I had a great many, very interesting conversations one of them was with Bill Stout who was the man who designed the first Ford tri-motor airplane. And Bill Stout later on then he was President of the American Association the, what is it, the automobile designing group? Society of Automotive Engineers SAE. And he wrote a very beautiful article about my vehicle and vehicle theories for their magazine, and then Bill later on built what he called the Scarab car in Detroit a couple of years after I did the Dymaxion Vehicle. Now when I did this Dymaxion Vehicle, as a consequence of the automobile show, and then the real things, the Crash, things were really settling down economically, and I, somebody said, "I would like to back you Bucky, you have a whole lot of ideas, and I'd really like to see some of the things" the Depression was completely on and somebody who had some money said, "You might just as well have some of the money I have, because it seems that everything is just going away anyway, and maybe something you could develop would be worthwhile."

So I said, I wrote a little simple, very simple, contract that said, if you'll let me if I can spend it all on ice cream sodas if I want, then I'll take the money, but it must not say what it's going to do it's not for profit or anything like that. And that turned out to be a very good contract later on. Because after things began to go, then everybody thought that this person ought to make a lot of money and so forth, but we did not go into it for venture. I was not trying to go into it for I just don't get anywhere if you're going out doing things for profit, I learned that in the housing world.

So, I went then to Bridgeport, Connecticut I went to Bridgeport, Connecticut the day that Franklin Roosevelt declared the bank moratorium it was just the day of his inauguration, and the person had given me the money several weeks before, and I turned it all into cash, and luckily I had turned it all into cash because suddenly the bank moratorium there was no money anywhere, and I arrived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the only person in town, not only with money, but my pocket was full of it. So I went from being the most ineffective character that ever happened to suddenly being very effective. And everybody wanted to work for me.

So, everything was shut down, and nobody had any jobs, and I got part of the this is my building in due course. I got the old Dynamometer building, of the old Locomobile automobile, which was a very great automobile in its day. And they had gone absolutely bust and the banks owned them, so they rented me this building which had been the Dynamometer building and, which was out on a point of land in the harbor a very nice point. And in there I produced the three Dymaxion Cars. Also up in the front of it you will see a boat upside down. And I got Starling Burgess who was a very great ship designer, but also a great aeronautical designer to come along with me as my engineer. A very extraordinary man Starling. Starling to anybody in the sailing world, knows all about him, but not so many other people do know of him. He did, with a man named Dunne who was a very great scientist in England, James Dunne, developed the Burgess Dunne airplane for the United States Navy in 1912, and it was the first hands off landing ship, and it was the first delta wing. There was the delta wing that came in many years later, they suddenly went back and found the Burgess wing but it was a plane where the pilot could literally take his hands off and it could land safely without any trouble at all self landing.

And then Starling designed he was there, if you are in the yachting world you know there is a six meters, and eight meters and the ten and the twelve meters are very well known the twelve meters are usually in the he had invented all those classes of sailing boats, and designed the best of them. He also designed the last three great "J" boats after W.W.II the cost of boat building so went up that you had to race the 12 meters which were pretty small boats, but the last of the big boats were the "J" boats, and Starling designed that all three of those. Before him, his father, Edward Burgess, had designed three Americas Cup defenders so it was very much of a family tradition. He designed the Puritan, the Bounty and the Mayflower, and they all beat the English. And, Starling Burgess' brother was the chief mathematician for the United States Navy's "lighter than air" structures. That's for all the zeppelins and everything he was a very extraordinary mathematician very extraordinary kind of a family.

Starling himself was very much of a mathematician and but a very eccentric man. He had gone to the same school I had Milton Academy quite a few years before me. And he was terribly interested in my ideas on Dymaxion House and all, and he was very eager to work with me on developing my vehicle. As I said I one thing, I don't have enough money being given to me to produce a Dymaxion House. That would cost really millions I'd have gone into that very clearly. Further more, I said, I cannot possibly develop the new propulsions means, therefore what I will do, because the automobile world is producing all kinds of equipment that I can use, I can test the ground taxiing qualities of my omni-medium transport, because the most dangerous phase of flying or shipping is when you hit the land whether you hit a rock or whether it contact with the crystalline, because in the air you are in a load distributing element, and once you launch your beautiful ship in the sea, all the loads are beautifully hydraulically and pneumatically distributed it is terribly safe, until you get to a concentrated load of a rock, or a pier, or another ship, so the most dangerous condition of flying is when you make contact with the earth.

I saw that with a completely streamlined vehicle when you got on the earth, because if you are a flyer of a light plane you know that she immediately as you land if there is a cross wind she wants to head into the wind and the old planes used to have a great deal of "ground looping" it is called, and this very violent swinging around, maybe you would turn upside down really often crack up a ship just after landing with the cross wind.

So I said, with the kind of streamlining I'm going to get into the "fairing" has to be absolutely superb, therefore she will want to head into the wind. Therefore, on the highway I can't control the wind, so her ground taxiing is going to be, how is she going to maneuver? What's going to happen? So, I built this vehicle to test the ground taxiing qualities of an eventual omni-medium transport. I did not go into designing an automobile. But here it was running on the ground and I had to get a license from the state to be allowed to take it out on the highways, so that in the end everybody called it the Dymaxion Automobile, and many people, incidentally, said to me, after I built three of these, "I'm sorry your car wasn't a success." And I'd say "What do you mean?" They said, "Well you didn't get it into production." I said, "I wasn't going into business, I was producing a vehicle. And it was extremely successful. I learned an incredible amount." And actually it has effected it did effect the whole automotive world. They did learn many, many things from that car, I assure you. And they did change a great deal of the grand strategies of the automotive engineering.

Now it was an interesting vehicle in that it also, like the bird, or the fish and so forth the propulsion is up forward abreast of the center of volume, the center of gravity and so forth, and the steering is in the rear that's the way a bird, that's the way nature does it she doesn't have the fish with it's tail out in front trying to steer. It seemed to me nothing more stupid than trying to jump overboard and push the bow of the Queen Mary around. Anyway. What you do, because the rudder really uses low pressures and so forth, so it is a beautiful thing to pull this ship around. So I felt, anyway, that the way to do was to do what I said, it would have to be front traction tractor-and rear steering. So it was the first vehicle of its kind that I know, that did that, and the only one other thing I've seen like that, which has been actually a road cleaner a very slow road sort of thing which you can turn around pretty easy while sweeping the gutters.

Now, to tell you some more, I'd kind of like to get at the fundamentals of what is going on here. You have a wheelbarrow. And how many of you have pushed a wheelbarrow? Let me see hands. It's a fairly common experience, right. Have you ever been pushing a wheelbarrow quite fast in a field, and then suddenly splat you hit something and it holds you in the stomach? If you put it behind you that doesn't happen. You can go just as fast as you want to over any open field, because you're pushing it down into the ground that's your force and if you get a bad bump it's just going to stop there. But if you're pulling it, you are lifting it off of the ground you pull it over the humps. So I said if I pull my steering wheel is not going to skid, if I push it down, all the cars we have are front steer and the weight of the they are literally being pushed down into the ground, and that's why the racing steering has to skid all of its turns. It does not steer around at all. It is a stupid way to have to steer to skid. So really, in all real racing, it's just a matter of how much angle skid you are really doing. Now once you are in a skid, you really have lost basic control it is really a flying machine now, hah I was just kidding. So it is very important not to get into skid if you really want to keep control, so I'm having a front tractor, and I'm pulling my steering wheel. And I assure you it behaved incredibly beautifully. Furthermore, now, the front steered car, due to the king pins and so forth, you could only get up to 34 degrees of angle before it blocks itself. And I saw that many times I'd like to turn much more sharply, when going very slowly there's no reason for not getting much more of an angle. So, with my rear steer I could then have a vertical rudder post and with the single wheel I could give it any angle I wanted. Didn't run into the blockings of the frame at all. So we had a we had a main frame, which was supported on the front wheels, and long undersprung wheels springs in the front. Automobiles have short springs in front and long in the rear. And I found what happened with that was that when you go over a bump you get a little, and the second one throws you off the ground. I found that if you have long springs in the front and the shorter in the rear, you go over the first ones, and the other one is contracting as you are going over here soon it compounds you see downwardly. Whenever we get any interference in the Dymaxion you'll sit down in the seat twice, not going off the seat at all. It was a very, very comfortable feeling.

Now, these were the things I really needed to try out, and the picture I think it would be a good idea to get me out of the way of this frame. Looking at the frame of that car, I want you to notice all the lightening holes. After W.W.II the Italians begin to build racing cars, because in building a structural, as you learn in aeronautics, if you make lightening holes, and if they're "dished" lightening holes, you not only have the hole but you push the hole through and you make the lip turn up to give it stiffness around the edge of the hole, these are "dished lightening holes", you can take 25% out of the weight of the structure without really losing any strength. So this is very worthwhile in the web. So this is, then, we had lightening holes wherever you could have lightening holes in my framing my framing was made of chrome-aluminum-steel as aircraft steel, not with mild steel of automobile. This was a very beautiful work of art.

And, you're just looking at the front end of the vehicle. The body is going to be mounted on it, so after that base frame, which is pretty well balanced over the front wheels, with the long spring, then we came to what you call and "A" frame, an "A" frame, there were trunions in the rear end of the base frame. The engine was in the rear end of the base frame, and therefore being on the base frame it was directly connected to the banjo(?) gear in the drive shaft, and simply the engine then rotated around the front drive shaft but the only springing was in that way. And then there was an "A" frame, here is the engine mounted here, and here are the wheels up here, and here is the frame, and this trunnions "A" frame and then from the "A" frame there was a cross spring at the end of the base frame, and we had two hangars from the "A" frame which was hinged down to the edge of those springs so that the engine was hung sprung, alright, in this long hinging frame, the whole frame itself would bend on its own part like this. It was a hinge. The frame was a hinge, and it just had a spring to keep it from doing that, so that it was then we had the body was completely separate suspension. Had it's own springs mounted above this, and it had two short Rolls Royce half circle springs back to the base frame, alongside where the inertia of the engine was. So you can look through a little window in the back seat of the car at the engine you could see that going up and down pumping or the "A" frame going like that, not in any way bothering the inertia of the main body which is on its own frame with its own long springs to the front wheel.