Books: Dymaxion Utopia

NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON—R. Buckminster Fuller—Lippincott ($4).

If all the people on the earth stood on one another’s shoulders, they would make nine chains to the moon. For most citizens, that thought is likely to be more alarming than otherwise, but for Richard Buckminster Fuller it is profoundly reassuring: it suggests “the littleness of our universe” when viewed by an unfrightened mind, and it reminds him that man has been made too conscious of his physical smallness to be aware of his own powers and potentialities.

That Author Fuller himself never forgets those possibilities was demonstrated last week when he published his first book —an extraordinary 408-page volume which includes 22 prophesies of developments in the next decade, a chart showing world copper resources and reserves, a chronology of scientific events since 3400 B.C., informal, iconoclastic discussions of economics, sociology, history, climate, mathematics, geography, the Bible, Henry Ford, Rockefeller, Leonardo da Vinci, taxes, death and housing.

Nine Chains to the Moon is not Author Fuller’s first demonstration of his invincible faith in man’s future. Designer of the famed Dymaxion— house, inventor of the three-wheeled, streamlined Dymaxion car, Buckminster Fuller is a New Englander who looks like a businessman and talks like a prophet of the coming technological millennium. A Harvard alumnus, he decoded radio messages in the navy during the War, became a manufacturer of molds for reinforced concrete afterwards, and in 1927, when he lost control of his business, settled in Chicago slums for a year to work out his ideas of modern society.

The first result of his pondering, the Dymaxion house, streamlined, suspended from a mast and containing a self-acting sewage system, made it plain that Mr. Fuller was the most fertile and inventive U. S. designer of pre-fabricated housing.

But even admirers who liked the thought of rubber floors on which children could not be hurt, or the fog gun for washing dishes, judged Mr. Fuller’s proposal that the house be set up by being dropped from a Zeppelin a little visionary. Although it excited less discussion, critics were more impressed by his model bathroom exhibited in Manhattan four months ago, supplanting the present complex arrangement of pipes and drains with a unified, economical design as symmetrical as a piece of metal sculpture.

Of Buckminster Fuller as an architect it has been said that he proceeds incoherently to logical conclusions. As a writer he follows the same procedure, leaping from-subject to subject faster than the eye can follow, but usually reaching conclusions notable for their mixture of blunt common sense and intuitive romanticism.

The framework of his philosophy is simple: Man, he says, is a product of his environment, and environment is “95% a shelter problem.” Nine Chains to the Moon begins with a description of a modern city dweller, the unfortunate Mr. Murphy, jostled in the subway, unnerved by noise, threatened with peptic ulcer, bolting his meals, quarreling with his wife, depressed by the incessant pressure of city noises great and small, bewildered at the contrast between his efficient radio and his inefficient, cockroach-breeding house.

But after page 25 Mr. Murphy seldom appears and Buckminster Fuller jumps from housing to Einstein’s theory (with an aside on the pernicious effect of lullabies), lambasts finance capital and advances a provocative comparison between primitive superstitions and the contemporary control of opinions. He believes that money will soon be based on the “energy dollar,” that power will soon be transmitted by radio, that all basic industries in the U. S. will be socialized within a decade.

But readers are likely to value his book for its incidental information rather than for its arguments, to be as much irritated by Buckminster Fuller’s exclamatory style as impressed by his occasional lightning insights. And by the time they have finished reading of all the stupidities, confusions and downright imbecilities that humanity tolerates, the moon is likely to seem just as far away as ever.

*An R. B. Fuller word signifying “dynamic” plus “maximum service.”