Chapter 16
The Long Distance Trending in Pre-Assembly
2The advantages of producing and assembling precision mechanics under critically controlled conditions has long been obvious in respect to the production of instruments, machinery in general and, in the last half century, of large complex machines such as automobiles, trucks and giant aircraft. Large complex structures and mechanics have been produced under favorable local conditions as ships in shipyards. The true beginnings of what we know today as mass production, can be seen in the ancient shipyards of Venice. Here we discover not only the cradle for the ship mounted on seaward-inclined rails which will employ gravity in the eventual launching of the massive assembly, but also a complex of feeder railways, gantry cranes and other means for bringing large sub-assemblies from ships around the shipyard, within which shops under highly controlled atmospheres, the various uniquely differentiated fundamental components of the ultimate ship, are produced.
3 The earliest shipyards included rope warping buildings, iron foundries, great steel forges, chain-making shops, spar and framemaking shops, frame bending within special steam-box as typical environmental controls, sail lofts, design-pattern lofts, drafting and engineering shops, and machine shops. All of these fine component shops were fed from the hinterland and (in times of national emergency or moments of high national enterprise in sending its ships to foreign lands) almost exclusively exhausted the total weaving, metal-working, woodworking, mining and other craft resources of the nation.
4 Only the ship itself, when she was a big one, was assembled out-of-doors. Big pieces were brought swiftly into place with cranes and soon the workmen were busy inside the ship where they could no longer be impeded by the rains, winds, snow, dust and other unfavorable conditions. Small ships were built entirely inside building sheds—that is, under essentially controlled conditions, shielding the worker and his work from excessive sunlight, rain, snows and dust clouds.
5 When the ship had been completed on the railway, her cradle was unblocked and she slid into the sea—that is, she was delivered into her ultimate service environment. All the stresses and loadings that had been highly concentrated by design into the ribs and further concentrated by the rib ends into the keel, and distributed from the keel by the snow-shoe-like cross-rails below the keel, resting on earth, upon reaching the water became almost uniformly distributed loads by virtue of hydraulic emersion and the even water displacement by the pneumatic structure which the shell containing air-space of the hull now constituted.
6 From this point on the ship was advantaged by the distributed loads and could carry enormous cargoes despite great buffeting by the sea and winds due to the total pneumatic hydraulic flexibility and load disbursion. Ships were then endangered only by the possibility of highly reconcentrated loadings, such as impact with a rock or another ship or other inert mass.
7 When the hull had been safely launched in the ancient shipyard, it was moved around to the outfitting dock—often a tide-dammed basin. Here the ship received its mast, spars, rigging, and all its secondary equipment. In many of the shipbuilding ports there was a scarcity of suitable mast timber. The fibres available to make the sails in most of the shipbuilding countries were relatively inferior in tensile and wearing properties, so also the rope fibres. When the ships had been rigged with the relatively inferior equipment of their national resource, they took on cargoes and proceeded in effect around the world, docking in country after country, trading their cargoes and taking on new and superior masts and spars, sails and ropes in the countries around the earth where these resources were notably at their finest. They took on excess cargoes of these superior components.
8 When the ship came into the home port, she was ‘‘gallant’’ beyond memory and dream. Thus, the ships became regenerative, bringing back the more able components for the building of more able ships, under the economically preferable controlled conditions of the home yard and its networked linkage to the organized home resources. The overland railway was an extension of the marine railway. The shipyard’s donkey-engines were mounted on carriages. The load-distributing capability of the rails and crossties made possible the launching of the steam-engine-equipped ‘‘ship’’ back upward onto the land, to reach the inland resources.
9 The resource linking network plus mass production under controlled conditions in the shipyard and finally the moving of the total assembly complex from position to position around the world, to receive additional components, altogether became the fundamental prototype of modern industrial mass production. This was the scheme that Henry Ford employed. It involved the total control of natural resources from mine to in-service functioning.
10 Fundamental to this history is the fact that Nature had provided a means for floating large complex assemblies by the displacement principle. Because there was a fundamental limit of weight displacement for a given ship, the designers of the ship were confronted with the task of providing an assembly which could operate successfully under maximum hostility of Nature, in effect designing for the exploitation of the hurricanes, for seaquakes severer than land-quakes, for daily avalanches when mammoth seas curled over on the decks, for daily flood—in fact for all the conditions which threaten landed structures less frequently.
11 Because there was a limit of displacement, the designer had to develop high performance capability for specific structures and mechanical tasks. He ratioed the weight of resources invested to relative limits of capability. To make the sea venture worthwhile, minimum weight had to be invested in the sea-keeping capabilities, in order to invest a majority of displacement in wealth generating cargo.
12 With the development of the nonfloating airplane and the expenditure of part of the cargo as energy, to angularly drag the airfoil aloft to obtain its additional lifting power, the performance per pound requirements of the airplane became far more exacting than in the case of the sea ships. Because of shipbuilding’s long tradition in producing higher performance per pound, out of world-around occurring resources, the shipbuilders’ techniques were adopted by the aircraft industry. Aircraft were originally designed in the terms of ‘‘water-lines,’’ and the mathematical ‘‘stations’’ of shipbuilding. Aircraft design was translated through the same ‘‘lofting’’ techniques. The heavier-than-air ship moved down the controlled environments production line, receiving its world-around-originating high capability components and was launched from the airstrip into its ultimate load-distributing medium, the air.
13 If we except tents, shacks and temporary hutments, we may state categorically that permanent buildings on the land were evolved in an entirely different logic. Buildings on the land were designed for permanence and therefore to withstand attacks of living enemies as well as attacks of weather and time. Permanent buildings developed essentially as fortresses and in order to be permanent even as storages, had to be fashioned of stone. Wooden ships could last long enough to make great wealth out of a few voyages. Ships had had the high priority technology, and the homes and shops in which the components of the ships were fashioned could be evolved from simple fortuitous building technique long since enjoyed without benefit of engineers or scientists in which materials not good enough for the ships would do for the shop buildings. Piling up of stone or wood or earth without thought of performance per pound, where inertia was a fortification virtue, resulted in the building arts being practiced without design reference to performance per pound ratios. All that men asked of their landed buildings was that they should last through siege and time—they did not design them for earthquakes or floods and when the latter came their buildings were devastated or unoccupiable.
14 Large buildings may not be centrally produced under highly preferred conditions without compromising their over-all organic conformation, if they have to be delivered over highways and railways, because of grade negotiating requirements of land transports, for they must penetrate mountains through tunnels and bridges. When the ship of the sea went up onto the land as the railway, its shaping was extruded into a ‘‘linkage of sausages’’ whose occupancy by human beings was characterized by jolt-and-joggle walking of its occupants through distinctly uncomfortable conditions. The American trailer, or its European counterpart caravan, is an extruded or elongated package of mechanics derived directly from the newest technology of the sea and air, but is frustratingly uncomfortable due to the bridge-negotiating function of its overland delivery. The only way in which large buildings or large building sub-assemblies can be delivered to occupation sites without organic comfirmation compromise is through air delivery transcending bridges and tunnels.
15 There is another way in which buildings could be delivered overland, and that is if they were designed to be foldable, like an umbrella, without compromising the organic design. I have designed foldable buildings which are self-openable, which could be delivered overland or within the design requirement confirmation of rockets for delivery to the moon, or our own earth’s mountain tops. All field assembly of structures brings about excruciating in-economies.
16 Radar enclosing plastic fibreglass D.E.W. Line radomes flown to their Arctic sites were assembled by Eskimos or others unfamiliar with such assembly, in an average of fourteen hours per radome. When assembled in New York City for an exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, they required one month assembly time by so-called skilled labor, together with months of negotiation with the New York Building Department regarding their structural safety—despite their having successfully withstood Arctic storms of severities never occurring in New York City.
17 In 1954 the United States Marine Corps airlifted with a helicopter a thirty-foot-diameter geodesic dome having floor space meeting the minimum one-family U.S. dwelling requirements thus avoiding field assembly in-economies. The Marine Corps delivered this dome at a speed of sixty knots. Two years later the Marine Corps successfully flew fifty-five-foot three-helicopter-hangers from aircraft carriers to the land at sixty knots. These hangars had two thousand square feet of floor space. In i960 one-hundred-and-fourteen-foot diameter geodesic domes of ten thousand square feet of floor space, or approximately one fourth of an acre, were successfully delivered by air at sixty knots by one helicopter per dome. Plotting the curve of square foot floor sizes of geodesic domes, progressively air-deliverable at sixty knots in the last six years, discloses a curve of accelerating capability, indicating that by 1970 we will be successfully air-delivering stadiumcovering domes of fifteen acres clear-span floor area by one airship at sixty knots.
18 Studies have been made of the delivery of large sub-assemblies of structural components for a two-mile diameter dome, which showed that a two-mile diameter dome could be assembled in six months by helicopter. The intelligence as well as direct statement by Russian engineers to this author, indicate that the Russians will, in the 1960’s, begin to make air delivery and air drops of whole geodesic domed Arctic cities in one day.
19 A decade of geodesic structures which has seen almost two thousand domes, mostly air-delivered into forty countries around the earth, has demonstrated that space may be enclosed and safely insulated against Nature’s most hostile or unfavorable conditions, at approximately one per cent of the weight of structure heretofore employed by the conventional building arts for a given volume. During this same period, the great automobile industry, which derived from the ship and airplane, building technology, have been giving larger and larger attention to the manufacture of the mechanics of living—refrigerators, washing machines, electric generators, heat exchangers, chemical process machinery, etc.
20 The present space age race finds billions of research dollars going into the problem of how to service the human metabolic process cycle under autonomously operating remote space requirements. This high priority science has for the first time in history been applied to a closed chemical circuit of ecologic sanitation and metabolic patterning of human life, not as curative but as anticipatory development of optimum environment conditions for protracted sustainment of high standard living of moon-rounding men. The combined effect of the space technology’s autonomous living package and the automobile industry’s engagement in livingry devices clearly indicate that the coming decade will see the mass production of autonomous living mechanics for use on earth with approximately exclusive air delivery of such mechanics to the air-delivered environment controls being distributed around the earth.
21 It is only when we realize that the changes about to take place around the earth in respect to the livingry arts, are emanating from the space technology and air-ship production and not from the old building arts, that we realize the changes ahead are as swift and abrupt as the change in our man-patterning on earth—from a century ago’s on-foot and on-horseback to our present around-the-world, jet-flown physical sweep-out and around-the-world witnessing events through television—all emanating from the weaponry industry originating scientific technology.
22 Unquestionably, the old building arts will persist in many ways and in special tasks for a long time. Realization by architects and engineers, scientists, lawyers and artists that one hundred per cent of humanity could be serviced at higher standards of living than any men have yet known by the total industrial resources of the earth, rather than the forty per cent that are now so advantaged if man applies the high performance per pound capabilities of the aircraft industry to that task, is not only inevitable of discovery but inevitable of swift realization. If man does not apply this excess high performance capability to his livingry, the economic machinery of world industrialization will break down.
23 There will be many economic and political crises in the immediate future out of which it is safe to predict will emerge a world society intent upon converting its history long experience and ‘‘survival-of-the-fittest-only’’ pattern to one of comprehensive physical success of man on earth. There will always be problems ahead—problems are the essential catalysts of growthful life. The problems of tomorrow will not be predominantly physical but predominantly problems of intellectual integrity.