5 The Happiest Years
1Buckminster Fuller’s happiest years were those he spent in the navy. He had no need to drive himself. He was doing what he liked best of all to do; and he was learning a great deal. Above all, he was learning to think in the terms that eventually made him the most original philosopher of our era. In addition, he was a damn fine naval officer; for what he lacked in experience he made up for by that ability for inspired improvisation.
2 Bucky commanded the Whisper very briefly. Then he was ordered to take command of the Inca (SP 1212), a superb, seventy-two-foot express cruiser, capable of the phenomenal speed for that time of 28 knots. Compared to Wego, she looked like a real warship, with a three-inch gun mounted on her forward deck, a tall mast to carry the wireless aerial, and a luxurious owner’s cabin for her captain. She was one of a fleet of six sister ships given to the navy by members of the Eastern Yacht Club. Bucky was made flotilla commander of three of these ships—Inca, Ellen, and Snark and ordered to take them to the Naval Air Station at Newport News, Virginia, to act as crash boats for the new navy flying school.
3 In World War I navy planes were the only American-made aircraft to make a significant contribution to aerial warfare. All the American aces in France flew French or British planes. The few land planes we sent over were. redesigned British De Havilland biplanes, with Liberty motors. They were so bad that their unhappy pilots called them “flaming coffins”—hardly a triumph for American know-how. However, the navy eventually had hundreds of Curtiss flying boats and seaplanes patrolling the coastal waters of England and France.
4 In the sheltered waters of Hampton Roads the fledgling pilots were being trained in Curtiss biplanes mounted on a single float, Curtiss boats, and seaplanes with twin floats. They were a gay and daring lot, who equated recklessness with courage. As a result the mortality rate was appalling.
5 One of the most common types of accidents was caused by the novice pilot coming in to land at too steep an angle, which caused the plane to trip on the water and flip upside down; the stunned pilot, hanging head down from his safety belt, would be submerged as the plane sank to float level. Bucky’s boats were very fast and the planes’ landing pattern quite tight, so he could usually reach the scene of a crash in a minute or two. The entire crew of the Inca, except the man at the wheel, would spontaneously dive overboard and try to get the pilot out before he drowned. Frequently they were too late. Though there was always a doctor on board to try to resuscitate them, many a young man, not otherwise seriously injured, died on the Inca and the other boats of the flotilla.
6 Bucky was terribly shaken by these losses, unaccustomed as he was to violent death. He and Anne were living at the Norfolk Country Club where many of the young flyers and their wives were billeted. “There were some wonderful young people there,” Bucky says, “the young men who were learning to fly, many of them my friends from Harvard and from Massachusetts.” There would be much laughter and gaiety in the evening and tragedy in the morning, as some young man Bucky knew died on his boat. In some ways it was worse than war, where casualties are inevitable, to have these boys die uselessly in the pleasant, peaceful autumn sunlight.
7 Bucky says, “It became a terrific challenge to me, with all that life involved, to try to find some way to get those men out quicker.” He spent long sleepless nights flogging his brain to devise a method of quick rescue, jumping out of bed to make innumerable sketches of possible solutions. With these sketches in hand he had long discussions with Commander Patrick Bellinger, who was in charge of the Naval Air Station. Finally he produced a working drawing of a device, which Bellinger approved for trial and authorized Bucky to install in the Inca.
8 It consisted of an auxiliary mast set in the stern of the crash boat with a strongly reinforced boom from which hung a grappling hook attached by a steel cable to a winch. With this Bucky hoped to be able to snatch the whole plane out of the water and quickly free its pilot.
9 After several practice runs with already-wrecked planes, Bucky tried it for real. A plane came in and flipped in the usual sickening way.
10 Bucky got the Inca to it in ninety seconds, swung her in her length, and expertly backed her to the plane. The grappling hook was dropped and engaged the wreckage, lifting it dripping from the water with the unconscious pilot hanging from his belt. A dozen hands ripped him loose and laid him face down on the deck, where the doctor went to work pumping the water out of him and giving artificial respiration. He worked for five eternal minutes before the young man’s eyes opened, and he threw up. It was one of the happiest moments of Bucky’s life.
11 Rescue masts were installed on the other boats of the flotilla. Some pilots still died, but many were saved.
12 Oddly enough for such a stubborn individualist, Bucky usually got along beautifully with his commanding officers; perhaps he was lucky in getting good ones. The first commander he served under at the Naval Air Station was Lieutenant Commander Edward MacDonald, who became his longtime friend. A little later MacDonald went overseas to be replaced by Commander Patrick Bellinger—one of the best. Pat Bellinger was Naval Aviator Number 4, a delightful and dashing character who had no use for naval punctilio. Later, in 1919, he commanded the NC 3 on the famous transatlantic flight of the giant four-engined Curtiss flying boats. Seeing that Bucky was doing a fine job, Bellinger gave him great leeway, and it was he who arranged for Bucky to live at the Norfolk Country Club with Anne, instead of aboard ship.
13 However, Bucky did get himself tangled up in navy red tape. One of those silly interservice rivalries was in full spate at Hampton Roads between Naval Aviation, so feckless and free, and the admiral commanding the Fifth Naval District at the Norfolk Naval Base, who thought planes were silly toys. Though Bucky worked with Naval Aviation, he was officially under the admiral’s command. Thus he occupied the classic position of the man in the middle.
14 Quite frequently Bucky had to take the Inca to the Norfolk Navy Yard to get supplies and take on water. It was quite a long trip round the point and across the mouth of the James River, from which the Merrimack had sortied for her famous battle with the Monitor. He grudged every second away from the base lest there be an accident while he was gone.
15 Another chore that took him away was being sent over to Old Point Comfort to ferry VIPs across the Roads. The regular ferry service had been discontinued, so Bucky would land at the ferry slip, which was equipped with water pipes. Right there he saw a way to avoid at least some of his trips to the Navy Yard by filling his water tanks from those pipes.
16 The admiral found out about it and there was a tremendous row. Bucky was ordered to report to him, and found himself on a hot carpet. Sitting at his desk, stout and wrathful, with his chest covered with ribbons and his dignity at full staff, the admiral laid Bucky out for his unauthorized pilfering of somebody else’s water. “It was an act of out-and-out piracy,” the admiral concluded. “We’re going to have to court-martial you—for piracy!”
17 Bucky was thoroughly disgusted and a little frightened. Fortunately, Naval Aviation had high priorities, and Pat Bellinger was able to avert the worst and save Bucky from being hanged from his own yardarm.
18 If Bucky had a gift for getting into trouble, he also had the luck of being at the right place at the right time. Doctor Lee De Forest, who in 1907 had invented the triode tube which made possible voice transmission by wireless, came to Hampton Roads to conduct an experiment for the navy in ship-to-plane voice transmission. The Inca was given the assignment in addition to her other duties.
19 It is easy to imagine Bucky’s intense excitement as the heavy electronic equipment was loaded onto his boat and Doctor De Forest himself came aboard to oversee its installation. Bucky was with him every possible second, examining every circuit, switch, tube, and meter; asking innumerable questions; learning about the shape of the future.
20 On a bright, cold autumn day, he took the Inca out into the Roads, with De Forest standing beside him on the bridge. One of the largest Curtiss flying boats staggered into the air laden with radio equipment and circled above the Inca. After much twirling of dials and adjusting of switches Doctor De Forest spoke into the clumsy microphone. Through crackling static, blurred by distortion but intelligible, a voice answered him. It was the first time a man on a ship had talked to a man in a plane.
21 The winter of 1917–18 came on fast and cold. Ice formed in the water around the air base and though Bucky used his flotilla as icebreakers to keep things going for a while, they were hardly designed for the job. The navy sensibly decided to transfer the whole operation to Pensacola, Florida, and Bucky’s Hampton Roads tour of duty was over.
22 World War I brought a huge expansion of the United States Navy. The authorities realized that to man it they would need far more officers than the Naval Academy could provide in its regular program, even though shortened from four years to three for the duration. Officers’ training schools, like the one at Harvard, had been set up, but these only gave once-over-lightly instruction to cadets who were then commissioned as reserve officers. The navy decided to inaugurate a three-month crash course at the Naval Academy, whose graduates would be commissioned ensigns in the regular navy. Naturally, the three-year men sneered at what they called “ninety-day wonders,” but some fine officers came out of it. Pat Bellinger had one appointment and he made Bucky his nominee.
23 The requirements were stiff. A cadet had to have been overseas; he had to be sponsored by a senior officer, and he had to have the equivalent of a college education. Bucky met only one of these conditions. However, he had a fine record commanding patrol boats and he had been to Harvard, if somewhat ingloriously. In addition, Pat Bellinger’s backing was very powerful, and Bucky’s invention of the rescue apparatus counted heavily. He was accepted, though how he passed the physical examination with his poor eyesight is just one more mystery in his career. Of course, he could see perfectly well with his glasses on.
24 The only damper on Bucky’s delight was that he expected to be separated from Anne. However, the Larneds, who owned the two leading hotels at Annapolis, Carvel Hall and Arundel House, arranged for Anne to stay very inexpensively at the Hall. Bucky lived in the cadet barracks, but often after evening parade he could get away for two hours more or less. Anne would be at the parade and they would walk back to the hotel together. “It was very beautiful having Anne there.”
25 The Naval Academy was one of the major landmarks in Bucky’s life; the source of much of his technical knowledge and the inspiration for his major preoccupation with ephemeralization. For in wartime a patriotic Congress was shoveling dollars into the navy by the billions and the entire effort was never based on what a thing cost, but whether it was the best obtainable. All the latest technological developments were being adapted and refined; experimentation, which is now called Research and Development, was proceeding “full ahead.” And because a warship requires the most intricate machinery occupying the least possible space and weighing as little as possible, efficiency was the goal.
26 A 10,000-ton “heavy” cruiser carried eight 8-inch guns, a large secondary battery, torpedo tubes, and armor plate. In addition, its hull had to be designed to withstand the tremendous stress of moving through huge waves, and to contain the essential life-support features such as water, fuel, electric generating capacity, and provisions for several hundred men. Most important of all, it had to contain enormously powerful engines capable of driving it through the water at thirty knots or more. Bucky was struck by the thought that, though a building required none of these things, a building structure of the same length and cubic capacity as a cruiser would weigh twenty or more times as much.1
27 Bucky thus realized that naval architecture was a triumph of the efficient use of materials. He began to see the infinite possibilities of design science if applied as enthusiastically to improving the living conditions of men as to killing them. The first glimmer of his vision of a world in which, by the efficient use of technology, natural resources could be stretched to provide ample living for all mankind, lighted his brain.
28 Since the cadets were supposed already to have a classical education, the three-month course at Annapolis dispensed with such irrelevancies and concentrated on engineering, navigation, ballistics, and the whole intricate technology of handling warships at sea.
29 It was highly concentrated and very tough. Bucky says, “I never worked so hard in my life.” In fact he ate it up.
30 The higher mathematics involved revivified his former interest in them and set his brain working in the true direction on which so much of his philosophy is based. In his own complicated phraseology, “Such a pattern-experience continually excited conceptioning in the potential accruable to new complex design integration…with forwardly conceived and theoretically designable entities.” 2 It also made him more dissatisfied than ever with conventional geometry and restarted the trains of mathematical thought that he was to pursue to completely unorthodox, though brilliantly logical, conclusions.
31 Another important enlightenment that came to Bucky at the Naval Academy was that, whereas at most universities the most brilliant students were encouraged to specialize, at Annapolis the brightest were given generalized courses to enable them to understand science as a whole. He said, “In 1917 I assumed that Nature did not have separate compartments for chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc., but only one department and only one arithmetical angle-and-frequency-modulating and coordinating system.”
32 At Annapolis Bucky was competing against several Harvard graduates of his class of 1917. Due to his enormous capacity for hard work and his affinity for the subjects of his studies, he was graduated well toward the top of his class. The other Harvard men were “washed out.” This gave Bucky much-needed self-confidence. “For my own comfort I realized that my getting fired from Harvard had nothing to do with my capability to master my work when I really wanted to.”
33 The Annapolis experience also renewed Bucky’s interest in what he called his “Chronofile.” Most children like to collect things. At the age of four or five, Bucky had begun collecting odd items of news, letters, and ideas concerning world patterns of developing technology. At first this was just a little boy’s interest in the wonderful things that were being invented—automobiles, wireless telegraphy, X rays, etc. Somewhat later he began noting his reactions to these things and their effect on his own development. At various times this extraordinary record showed some lacunae as he became too busy or uninterested to maintain it.
34 Beginning late in 1917, intuitively knowing that someday it would be of enormous value to him and possibly to the world, Bucky kept it meticulously. It became a record of a boyhood at the turn of the century and maturing during mankind’s epochal movement from “the inert, materialistic nineteenth century, into the dynamic, abstract twentieth century.” For he became convinced that a greater technological transformation was taking place in his own lifetime than in that of all the previous generations of humanity. The “science-quaking fact” of his boyhood seemed to him to be the discovery that light has speed. The fact that it was invariable had been proved by the experiments of Morely and Michaelson on the very sea wall of the Naval Academy.
35 Bucky was graduated with the rank of ensign (temporary). A little later he passed the required examination to become a regular line officer of the United States Navy—Ensign R. Buckminster Fuller, USN—not USNR. That was a powerful difference.
36 On graduation, Bucky was given a week’s leave after which he was to report to the transport Finland. He took Anne straight to Bear Island. It seemed cold and somewhat cheerless to her. Bathing in icy water, using outhouses, making a wood fire in the old iron stove to cook by was not exactly to her taste. But she had Bucky to herself at last—their first real honeymoon. He, of course, was greatly refreshed.
37 When they returned to New York, he found that the Finland had been torpedoed on her return voyage and was in drydock. He was ordered to the staff of Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves, commanding the cruiser and transport operations, as a communications officer. As usual—in the navy—he was very lucky.
38 The headquarters were in Hoboken. The officers in the communications section were a fine lot. Among them De Coursey Failes, Henry Glieb, Oliver Jennings, and William Long became close personal friends of Bucky’s. Admiral Gleaves took a great liking to him, and made him his personal aide for secret information: “a very exciting position.”
39 There were 130 ships in the transport operation, which had to be coordinated into convoys with appropriate destroyer and cruiser escorts. Nearly two million men were transported to Europe. With immense pride Bucky says, “We did not lose a single army man to enemy action on the sea. On the return trips, which were unescorted, we did lose some ships. That was the price the navy had to pay.”
40 All the ships reported their positions daily to Gleaves’s headquarters. Bucky was the only one who knew where every American ship was at all times. He kept the records in a supersecret black book, but with his excellent memory, he kept them in his head as well. Every day he sent a report to the office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington. He was also in charge of communicating with all the ships at sea. This was another important part of his education. He says: “At this time I developed a thought that has been very powerful in my theory of communication ever since. I said: ‘I don’t care if I am not understood as long as I am not misunderstood. For if I am misunderstood the captain of a ship may do the wrong thing with fatal consequences, but if he does not understand me, he queries the message and you give it to him again until he gets it right.’ This principle became absolutely fundamental in my life from then on.”
41 The messages had to be sent in code in as few words as possible. Thus Bucky learned to convey enormous amounts of information with minimum wordage in such a way that he could not be misunderstood.
42 In October, 1918, Bucky was ordered to the transport Great Northern and sailed in a convoy to France. On the return voyage, on November 11, word came by wireless of the signing of the Armistice. This, of course, brought the transport service to a temporary halt, prior to reversing its direction to bring the troops home.
43 In December, Bucky was ordered as a communications officer to the George Washington, which was being elaborately reconditioned and refurbished to take President and Mrs. Wilson to the Peace Conference in Paris. Among the most modern communication equipment that Bucky helped to install in her was a long-distance wireless-arc telephone. The De Forest tube and spark-set squawk, which had been used at Hampton Roads, had a maximum range of only about seventy miles; the new equipment was designed to make possible transoceanic voice transmission.
44 Bucky sailed on both the presidential trips of the George Washington, spending much of his time with technicians tinkering with the new radio equipment, which was far from perfected. On the second trip Bucky was present at another technological leap forward. As the ship lay in the harbor at Brest, the voice of a man speaking from her was heard and understood at the great government wireless installation at Arlington, Virginia.
45 For many of the reserve officers the signing of the Armistice meant that their service was drawing to a close. But Bucky’s status as a regular line officer gave him the option of remaining in the navy if he so desired, which he did. For to him the service meant the opportunity to continue a way of life in which making money was a tertiary consideration. He had neither any desire to amass a fortune nor interest in a world dominated by the profit motive, and based on what he already considered a false system of reckoning real wealth. Rather he wanted to continue exploring the realms of scientific knowledge which were expanding with the incredible acceleration imparted to them by the necessities of war. His theory then, and ever since, was that the great technological advances were always made under the impetus of war. Later, when they were superseded by still more advanced technology, the masters of industry adapted them to civilian purposes in order to be able to use profitably the machinery for producing them. His ambition was to cut out the preliminary steps and apply the most advanced technology immediately to what he later came to call “livingry” as opposed to weaponry. Meanwhile, the navy seemed to him the best place to learn.