Fuller consciously, even obsessively, documented his own existence, referring to himself as an experiment: “Guinea Pig B,” as he phrased it. The Chronofile, assembled by Fuller and his assistants, is perhaps, Keats says, the most comprehensive record of any individual’s life. Now maintained by Stanford University, it challenges scholars with 1,200 linear feet of boxes containing manuscripts, drawings, and tapes of lectures (as well as overdue library notices and grocery lists). Fuller’s was not a life unrecorded. But it is a life practically un-examinable in any comprehensive way.
.. Yet peeking through that smokescreen of self-mythologizing in fact provides ample evidence that, even when it came to basic moments in Fuller’s life, the visionary designer was anything but a reliable narrator.
.. For instance, central to Bucky Fuller’s story was a winter evening in 1927 when, beset by financial woes and a string of business failures, he resolved to end his life in the icy waters of Lake Michigan. A voice, telling Fuller that he “belonged to the Universe,” convinced him that his life had purpose. Returning home in a trance, he then remained silent for two years (maybe); wrote 5,000 pages of notes (maybe); became a vegetarian (maybe); started to lecture, publish, and craft his own legend (certainly).
.. Readers who possess sufficient fortitude to brave the Chronofile, writes Keats, might be disconcerted at how little of Fuller’s autobiography agrees with facts.
.. Yet for someone whom left-leaning university students embraced as an iconoclastic advocate for international peace and cooperation, his professional life was enormously shaped by the military.
.. Fuller designed and patented his Dymaxion World Map. Eliminating the spatial distortions of traditional Mercator projection, Fuller broke the world into 20 equilateral triangles, projected onto a multi-sided polyhedron, which could then be unfolded and flattened. As Keats describes it — inexplicably, the book does not have illustrations — Fuller’s Dymaxion map was a “remarkably neutral platform.” One could use it to center the world around any one point instead of privileging a particular country or landmass.
.. Fuller’s dome design swiftly became a symbol and instrument of American power.
.. He became an example of what Keats might call a “world-changer”, a person with an expansive view of our planet’s systemic shortcomings and how Big Ideas — specifically, Fuller’s — could fix them. His lecturing stamina became legendary. Picture a sprawling TED talk lasting for hours with dozens of ideas, concepts, and neologisms projected at the audience in a manic torrent of words.
.. they acted not as visionaries but what I have called “visioneers.” The former offer only speculations, informed or not, about what the future, especially the technological future, might hold. The latter work to bring these over-the-horizon conjectures closer to physical reality.
.. For example, Fuller’s car anticipated, according to Keats, today’s use of biomimesis, in which features from nature are incorporated into designs.
Einstein’s First Proof
The proof relies on two insights. The first is that a right triangle can be decomposed into two smaller copies of itself (Steps 1 and 3). That’s a peculiarity of right triangles. If you try instead, for example, to decompose an equilateral triangle into two smaller equilateral triangles, you’ll find that you can’t. So Einstein’s proof reveals why the Pythagorean theorem applies only to right triangles: they’re the only kind made up of smaller copies of themselves.
.. What we’re seeing here is a quintessential use of a symmetry argument. In science and math, we say that something is symmetrical if some aspect of it stays the same despite a change. A sphere, for instance, has rotational symmetry; rotate it about its center and its appearance stays the same.
.. Throughout his career, Einstein would continue to deploy symmetry arguments like a scalpel, getting to the hidden heart of things. He opened his revolutionary 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity by noting an asymmetry in the existing theories of electricity and magnetism: “It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena.” Those asymmetries, Einstein sensed, must be a clue to something rotten at the core of physics as it was then formulated. In his mind, everything else—space, time, matter, energy—was up for grabs, but not symmetry.
.. In general relativity, where space-time itself becomes warped and curved by the matter and energy within it, the Pythagorean theorem still has a part to play; it morphs into a quantity called the metric, which measures the space-time separation between infinitesimally close events, for which curvature can temporarily be overlooked. In a sense, Einstein continued his love affair with the Pythagorean theorem all his life.
.. Incredibly, in the part of his special-relativity paper where he revolutionized our notions of space and time, he used no math beyond high-school algebra and geometry.
Who was first to Fly?
I say “one of the first” because there is a bit of controversy about who was first to fly, depending on how Clintonian you want to get about the meaning of “flight”.
If simply getting airborne is the criterion, honors have to go to the New Zealand eccentric Richard Pearse, who in 1902 built a giant flying table that enabled him to reach an altitude of several dozen feet and crash into gorse hedges.
If powered flight without a pilot on board qualifies, then credit is due to Charles Parson’s powered glider (1883) and Alexander Mozhaiski’s steam-powered [!] monoplane (1884).
If reaching an altitude of eight inches counts as flying, then put your hands together for Clement Ader, who made the first manned flight in 1890 – also using steam power – and then improved his aircraft so much that it could not get off the ground at all.
If you believe that a qualifying flight has to be sustained and controlled, but you have lenient standards of proof, then you should consider the claims of Gustave Whitehead, who built a plane that modern science shows to be stable and controllable, but neglected to bring a camera or logbook along on his maiden voyage.
If you are very demanding and insist that the plane not only stay in the air under its own power, but land at the same point it took off, to demonstrate full control, then you’ll be wanting to congratulate the Wright brothers. In 1904, they rolled up their sleeves, built an improved version of their flyer, and on October 20 made a circular flight a little less than a mile long. Not even a year later, Orville was able to fly for more than 24 miles, staying airborne for 39 minutes.
.. I believe that the Wright patent story drives home the intellectual bankruptcy of our patent system. The whole point of patents is supposed to be to encourage innovation, reward entrepreneurship, and make sure useful inventions get widely disseminated. But in this case (and in countless others, in other fields), the practical effect of patents turned out to be to hinder innovation – a patent war erupts, and ends up hamstringing truly innovative technologies, all without doing much for the inventors, who weren’t motivated by money in the first place.
It’s illuminating to point out that all three transformative technologies of the twentieth century – aviation, the automobile, and the digital computer – started off in patent battles and required a voluntary suspension of hostilities (a collective decision to ignore patents) before the technology could truly take hold.
.. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.
The Wright Brothers: They Began a New Era
.. they were looking for a location with good weather and reliable wind where they could conduct tests. Chanute suggested the coast of South Carolina or Georgia where there was also sand for soft landings.
.. He was calm and self-confident though he and his brother had been continually regarded as bluffers and frauds. Berg said afterward:
One thing that, to me at least, made his appearance all the more dramatic, was that he was not dressed as if about to do something daring or unusual. He, of course, had no special pilot’s helmet or jacket, since no such garb yet existed, but appeared in the ordinary gray suit he usually wore, and a cap. And he had on, as he nearly always did when not in overalls, a high, starched collar.
He took off to cheers, then turned, and came flying back toward the crowd. He maneuvered gracefully, made several complete circles and ended by landing gently within yards of where he had started. He’d been in the air for a little less than two minutes. The crowd went wild. Louis Blériot, who was a flyer himself and present, was overwhelmed. So was France itself. There was immediate acclaim. Doubt about the Wrights’ achievement vanished; people were aware that another era had begun.
Through the summer and fall Wilbur remained at Le Mans flying and taking passengers up with him, continually drawing crowds that came by car and special train, magnates and kings as well as people from all over Europe.