude, and the angle of the you'd have two jet stilts, and you'd have them going a little bit outwardly like that so that they would converge above you here above your center of gravity. And the third pole would be the falling pole. Gravity would make the third leg, because then you've got your momentum to stabilize that.

So, I want to come back to another experience you have. If you've ever done stilt walking stilts. Now here you've got, I gave you, remember, two poles standing up and they would could go anyway, but two got together and then suddenly they could only act like a hinge. So on stilts you're on a hinge so you've only got two ways you could fall backwards or forwards here. So you start to fall a little forward and then you just move the stilt forward and it makes a third leg, and it stops you there. So now you've got a new hinge and you hinge this way, so you start to go that way and then you move this one over here and it stops you falling in that direction. So, this little delicate falling forward and just simply the ability to change to the third compression member, and that's always initiatable. So I saw in the same kind of a way, then, as that, my twin jet stilts first giving you the verticality, and then building up momentum forward and getting out flatter and flatter. Then when you want to come in for a landing you could do this but your jet stilts can be quite wide, if you want to have the hinge wide or narrow. And all of these would converge above you so that you would be hanging from it, if you were up on top of it, it would be top heavy it must be convergence of the vectors must be above you. At any rate, this was my theory of what we call then Dymaxion Vehicle, and I called it the OMNI-MEDIUM TWIN JETS ORIENTABLE STILTS VEHICLE No TRANSPORT.

So, obviously, I was not going to be able to get that kind of equipment right away, but I'm quite confident you're going to see what I have given you, because in the years that have happened since that, suddenly we did come when I talk this way, in '27, there came a chance in 19 the picture you saw of some little vehicles there. May I come back to that same picture there the first picture in this group. Here you will see some of those vehicles. They are, you can see them on water. There is an entry. It is a V-bottom and you see the two points of contact, and these are pictures of my vehicle going through the sky. Those models, I had drawings of them and Noguchi he was a very great sculptor friend of mine made me some very nice clay models and then we made them in plaster and colored them. And the New York automobile show the year before the episode I told you about of Chrysler, was the, this was the year the New Deal came in and everything was absolutely stopped, and they had the hall all hired, and very few people put any automobiles over there, but they had seen my models in an engineering book shop on Park Avenue, so they asked me if I would come to the show, and I did, and I had a booth and talked to I described what the models would do what I hoped the models would do what the theories were.