¶ Plumbing (1)
Index Entry
Plumbing:
"My self-disciplining strategy of never losing the large-pattern comprehensivity doesn’t mean that you have to disregard the particulars. For instance, when I was designing my stamped-out bathroom, doing the research for it, I discovered that there was one man in Toledo, Ohio, who designed all the toilet bowls in the U.S. His problem was largely one of manufacture, where the crude ceramics employed did not permit any fine tolerances.
"Scientists are simply not looking at plumbing. There is a feeling that pure scientists shouldn’t stoop to that sort of nonsense. Nature spends a lot of time separating materials out into solids and liquid-- as you know if you’ve ever done any mining or refining. We should always pay close attention when nature does this kind of thing. If we employed stainless steel instead of ceramics we could have very fine tolerances and we wouldn’t have to waste seven gallons just to flush one pint of waste.
"The point is that you can be a generalist and still plunge into the particular. I’ve done such plunges for one month at a time or for six months at a time, such as the time I was doing my
¶ Citations
- RBP at Penn Bell studios, Philadelphia, Pa., 25 Jan’75
