¶ Tooling of Domes (2)
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Index Entry
"mechanic to coordinate, that we have the really important improvement in scientific industrial mass production.
"In producing the parts for my geodesic dome for the Ford Motor Company’s Rotunda Building in Detroit, Michigan, the ‘Class A’ Ford tooling maintained a tolerance in the positioning of the rivet holes, and in the diameter of those holes, of .005 inch. This is an invisible increment to the unaided human eye. Maintaining this tolerance produced a structure whose end-fixity strength was twice what it would have been had the tolerance been slackened to dimensional variations of .01 inch–which is the limit of human sensorial perceptivity. This is to say that by taking advantage of the tool’s capability to operate at subvisible tolerances, double the strength was attained and therefore the dome weighed one-half as much as would a dome of equal strength, if the dimensioning had been accomplished within the limit of human visibility and hand-indexed coordination.
“It is a corollary of the above that structures produced by the most advanced capabilities of scientific industry no”
