Chapter 2
Later Development of My Work
2I have been concerned for a great many years with the potential functioning of the individual in the presence of swiftly integrating world affairs and the increasingly massive states and corporations, and their respective enormous capital advantage in respect to the accrediting of initiatives in any directions. I am sure I am but one of several millions who wonder how much the individual can actually affect the evolutionary processes of his day, while starting only upon his self-accrediting of his own initiative, enterprise and effective transformation capabilities.
3 In 1927 I decided to experiment and probe in this direction by gathering data on how much the contemporary individual might be able to effect. That year I had come to the end of some very vigorous experiences in the world of building activities. I had taken part in the building of 240 buildings between 1922 and 1927. I had had a very vigorous experience in the American scene regarding this kind of activity. And that building activity followed directly upon experiences in the Navy with its then new world of flying and of radio and other experiences in mechanical activities. My conclusions after five years in the building world were that it, through no fault of its own or of its choosing, did happen to be the last primary area of man’s activity yet to come importantly under the effect of the industrial equation which had been coming over all other world technologies and economics for at least a hundred years.
4 It was also very clear, I thought, that the superior capability of the industrial equation was approaching inexorably an embrace of all of mankind’s productive techniques and therefore would in due course come into availability for direct solution of men’s immediate living problems rather than as an aftermath diversion of war-born technologies. Industrialization had been applied at first on very high priority, due to its relative scarcity and enormous initial cost, only to great emergency problems of war and the annihilation of life. Because I had had high-priority industrial technology experiences in the mechanical, Navy, and aircraft worlds and then subsequently non-industrialized experiences in the building arts, my experiences had taught me to see the differences between these industrial and non-industrial capabilities. Inasmuch as I saw those differences, there seemed to be some responsibility for personal taking of initiatives.
5 In 1927 I decided to peel off from conventional livelihood preoccupations and to enter into a period of research and development, the minimum limits of which turned out to be of many years’ duration. In fact, the first prospecting into the ramifications of such a researching initiative pursued alone as an individual, indicated that there was a minimum of twenty-five years of detached reconnaissance activity before the individual might be able to bring into industrially useful economic harvest any of the kinds of initiations that he might undertake within these vast new evolutionary premises. Feasibility studies I orginally found myself making showed that there were many different kinds of unfamiliar gestation lags in respect to final birth patterning within the industrial equation. Whereas in the agricultural world we tended by historical experiences to think of crops coming in annually, we also tended to expect profits annually in respect to the industrial equation. However, I found that there were a variety of multi-year lags between the various industrial inventions and their respective active introduction into the industrial world as new tools, structures and processes. For instance, in the railroad arts, there was an average of fifteen years’ lag between invention and the incorporation of that invention in the railroading arts.
6 The lag was much shorter in the radio world—only about two years—and in the airplane world about four. In the world of building I found an enormous lag—approximately forty-two years. Typical had been a building arts invention at the time when mass production of steel by industrializing man began. Mass production steel was very different from the previous making of steel by man, which had dribbled along for centuries as a fine art. Production steel ushered in the civil wars of the mid-nineteenth century. In the mass production of steel Portland cement became a fundamental by-product of the complex steel-making activity. It was, however, forty-two years after the production of Portland cement as a by-product of the steel industry in America that anybody thought of putting a piece of steel into the cement to make reinforced concrete. This is very typical of lags in the building field—as well as of the latter’s blindness.
7 Integrating all the different kinds of lags in the industrial equation ranging between forty-two and two years and weighting the total inventory of categories in the terms of their respective total dollar volumes in respect to the total annual activities, it appeared that there would be a twenty-five-year lag instead of a forty-two-year lag to be anticipated in relation to shifting ‘‘building category’’ over into the industrial equation columns and out of the craft arts columns.
8 I am going to examine the craft arts in contrast to the industrial equation in search of working definitions. There may be other definitions for craft v. industry, but when I use these words I mean the following:
9 Both craft and industry deal with extra corporeal work capabilities greater than those that are integral to the human organism. Therefore, both deal with tools. The craft tools I define as that class of tools which can be spontaneously fashioned and adopted by any one individual starting nakedly in the wilderness—for instance, his picking up of a stone to do work at a distance greater than his arm’s length; or his picking up of a stick, using the stick either as spear or as lever. Industrial tools I define as those which cannot be produced by any one man.
10 Those definitions seemed to me to provide a rather sharp differentiation. But adoption of the definitions brings surprise lines of cleavage. Let me take the case of the hammer: The man in the woods certainly would be prone, having thrown stones and probed with sticks, to take a crotched stick and lash a stone in it, making a hammer with which he could deal a blow greater than that accomplished with his fist. So we might say a hammer belongs categorically to craft. However, I looked at a modern carpenter’s hammer and I found that this instrument, made out of forged alloy steel, does involve finding iron which would probably not be in the vicinity of the man in the woods. It involves a knowledge of how to mine the ore, to render and produce the iron, to find and render the manganese, nickel and molybdenum in faraway lands and to bring them all together. Therefore, invention of ships is involved in the bringing together of many metals, and there is also requisite the invention of blast furnaces, forges and so forth. Obviously, the modern carpenter’s hammer cannot be produced by one man, and is therefore industrial—so there are both craft and industrial hammers.
11 While hammers demand a little exploring, we can take other cases, such as a steamship like the Queen Mary, which obviously cannot be produced by one man, operated by one man, or used by one man. What I mean by the industrial tools are those which only relate to the integrated capabilities and initiatives of a plurality of men. With that basic distinction I then discover many other and very important differences between the crafts and industry, as, for instance, craft is inherently local—local in time and in the generations of man. It is local geographically in the small ecological roam-around of the individual; it is very local, then, in knowledge.
12 In contradistinction then to this local time and geography and knowledge aspect of craft, we find the industrial equation does represent an integration of all the knowledge of all human beings, as gained from their plurality of experiences, and as relayingly communicated by one man to another. Industrialization represents an employment of all the resources of the earth, wherever they may be. It is inherently comprehensive and universal, in contradistinction to local. This is the reason why I have adopted the word comprehensive as unique to my kind of exploration.
13 The industrial equation goes inherently, ergo inexorably, around the world to find the various excellences of unique behaviors of respective elemental resources, because tools are only adopted by men to help them to do greater or more incisive work than that to be accomplished only with their integral physical member capabilities. Out of men’s integrated experiences, there is regenerated an accelerating realization of ways in which they can improve a workable advantage over the progressively evolving physical environment.
14 In no time at all we begin to discover that not only in our own wanderings, but also in the reports of other men, there are unique materials elsewhere, which, if added to what we have locally, could give us greater performance capabilities, such as unique lightness combined with a unique new degree of hardness. We also begin to discover that by travel and commerce we might be able to bring together extraordinary new complex capabilities. Thus industrialization, as the total integrated complexity of advantage gains, grew slowly out of the progressively and regeneratively integrated information of man.
15 Unquestionably, we would say that words are the first industrial tools, for inherently they involve a plurality of men and are also inherently prior to relayed communication and integration of the respective experiences of a plurality of individuals. Due to the fact that nature has disposed the chemical elements around the earth in a very uneven manner, recourse to the total physical resource inventory of unique behavior advantages to be earned by integrating the totally relayed information does involve man’s going all around the earth. Starting from any one point he has to go half around the world—which is always the length of his journey to reach the furthermost earth surface point. The industrial equation, involves at maximum going half way around the world and then separating out the desired resources from their matrix, and thereafter a set of progressive separations and progressive forwarding movements of the unique resources towards the special area where you would wish to bring about the highest separation where you have already established a complex of high advantage tools.
16 Finally, on reaching the home tool complex, the resources from far and near are separated out to the maximum degree. Men then begin to reassociate the various preferred performance characteristics of these resources in preferred complex patterns, thus accomplishing greater or more incisive tools. Having done so the environment itself becomes permanently altered. The world never returns to the shape that it was before.
17 It is important to realize that the industrial equation has really altered our physical world relations, the major geophysical patterns, in ways and degrees possibly greater than are popularly realized—as, for instance, England was first exploited by foreign men, the Phoenicians, who discovered England’s tin. This low-melting-point metal suddenly opened up new technical capabilities—therefore, economic wealth—and attracted the Romans. The tin ore was finally exhausted here, yet so much machinery of reduction, production and commerce had been developed around it, that tin was sought elsewhere by Englishmen who, going half way around the world from England, found tin in the Malay States, Bolivia, Tanganyika and so forth.
18 In America we have no tin ore of workable grade or amount. In the industrial equation we need enormous amounts of tin for many kinds of special abilities and tin opens up over and again all kinds of new ventures in industry. For instance, as babbit or bearing metal it first permitted the industrial wheels to go round.
19 So much tin has been gradually brought into America, and so easy is it to recover, that America’s cumulative inventory of available tin has finally become a major world body of the tin reserve. In our aircraft industry today, because it is predicated on very swift changes of design and is a swiftly evolving art, we have so-called soft tools to make possible short runs of entirely new designs, and we learned from England how to make our Kirk-site tin-forming dies. Back of every aircraft company in America will be found an enormous store of tin in the form of obsolete dies soon to be melted to form new dies. These tin die storage yards look exactly like large graveyards but are far more useful. In fact the largest inventory of tin in America is back of our aircraft plants. And there is so much of it there now that the actual tin in concentrated form above ground in America is so great that it is approximately equal to that below ground in Bolivia and the Straits Settlements. That is to say we have in America the largest tin mines in the world, all above ground.
20 So here we see major geophysical patterns of man’s earth irreversibly altered. I have only given one typical case of a myriad in which the earth will never be restored to its previous patterns.
21 It was perverse in my youth young people were not supposed to know anything. All the grownups seemingly knew all the answers and you were simply told to shut up and learn. I was willing to shut up and learn. I decided that if I didn’t like the smell of the building I’d better shut up—that I was stupid and squeamish. I stuffed back natural reactions pretty hard. It wasn’t very long before I was suddenly out of my home. My father died when I was twelve. He went through a lot of sickness in our home, and I looked out for him. He had strokes and he was out of his mind for the last three years of his life. I had to lead my own father around by his hand, a man I had loved and revered. When I finally got through high school and went to college, I got into a lot of trouble, because I was suddenly on my own. I thought I was going to be a great athlete, and then I busted my leg playing football so I couldn’t be an athlete. I was given some money—my year’s allowance—and I didn’t know anything about money at all. I spent my whole year’s allowance in one week. I obviously couldn’t stay at Harvard very long, so I got fired. They can’t fire you for spending your money—it’s your money—but they could fire me for not going to my classes. I got into trouble with Harvard two times, and if World War I hadn’t come they would have let me back in again for a third try because I had high scholastic grades.
22 Each time I was sent out I went to work. I liked the people I met at work and I liked mechanics. I found myself employed as a machine fitter and I made a good mechanic. I worked hard and everybody said, ‘‘We’ve made a mistake about this boy, he really enjoys work and he’s a very sane boy, so let’s let him back in again.’’ Then I would get in trouble right away. What I was getting in trouble with was not the college at all. In fact, I hardly knew the college existed. What I was really getting into trouble with were the social institutions: the club systems and things like that. I didn’t like the feel of fraternities and clubs and patterns that were being formed on a basis I couldn’t understand. They had nothing to do that I could see with the merits of individuals. I felt there were forces operating that were unreasonable and this was affecting me the same way those buildings originally had when I didn’t like the smell of them or like the looks of them. I didn’t like the smell or the looks of the patterns that seemed to move some people into power and some people into non-power that you couldn’t see and you couldn’t seem to deal with.
23 I’ve heard people say that I was a rebel; I wasn’t a rebel at all. I just didn’t know what to do about it and I dropped out. I had a genius for getting into trouble and then getting out of trouble when I had been displaced and moved into an area where there was something I could get hold of, like a piece of machinery. Anything you could weigh or feel or apply yourself to was fine, but not the dealings with the patterns of arbitrary customs and ways in which people were evaluating what you couldn’t be—such as some old lady who didn’t like your looks or whatever. At any rate, those were the things I had trouble with.
24 We all have certain tactical events that happen in our lives. A certain thing happened in my life that was tactically important enough to force me to make utterly vital decisions about my life. I was married during World War I and I was in the Navy. We had a little child born and she caught the flu, then spinal meningitis and then infantile paralysis. We seemed to be able to overcome these attacks more or less. That is, she seemingly was cured though she had many traces of paralysis left. Just before she was four years old she caught pneumonia and died.
25 During those years with a new life whom we loved so dearly, we were continually frustrated with physical inadequacies, such as the kind of apartment we could have. The physical environment conditions seemed terrible. By this time I had had a great deal of experience in flying and new technology. We didn’t speak of ‘‘electronics’’ in those days—we spoke of it as ‘‘radio’’ or whatever it was—but I had had excellent experience in the Navy. I had been sent to the Naval Academy and I knew how to make big ships work. I knew a whole lot about mechanics.
26 The fact that the housing that we were in was very poor made me feel many times that the conditions which we were operating under were in many ways responsible for our child’s sickness. The fact is, I was right because spinal meningitis, infantile paralysis and flu have since been brought under control in recent years. But in those days they were considered lethal and there was nothing you could possibly do about them. Nobody even tried to do anything about them. So Alexandria died just before her fourth birthday.
27 Before going into the Navy and in and out of Harvard twice I had been in a cotton mill where, as recounted earlier, I finally learned how to put up each type of cotton manufacturing machine. The second time, I went into the packing house business with Armour and Company. I went to work in New York and I worked in twenty-eight branch houses around New York—as I now review psychologically rather than technically.
28 In those days the packing house was a very tough business, along with all the other businesses, as far as hours went. We began work at 3 a.m. and perhaps were through at 3 p.m. because markets had to open before the rest of society to get foods distributed around the city. I learned a lot about New York on that job. I really knew something about the patterns of society there. From there I went on, as I said, into the Navy and I did well in the Navy. I got all the experience I could want with all the new technology—with the new airplane, the new radio, the new big ships, the new turbines and so on.
29 After I finished in the Navy I came out and they took me back into Armour and Company again because I had done well. They gave me a very good job; I was made assistant export manager. It was under these conditions that my child went through her sicknesses.
30 Despite the fact that I was assistant manager of Armour and Company, the pay at that time was $50 a week, which would not be considered very good today. There wasn’t much for rent, particularly when we had two trained nurses. We had very tough going. I did well enough at Armour and Company so that an old Navy friend asked me to get out of there and go into a big truck company, and I was equivalent to national sales manager. My father-in-law was an architect and had invented a building structure. I liked this man very much—my own father having died—and I liked the invention he had. It seemed to make sense and I thought it would be useful if somebody did something about it. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his invention, so I decided I would do something about it. I learned a great deal about corporations, and I finally organized five small factories around the country making this material.
31 Those years came immediately after Alexandra died. I worked very hard and I did build 240 small buildings in the eastern United States.
32 This building system was good for any filler wall. It was a light reinforced concrete structure and it would do for garages and residences or small buildings or filling in the walls of big buildings. During these years I worked terribly hard, but the minute I was through work for the day—I guess I was in a whole lot of pain about our child having died—I would go off and drink all night long and then I’d go to work again. I had enough health somehow to carry on.
33 Suddenly, I lost control of my company. I’d found myself becoming powerful through it. I met the prominent businessmen and the powerful bankers in the country who were all terribly interested in the idea of building. If you had something that was really going to be a breakthrough in building, you had people coming around looking at it with investment in mind. By 1927, it looked good enough so that others were ambitious enough to try to take it away from me.
34 I was very unguarded in my own personal life and suddenly I found that I had lost the company. When a person happens to play tough games he may be surprised to find himself not only in an embarrassing position, but also in a difficult position. I was in a difficult position, and just at that moment a new child was born—five years after our first one died. Under those conditions I was utterly broke, in Chicago, and I had lost much vitally important confidence in those whom I had thought to be my friends—and I was in a mess.
35 But I had had a terrific amount of experience. I came to a point where I found myself saying, ‘‘Am I an utter failure? If so, I had better get myself out of the way, so at least my wife and baby can be taken over by my family and they will do the best they can with them. Am I going to be a drag on them, or is there possibly any reason I can see why I ought to go on?’’
36 I was forced by these circumstances to start doing some thinking on my own. It was at that point that I decided that there must be a certain first thought that I would have to go into. What is the first question I could possibly ask myself if I was going to do some thinking?
37 Standing by the lake on a jump-or-think basis, the very first spontaneous question coming to mind was, ‘‘If you put aside everything you’ve ever been asked to believe and have recourse only to your own experiences do you have any conviction arising from those experiences which either discards or must assume an a priori greater intellect than the intellect of man?’’ The answer was swift and positive. Experience had clearly demonstrated an a priori anticipatory and only intellectually apprehendable orderliness of interactive principles operating in the universe into which we are born. These principles are discovered by man but are never invented by man. I said to myself, ‘‘I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call ‘God.’ ’’ My next question was, ‘‘Do I know best or does God know best whether I may be of any value to the integrity of universe?’’ The answer was, ‘‘You don’t know and no man knows, but the faith you have just established out of experience imposes recognition of the a priori wisdom of the fact of your being.’’ Apparently addressing myself, I said, ‘‘You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage of others. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.’’
38 The next few thoughts had to do with the fact that I knew I did have many more types of experiences than most of my contemporaries, just by the good luck of being fired out of this and forced into that pattern. I had certainly had an extraordinarily broad pattern. Furthermore, I had known the most powerful people in the American world. I had dined with several of J. P. Morgan’s partners, and I knew Al Capone. I was convinced that people on either side of the track in many situations didn’t know or understand one another and yet somehow or other I did seem to know them both, and did seem to understand them both—and they seemed to understand me.
39 The next thing I concluded was that one reason I was in a great deal of trouble was that I had been extremely accommodating in my willingness to believe what the other fellow asked me to believe. I was over and over again in enormous conflict between what had seemed to be good rules given by one fellow who seemed powerful in his area and another fellow powerful in his area. Each one told me his little rule of thumb for things he thought really were important.
40 I was at an enormous pinch-point of pain in the great contradiction of many of these dogmas. Obviously, one had not thought the other’s problems out well enough. The various kinds of tenets different people had were not comprehensive enough to anticipate the kinds of problems I was going to run into. So, it seemed to me, number one was, whether I liked it or not, that I was going to have to do some of my own thinking.
41 Having been told when I was young to shut up and learn, this was the first time I could possibly say the thoughts I had held for a long time might be valuable. My father-in-law, who invented the building system, was the first older man I had ever met who told me my own thoughts were valid and that I ought to pay attention to them. He encouraged me to go on with inventions, which I did. I took out quite a few patents. I invented the machinery that went into the manufacture of our product as there was none available to do the job.
42 I had become so impressed with the idea that I wasn’t supposed to know anything that, when I wanted to get somebody to back my idea, I got some mechanic who was my friend, and I told him what my invention was. If he was enthusiastic enough about it, then I told the man with money that the mechanic had invented the thing, because I was pretty sure he trusted the mechanic’s judgment. If the mechanic said it was good, then I was hopeful that the man would back it. But I didn’t expect anybody to back my ideas. I don’t know why I had this feeling, but I just didn’t expect anybody to back me.
43 Anyway, in 1927, I decided that the way I had acquired bad rules and conflicting thoughts was through words—when somebody told me these things. Therefore, I became very suspicious of words. I said, ‘‘Words seem to me to be one of the most extraordinary tool acquisitions of men; I don’t think men were born with words, but rather from what I have learned in education and of the educational system I suspect that men have evolved words. There may have been a time when they didn’t have words. There are now many more words than there are birds or monkeys. I know of people inventing words, but most of the words were here before me and they are tools. They are obviously tools, and I’m enough of a mechanic to know that you can use tools in the wrong way. It seems to me that the facility with which we can make these sounds, as a parrot can copy a sound, is possibly one of the ways in which the trouble starts.’’
44 It was very tough on my wife, but I decided I was going to try to hold a moratorium on speech for myself. So for approximately two years I didn’t allow myself to use words. I thought I would see if by doing that I could force myself back to the point where I would really understand what it was I was thinking and be sure that when I made a sound that I really meant to make that sound—that it wasn’t something I was parroting and that was just coming off my tongue. I had learned how facile I was at popping off things that someone else gave me.
45 All this was pretty difficult for my wife because we were in Chicago and didn’t have any money. We had an apartment in the least expensive fireproof tenement I could find, because we did have our baby. I really did stop all sounds, and then gradually started wanting to use a particular sound. I was finally pretty sure I would know what the effects would be on my fellow man if I made a particular sound. I wanted to be sure that when I did communicate that I really meant to communicate thusly and that this was me communicating and not somebody else.
46 In this time of isolated thought, I said to myself, ‘‘Out of all your experience what kinds of things do you know? For instance, what are the fundamental ways of looking at phenomena?’’
47 I said, ‘‘Experiences themselves begin and end. When you go to sleep you can never prove when you wake up that you’re the same fellow that went to sleep. You may feel quite a lot like ‘‘him,’’ but there’s no telling whether this is the starting of another kind of dream. At any rate, we certainly do have stop-and-go consciousness, and you might say that there is a finite period of when-I-started-to-think-this-morning and when-I-come-to-a-shut-off-tonight. So that’s a package.
48 ‘‘Experience is something that very clearly begins and ends and is finite. Furthermore I don’t think that anything I feel or think can possibly come out of anything except experiences. Do I ever think in terms that are not of experience?’’
49 I could never catch myself thinking in terms that did not have something to do with experience. There’s nobody around to ‘‘mark our papers’’ in this kind of a situation. So I decided that it was impossible for me to think except in terms of experience. This was my decision.
50 You might ask, how was my wife eating and how was my baby eating? I decided just to leave that to luck. I didn’t know anything else I could do about it. I was confident that the one thing I had to do was think. I was also confident that if I really did think, that there would be a day-to-day survival, provided I really was working hard at this thinking.
51 If I were just trying to get away with something, I knew what I would do; I would simply jump in the lake. That would be easy and my family would take care of my wife and daughter. The family were not rich but they were comfortable, and would find a way to do something about them. But if I were going to stay around this show at all, whatever I was going to be able to do about it had to be by virtue of my dealing with the only asset I had, and that was my experience. So I had to do something about looking my experience over and though nobody had taught me how to think, I had to learn to think.
52 ‘‘I’m just going to take a chance,’’ I said, ‘‘on the idea that if I’m working at it awfully hard—there won’t be any margin here; nobody will be able to encourage me—but if we survive at all it will be because one of the rules of Nature is that she permits us each day the integrity of that day’s thinking. I must learn to work this way’’—and I did.
53 When I was nine years old the airplane was invented, and it was a very extraordinary kind of experience of fundamental change. I was among the thousands or millions of young boys trying to make some kind of a little device that would fly. And suddenly there it was. When my daughter Allegra was born in 1927 (the year of Lindbergh’s flight) I was pushing her baby carriage—in Lincoln Park, in Chicago, because at this time I had started in on a research program. I didn’t have any everyday business so I had time to push the baby carriage. The night air mail was not to be flown out of Chicago until two years later, 1929, so it was a rare event indeed that as I pushed my daughter’s baby carriage a little light plane flew directly over and I said to myself: Isn’t it amazing that, unlike myself, my child is born into a world in whose sky there is an airplane as an a priori universal event? How different that universal relationship eventually became, even though we didn’t see another airplane there for the next two years. But a quarter of a century later my granddaughter Alexandra was born in New York. She was brought by her parents from the hospital to their apartment in Riverdale, just across from the northern end of Manhattan, which is quite a high point of land. This point was directly in the path of the take-off pattern for both of New York City’s major airports, La Guardia and Idlewild, with their westbound American continent flights. The planes were going over frequently, sometimes every few seconds. There was the familiar roar and, on such a high promontory, it was a very important fundamental event to a new life.
54 The interesting result was that my granddaughter’s first word was not ‘‘Mummie’’ or ‘‘Daddy,’’ but ‘‘air’’—short for airplane. She was born in the fall of the year and though her parents had a little balcony on their flat, looking out upon some trees, the fact is that she saw many thousands of airplanes before she ever saw a bird, and the airplane was much more normal in her sky than was a bird. As I realized and thought about this, I wondered if there were other important a priori changes, and I looked at the books that were given to my granddaughter. These books were the same kind that I had when I was a child. They were full of donkeys and pigs and goats and cats—but my granddaughter had never seen a donkey or a goat or a horse! They were just as unfamiliar to her as if you showed her microphotography of germs and cold bugs. What had been normal to me was abnormal to her. She was very kind to us about it and was politely amused at the things we were showing her, but they had no relation to reality! This accelerated progression of a priori universe alterations is typical of the very swift alteration brought by the industrial equation. Disparity of the successive present generation’s norms with those of previous and yet living generations is swiftly widening the gap between aspirations of the old and newer generations.
55 To make this disparity and its potential solvability clearer for study, I made some figures that I now find useful in comprehending the enormous velocity of change wrought in our evolving relationship to our respectively altering a priori universes. I started with a sphere twenty feet in diameter as a model, was meant to represent the slowest relative rate of negotiability of the earth as gauged by the following calculations.
56 First, I supposed a path to be put about the earth, there being no dry path around the earth. But I wanted to allow a man to walk around the earth at the rate at which the Army says a man can walk daily, and rest and feed. The twenty-foot globe represented the rate at which he would be able to walk around the earth. Then I gave him a horse. The horse also had to sleep and rest and eat—and, using the Army figures again, I found man can negotiate the earth with a horse so fast that the relative size of the earth is reduced to a ball six feet in diameter.
57 I gave man a fast-sailing clipper ship and the earth came down to the size of a basketball. When I obtained these figures I realized the historical economic advantage that a man with a ship had over a man with a horse and how much greater advantage they both had had over a man on foot, throughout all history. The clipper ship, of course, was a tool; it was the first really large industrial tool that could not be produced by one man. And it did not have to stop to sleep at night like the horse, but kept on going twenty-four hours, day after day.
58 Now when you give men railroad trains and steamships, which can negotiate about the same distance daily, because the railroad train has to be replenished very frequently, we find that the relative size of the rate of negotiability of earth comes down to the size of an American baseball. Taking the jet planes, the relative size of man’s negotiable earth comes down to the size of a 3 ⁄ 4-inch marble. Projecting the present rate of acceleration of commercial air transport speed for just five years and taking the figures now adopted for 1968 by the International Aeronautical Union and the American Air Force, the relative size of man-negotiable earth will be the size of a pea, and that is the smallest we need now consider, for it will inaugurate an entirely new era of man-around-earth.
59 Any who have looked at the jet plane schedules know that they can fly to the furthermost points around the earth from where they start in less than 20 hours, so that within the day they can reach the furthermost point of the earth. Projecting for only five years, you find the speed is such that you will be able to leave your home any morning, go to any part of the earth to do your day’s work, and come home for dinner. And if our definition of a town is a place where you work and sleep, then in five years from today we can have a one-town world. What, has been a theoretical and idealistic concept will be stark reality.
60 These are the consequences of altering the relationship of man to his environment as uniquely brought about by the industrial equation—an alteration utterly impossible to craft capability. While we in no way deprecate the extraordinary craft accomplishments of men, we do see the great difference in the relative economic and social effectiveness of the industrial and craft tools.
61 In 1927 I became interested in discovering in what way the enormous advantages of the industrial equation might come to bear directly on man’s means of living, even as it had already been brought to bear on mass production of ways of dying. When first employed, this industrial capability was inherently very scarce—scarce in material, ships and men who would know how to employ it. Its scarcity and complexity of tool-up costs made its initial employment almost prohibitive in cost. Only in great national emergencies, underwritten by mortgaging of whole sovereign states, could men muster the capital credit to use the industrial equation. These national emergencies we know were the great moments of war, and under those war conditions high categorical priority of use was given to the application of those scarce industrial capabilities. In setting these priority schedules we hoped to keep the war to be joined as far away from home as possible, because if the joint of war reached home you had lost. Priority of industrial capability went to the establishment and support of the longest ranging arm of highly energized hitting power by the world-integrated network of comprehensively designed industrial capability, which first of all had to produce the navy and transport to rule the seas that covered three-quarters of the earth and divided all lands and therefore controlled the principle of longest arms of hitting power.
62 By making do with industrially unwanted, low-performance materials, men were able to solve non-war production problems. We praised the many ingenious make-do solutions we gave to home-front problems, quite independent of and out of sight of the alternate solutions we might have made with the industrial equation, were its capabilities grown so plenteous as to make universally possible the using of world resources in the most effective kind of manner.
63 There are several more fundamental aspects of the industrial equation. We have seen that because the industrial equation involves the enormous pattern of half-way-round-the-world resource-centralizing that by the time we have centralized the resources, the capital expenditure is enormous. In order to justify such enormous anticipatory expenditure, we have to reassociate the centrally dissociated chemical elements in such an effective manner that the temporary products of this activity will be so generally advantageous to the world around man as to win an actual commonwealth of a physically regenerative, or inherently increasing, advantage of man over nature’s a priori patternings— which means the increasing ability to govern the ceaseless evolution of inter-patterning transformations. Therefore, in order to find the largest number of human beings who can be benefitted by the newly produced patterns we have to go half way round the world again—in all directions.
64 By discovering the highest possible numbers of users we find means of maximum division of initial costs and sharing of further capital initiations. Therefore, the industrial equation is inherently involved in underwriting two half-way-round-the- world network ventures. Next we see that the energies expended in doing work all around the world are enormous. We therefore begin to comprehend that the ratios of performances per foot pounds of work done by given units of resources invested or expended are vital data to the comprehension and scientifically designed employment of the industrial equation. In the industrial equation performance ratios per weight of products are very important to the success of the world-embracing economy that is being developed.
65 In our home front buildings, however, we do not think very much about weight. The engineers who must calculate the buildings, in order to implement their architectural designs, are forced to analyze and treat with their weights, but weight is not an original consideration of the patron and architect. Does anybody know what a given building weighs? I once asked an American symposium of architects, including Raymond Hood and Frank Lloyd Wright as well as the architects of Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building what the different structures they were designing weighed. Clearly, weight was not one of their considerations. They didn’t know.
66 If we ask about the weight of one of our major ships, such as the Queen Mary, which is obviously of the magnitude of one of our very large buildings, we find that these kinds of industrial pattern weights are very familiar to the public. Therefore, the fact that weight considerations are not primary in buildings tells us how far building is from the industrial equation. No one should think that because we build big buildings and use some industrial materials that industry has therefore embraced the building arts.
67 One principle governing the industrial equation is that the tools themselves can be used to make more tools. You can invest the industrial capability exclusively in the regenerative function of greatly enlarging itself. Industry really accomplishes self-lifting by its own boot-straps. One lathe man can make ten more lathes instead of consumer products, and then ten men can go to work, each making ten more lathes, and each one can be a better lathe than the one before. Thus the whole world’s overall tool capability is swiftly regenerated toward comprehensive and plenteous capacity.
68 Another aspect of the industrial equation is that it gradually discerns the various functions of humans and differentiates those functions out, developing tools which can carry out those functions. We find that industrialization is inevitably headed towards automation, that is towards disenfranchisement of man as a physical machine. The concepts of Karl Marx are typical of the erroneous and inadequate way in which men at first pondered the industrial equation. They thought of man chained to the machines and grievously exploited by the machine owners. With automation, an increasing economic reality, we now see that the industrial equation was all the time heading toward complete elimination of man as a worker. The industrial equation will bring about a condition where, within a century the word ‘‘worker’’ will have no current meaning. It will be something you will have to look up in an early twentieth-century dictionary.
69 How, then, does the industrial equation go on? What is man’s relationship to it? The answer is that the larger the number served by the industrial equation, the more the unit costs are lowered and the more universally its regenerative pattern stimulations become distributed. This is to say that the greater the number of consumers, the more successful is the industrial equation. The more people served, the more regenerative industrialization becomes. Industrial equation works toward man having infinite significance in the universe as a regenerative consumer.
70 As a fundamental result at our present moment in history, men are becoming very swiftly disemployed as physical workers. On the other hand, men are now swelling the ranks of intellectually preoccupied experimentalists in scientific and industrial research and development and are getting ready for the launching of the next wave of evolutionary transformations. Men are increasingly concerned with greater anticipatory design of the use of the world-around network of industrial capabilities. Even unwittingly men are accelerating their capability to render the world’s total inventory of resources adequate to the comprehensively advancing needs and growth advantage of all men.
71 I will cite one more pattern governing industrialization as it comes finally to bear upon the building arts. The kind of patterns that we are reviewing are obviously patterns that only come into apprehension, comprehension and reviewability through time and increasing inventories of the integrated experiences of all men. These are not patterns which were discoverable in advance by men.
72 In architectural circles we frequently speak of buildings as environmental controls, or the local controlling of energetic patternings of the universal manifold of high and low frequency events; we have local environmental controls on the land which we call buildings; we have environmental controls on the sea which we call ships; we have environmental controls in the skies which we call airplanes. These are each and all vessels of preferred pattern regeneration.
73 The environmental controls on the land are installed in the crystalline chemical structures’ state. Environmental controls on the sea are installed in the chemical structures’ liquid state and the environmental controls of the sky are installed in the chemical structures’ gaseous state. In the crystalline state, the amount of energy necessary to disturb the chemical structures is enormous. The amount of energy necessary to disturb liquid phase chemical structures is but a small fraction of that necessary to disturb crystalline structures. The amount of energy necessary to the pattern disturbance of the gaseous phase of chemical structures is but a small fraction of the amount necessary to the disturbance of the liquid phases of chemical structures. Einstein’s equation E = MC2 directly governs these relationships. In a universe of energy in which no energy is created nor energy lost, the number of times that Nature has enough energy concentration to disturb the crystalline state at any one locality in the universe is relatively infrequent. The number of times the universe has energy available locally to disturb the liquid structure states is very much more frequent.
74 Even more often there are enough energies available locally to bring about very large disturbances of the gaseous states. If men are going to build a structure on the land as a local energetic environmental control (knowing the probability of an earthquake at any one point is so low that men for many generations were unaware of its even being a possibility) they certainly would hope to build in between the earthquakes. The number of times floods might occur is much more frequent but it is considered worth while, because the alluvial plain is so rich the inhabitants would rather climb to the high land as the floods occur and go back to the low land when the floods receded. The number of times that there are avalanches and fires are relatively few, so people build upon the crystalline state, oblivious to the infrequent challenges of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, avalanches and so forth. They were more concerned with building bulky, inert fortresses which, because of the solidity of the earth, seemed to rest on top of the earth without sinking into it as men developed building arts.
75 On the sea we are immediately faced with flood all the time, and the best thing to do is to stay on top of it. And when we try to discover how to float, we find that stones don’t but wood does. Thus men discovered floatability millenniums and millenniums ago. In dealing by designed actions with controlled environments suitable to the liquid state, men are normally faced with this floatability as a basic requirement, but are also faced with very frequent seaquakes. We probably have seaquakes every day in which the size of the waves will be greater than those of the earthquake. Therefore, we have to design for seaquakes or we won’t stay on top of the water. Every time the great seas come combing over and smashing down on our decks, the actual tonnages involved are quite equal to the tonnages of the impact of an avalanche.
76 When controlling environment on the liquid state we also have to design for hurricanes because in fact upon the sea we are going to exploit the hurricanes to drive our ships. In ships we must design directly for structural behavior superior to all these very hostile behaviors of Nature, specifically regarding the foot-pound energies of Nature’s limit behaviors. Once we have learned how ferocious Nature may be, then we ask: Is it worth while going into this very unfriendly, energetic world of the sea? We discover it is, first, because of those resources that occur remotely all around the world, and second, because of the fact that you can float such enormous loads of resources from here to there as to completely outclass the small loads that you can carry on your back or on the backs of animals. Therefore, the ships are potentially very worth while, and in order to make the ship realistically very worth while you have to learn how to establish ratios of preferable investments of the total floatability, how much is to be assigned to the cargo and how much is assigned toward each of the structural capabilities required to meet these enormous stresses, corrosive forces, etc.
77 Rationing of the performances per pounds per functions became the very essence of shipbuilding design, whereas such ratios were never thought of in respect to building environment controls upon the crystalline structured land. In fact, the first great buildings were only for fortresses in which weight was desired. They were preceded by nature’s own caves, which were occupied and which were later contrived as local modifications of the solid earth and not thought of as separate buildings.
78 When we go into the air with man-designed environmental controls, we come into conditions where there is no floatability. To stay in the air at all, we have to stay there on sheer intellectual capability. We get out into the sky and stay there by integrating the experience of all men and by faithful consideration of the factors and measurements of the experiences. You cannot stay out there on a myth. First we must start flying at greater than hurricane speed. Hurricane speed is stalling speed, so the hurricane speed becomes minimum normal and in our modern airships we go into six, sometimes eight times hurricane velocities as a normal condition of environmental control designing.
79 Due to large-size disturbances of the air by very small amounts of energy, even the sun radiation reflecting from the surface of a small white glistening roof will bring about a spirally rising thermal column of air rising hundreds of feet, sometimes a mile high, into the air. In a plurality of these great thermals we get enormous air waves which might properly be called airquakes. The airquakes are enormous in size and of such high frequency as to be almost continuous.
80 When a great airliner moving along at five times hurricane speed runs into one of these thermals and rises and drops hundreds of feet, the physical dimensions and stresses involved are precisely those of taking the Queen Mary over Niagara Falls at full speed and doing it so capably that the passengers believe it’s only a 'little bump.’’
81 It is very important to realize the magnitude which man’s scientific and technical capability has really reached. In both the airframe and power plant phases of industry today man has really reached astronomically augmented degrees of new advantage in respect to his ability to swiftly alter his a priori physical environmental patterning. When we learned of Sputnik’s success, we were thereby informed of the arrival of the inter-continental missile rocket. With it, the airplane, which in the first decade of this century became the longest arm of striking power, was displaced as the number one weapon. For fifty years the aircraft had enjoyed all highest priorities of access to scientific industrial capabilities. So complex and swiftly evolving was the airframe phase of the industrial equation that its underwriting could only be financed by major nations and only under the mandate of omni-survival emergency anticipations. So great have been the nationally subsidized underwritings of the airframe phase of man’s acquisition of the industrial equation capabilities that the fifty years of man-piloted aircraft development involved a total of international expenditure in the range of three trillion dollars, approximately one hundred times the value of all the gold in the world. It was an over-all undertaking whose magnitude could only be visible in retrospect, and as astronomically invisible to yesterday’s private finance capital capabilities as was atomic power to optical foresight.
82 With the airplane industry rendered suddenly obsolete as the premier long-range, highest velocity, highest energy packing and hitting power—the great national subsidy of the aircraft industry automatically relinquished its half century of popular mandate support as the national emergency-anticipating defense measure. This obsolescence became simultaneous in all the major industrial initiative-competing nations. The aircraft industry should not be looked upon as one industry amongst a myriad of other independent industries. It should be regarded as the total industrial equation, accredited and operating at the highest level of historically augmented and integrated capability. In the aircraft phase of industry, the relative efficiencies of performance realizations as ratioed to invested resources are, for instance, ten-fold the efficiency realized when, the industrial equation is operating at the automobile manufacturing level of comprehensive policy integrity. Shorn of its half century of vital subsidy— as a child grown to manhood and at full stature of capability is divested of further parental support—the aircraft phase of industry will now have to employ its superior degrees of capability with even greater discretion and comprehensive usefulness than under its bureaucratic governance. With its sudden reorientations first labelled recession, this release of a ten-fold greater capability into the home front undertakings will bring about manifold dislocations of the lower order of efficiency phases of industry—but nowhere will its world-around capabilities be more dramatically applied than to the long-time antipriority area of the comprehensive building arts and to the swift provision of world-around accommodation of the new air-ocean, world-flown embracement of whole earth by all men—in their frequency-modulated, therefore approximately invisible, one- town world of 1968 realization.
83 In 1927 I undertook a thirty-year series of experimentations, not only in the direction of ultimate participation of landed environment controlling in the most advanced capabilities of industry, but also in relation to the individual and his functioning, and in relation to the questions of whether and how he can take the initiative in regard to various challenges. In searching for the functioning capabilities of the individual in the industrial equation evolution I saw myself as ‘‘any typical, fairly healthy individual.’’ What impressed me about me in making the experiment with me was that I was so very average. I can say that whatever results are now subject to inventory, are the results of my basic assumption of ‘‘average individual capabilities’’ at the outset. I knew when I started in 1927 that I could not jump very high and I could not swim very fast and I hadn’t earned the best marks in the class. Inasmuch as I was interested in what the average individual could do, I was a very good case for experimentation.
84 There was one a priori requirement to this third-of-a-century experiment, that I adopted to give it a cleanly controlled opportunity of producing unprejudiced results. I must forsake altogether the idea of priority of the necessity to earn a living. When I was very young my two grandmothers told me about the Golden Rule, and as a young man of four I thought it was a very excellent rule and I admired the idea. I had a shock later on when I joined the Navy, where it was suggested that this might not be the operating rule of the seafaring people. Later an uncle took me aside and said, ‘‘Young man, I am sorry to have to tell you that about a hundred and fifty years ago we had scientific proof that there is not enough to go around…. and so it must be you or the other fellow and it must be your family or the other fellow’s. Really, it’s very tough, but Malthus and Darwin gave very clear proof of these facts. So I suggest that you learn how to acquire yours quickly and incisively and then get around to applying the Golden Rule as far as is expedient.’’
85 Even if born with an adequate income almost all of us are faced with the necessity of earning ourselves a living. I have visited many universities, and certainly the idea seems universal that the boys are preparing themselves first of all to be able to earn a living, hopefully within an area that is interesting to them. They hope they’ll earn a good enough living and obtain early security so they may have time to do the things they would really like to do all the time.
86 Now, in 1927, when our daughter Allegra was born, we had no money, and obviously under those conditions I ought to have gone out to earn a living. But it was just at this moment that the kind of picture I have been describing was looming before me and I didn’t see how I could escape doing something about it. I first tried to interest people I thought were much more capable than myself in respect to the problem, but I found none who were interested in spending the rest of their years on it. It seemed to me from my industrial lag studies it was a problem that was going to take a minimum of twenty-five years to bring into useful scientific treatability. So the question was: How could I peel off and forget about earning a living? I did finally detach myself from conventional preoccupation with living security, but I did not undertake this research and development as an idealist nor, I hope, as a crank. My conviction grew out of my discovery of the comprehensive validity and vitality of the industrial equation and the operative principles apparently governing its growth transcendentally beyond any directed ambitions of men.
87 I was impressed with the fact that in the primarily agricultural and craft eras the individuals in the little towns bartered directly with one another to arrange for their mutual security. One was a shoemaker, the other was growing potatoes, and so forth; each one produced more of his products than he could use personally and exchanged his surpluses with the other fellows. A man then bargained at 180° with the man in front of him. Each made his own deals and organized his comprehensive security within the visible horizon.
88 However, in the industrial equations, I saw the man standing or sitting at his production station and the nuts or bolts the machine was making at his station were not going off at 180°, but were going off sideways at 90° to his line of sight. I saw that it was futile for him to fill his pocket with nuts or bolts to exchange with the hamburger man. The industrial products tended to go off around the world until the nuts and bolts, for instance, each arrived in their respective logical relationship in larger industrial organisms, along with the myriad of other kinds of components; and finally some nuts and bolts would come back to that machine operator, but only as an organized technical complex such as an automobile or water pump or whatever it might be. His basic security was obtained through the increasing capability of all society, thus comprehensively advantaged by the universal tool network.
89 It occurred to me that it could also be true in the industrial equation that security need not be a local, 180° negotiation, but an around-the-world circuit-closing principle. If this were so it could also be true that if your experience actually discerned an industrial gap-closing task that needed your particular experienced attention, and no patron of the task could be discovered who was inherently concerned with such tasks, you might then assume you were being directly challenged by natural evolutionary process with doing something about that gap, which challenge and response were no more mystical than the spontaneous dodging from under a falling tree. It might prove to be economically feasible for the individual to apply himself to such gapfilling functions whose developed solution might then go multi-directionally around the world to find its right places in the network of integrating capabilities. Thus, the wealth advantage of man might be comprehensively increased and the gap-filling individual might find himself surviving by all manner of indirect means as integral functioning of the larger network equations.
90 So it was with the hope of discovering as soon as possible whether that really was true or not that I decided, in 1927, to forget forever the idea that I ought to earn a living. My wife really bore the brunt of that decision. But as months and years were passed safely, I watched young men become interested in my kind of research and development advantages and results. The minute you were not concerned with earning a living and really tackled problem after problem that the other fellow was not tackling, there proved to be a wealth of solvable problems. In fact the whole mass of problems that are worth tackling is so great that any average individual who goes into that kind of a paradise wilderness garden ought to make very good progress. If I have made progress that is mildly notable it is only because I walked into a vast, unattended, potential harvest.
91 Year after year I saw young men become fascinated with those potentials I was dealing with, and then suddenly say to me, ‘‘I’m sorry, but I have to earn a living—I’m different from you, I’ve got a wife and child. I’m sorry to have to quit you.’’ Today I am still engaged in this experiment and while I have no right to certify that others may be able to survive working upon these same premises, the fact is that my family and I have weathered more than thirty-five years in search and development relating directly to the application of the industrial equation to shelter and shelter mechanics and their design, production and distribution.
92 We cannot say that this survival success is not coincidence, but I personally think it would be extravagant to call it coincidence. I think that the principle of indirect industrial realization of survival advantage is as well proven by my experience as is the indirect result of general good health that comes of an integration of a myriad of individual self-disciplines. I am not afraid to suggest to a young man today that it is possible to forget altogether about the priority concept of earning a living.
93 I had the great honor of meeting Dr. Jonas Salk not long after his vaccines had been acknowledged in America as providing immunity to the vast majority of infantile paralysis exposures. Dr. Salk said, ‘‘I’ve always felt that those dymaxion gadgets— cars, houses, maps, etc.—were only incidental to what you really are interested in. Could you tell me what your work is?’’ I said, ‘‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that definition for a long time. I’ve been engaged in what I call comprehensive anticipatory design science.’’ And Dr. Salk said, ‘‘That’s very interesting, because that’s a description of my work too.’’
94 That statement by Dr. Salk fascinated me because I have long felt that (whereas medical doctors were at first accredited by society only when men were in trouble, and that whereas cures were difficult, doctors long ago discovered the excellent results to be obtained by anticipatory laboratory research that led to prevention as far more comprehensively effective than cures, and thought that whereas doctors are concerned with the internal organism of man) industrialization might be thought of accurately as the external organism of man. Man’s external disorders could best be treated, therefore, not as local curative techniques but as comprehensive laboratory search and research leading to universally effective anticipatory prevention of maladies of the industrial organic evolutionary growth by appropriate comprehensive anticipatory design science.
95 Comprehensive anticipatory design science assumes that the client knows absolutely nothing about what he needs or what should be done about it. There is a word which I would like to introduce into our thinking, and that is synergy. Now the word synergy is as old as the word energy. By energy we mean the differentiated-out local behaviors of comprehensive universe or Nature, for instance as gravity or as optics. By synergy we mean the integrated behaviors of nature, and synergy is said to be ‘‘behavior of a whole system unpredicted by the behavior of its components or any sub-assembly of its components.’’
96 Men do not know the word synergy because they do not tend to need the word in their thinking patterns. Behaviors of whole systems, unpredicted by behaviors of their parts, seem to our accepted logic to be a sort of mystical concept. We tend to think in the terms of our elementary strategy of education, where we start by dealing with our local parts and learning how to handle these parts well. Because of our local elemental focus we tend to think it is logical to say that ‘‘a chain is no stronger than its weakest link’’—which immediately is thrown out of validity when we first join the other end of the chain back on itself. When we break the weakest link there is still only one piece of chain and we are mildly confounded in our statement. ‘‘Well, chains are not supposed to be linked together at both ends,’’ and the reason we say that is because we inherited the Greek concepts of linear and plane geometry as elementary and later those of solid and spherical geometry as ‘‘advanced.’’
97 The exclusively local aspect of plane geometry imposed the concept of an infinite surface and the infinite line as logical to the then-prevalent belief that the earth was flat and infinite—ergo, all ‘straight lines’ were open-ended, or infinite. That is why we think a chain ought to be just an infinite line. However, in Nature all the lines are completely curved and all chains do eventually return upon themselves. This fact is reflected in, for instance, the very essence of metallurgical structuring.
98 Are there, in nature, behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by the parts? This is exactly what the chemist has discovered to be true. Moreover, he had discovered that, contrary to his elementary kind of experience at school, he did not come into the chemical laboratory and find a soda fountain with spigots for hydrogen and oxygen and so forth with which you mix up the universe as you go, and then begin to make it work. He found the universe already in complex working order. And every time he partially separated out any of the elements from the others, he always discovered that the behaviors of the localized elements never accounted for the associated behavior of the a priori complexes.
99 The chemist is thoroughly familiar with the word synergy, which is the only word in the dictionary for this omnioperative behavior of universe. Synergy is the essence of those great changes of man in respect to his a priori environment. The essence of the evolutionary realization of the jet airship is chrome nickel steel, by virtue of which the enormous concentrational energies could be released as heat, which would have destroyed engines of any pre-chrome nickel steel production. Because of the strength of chrome nickel steel, even under conditions of enormous heat, it prevents the destruction of the structural design integrity of the jet engine, which could then translate its thrust to the ship. And chrome nickel steel is very typical of synergy.
100 The predominant constituents of chrome nickel steel—the primary element components, iron, nickel, and chromium, and their tensile strengths per square inch of cross section—are their primary criteria of relative strength. Taken individually the chrome, nickel and iron square-inch sectional capabilities are in the approximate range of 70,000, 80,000 and 60,000 p.s.i. tensile strength respectively. In association, chrome nickel steel is a pattern, a constellation of behaviors dictated by Nature, not by man, and as a chrome nickel steel casting we will often realize 300,000 p.s.i. tensile strength, which is then five times as strong as its weakest elemental link and four times as strong as its strongest link.
101 Is this a mystical behavior or can we account for it? We discover of course that we can account for it in a logical manner. We knew, regarding organics in the previous century, that all the organic structures were tetrahedronally configured. Since 1933, we have also learned that all our inorganic structures are tetrahedronally configured.