12 Nine Chains
1While the cars were building in Bridgeport, Bucky lived a more normal life than he had in many years. The Pearsons had a summer place in Fairfield, a pleasant house overlooking an estuary of Long Island Sound, less than ten miles from the Dymaxion plant. There was a garage with a flat roof and an equally fine view. Learning that Anne was looking for a place to live, the Pearsons made her a kindly proposition. “If you will design an apartment on the roof of our garage,” they said, “we will build it and you can live in it as long as you want to. Our boys are growing up and when you leave, it will be just the thing for them.”
2 Pearson’s confidence in Anne’s architectural planning was not misplaced. Through osmosis or heredity she had innate skill and taste which, like many of her other qualities, had lain dormant until called upon. The garage backed against a hillside, so Anne planned a front door there at ground level. There was a double bedroom for the Fullers, a room for Allegra, a guest room, and, of course, a bath and kitchen. All one end of the apartment was a living room with long windows that opened on a wide porch, with a view of the bright blue estuary flecked with white sails. Bucky loved to sit there watching them.
3 With Anne’s already-practiced flair for interior decoration, the apartment was so unusually pretty that the Architectural Forum ran pictures of it to show what could be done with a garage apartment.
4 The Fullers lived there very happily for about a year. Allegra, who was six, started school in Fairfield, but in the fall of 1934, when she was seven, Bucky convinced Anne that their daughter should have a more sophisticated kind of schooling. The modem transcendentalist’s ideas on education were strikingly similar to those Ralph Waldo Emerson had expressed nearly a hundred years before: There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct.1
5 Bucky had always been fanatically determined to preserve Allegra’s innate intellect from being silenced and obstructed. To this end he chose for her the most intelligently progressive school in New York—The Dalton School. The Fullers rented an apartment on East 87th Street, just around the corner from Dalton so that Allegra could walk to school without crossing the street.
6 When Bucky returned to New York, he found that the scene had changed dramatically; indeed, the whole country had been changed by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Instead of a Communist revolution, which the liberals had been predicting because of depression desperation, Roosevelt had instituted revolutionary reforms which, while they did not cure all the economic ills of the nation, did abate the worst abuses and gave people hope.
7 The best of the liberals were working with the government, leaving the radical fringe, who had joined the Communist party and hoped for revolution, in limbo. As a result there was an increasing polarization between the people who were trying to make the democratic system of government work and those who hoped it would not, between the true liberals and the radicals.
8 The whole world was changing, too, moving, as Bucky saw, toward another war. Hitler had assumed power in Germany shortly before Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration and was clearly heading toward a great confrontation with the democracies. Mussolini’s New Roman Empire was becoming increasingly militaristic. Japan had begun her aggression against China; and Communist Russia under Stalin’s iron dictatorship appeared ever more dangerous, because no one knew which side she would take.
9 In these perilous circumstances the United States Government began tightening security, assuming that there might be another general war. Bucky says: “The people who had joined the Communist Party down at Romany Marie’s were coming under suspicion; and the people like myself who had not joined, did not want to be questioned about our friends. We did not feel that they had done anything even mildly wrong, but we felt that if we were questioned about them we might get them into trouble. So it became almost illogical to go to Marie’s—you would almost precipitate trouble. But she was such a friend of mine…
10 “That was really the end of the Greenwich Village we had known, and of Romany Marie’s as a great Bohemian headquarters. From that time the Bohemians began to move uptown, but never again was there such a meeting place for them.”
11 At about this time Bucky made one of his greatest and most lasting friendships. Felix Morley invited him to lunch at the Three Hours for Lunch Club, where he introduced him to his brother, Christopher Morley. At lunch Bucky recalled a poem of Christopher Morley’s which he had read in The Bowling Green, Morley’s column in the old Evening Post, about a month before Alexandra’s death. It had so affected him that he memorized it and, after explaining the circumstances, Bucky recited it to its author, who had forgotten it:
1213To A Child
14…The poetry innate I am told Of being only four years old, Still young enough to be a part Of nature’s great impulsive art Born comrade of bird, beast and tree And unselfconscious as a bee, And yet with lovely reason skilled Each day new paradise to build.
15Elate explorer of each sense Without dismay, without pretense In your unstained transparent eyes There is no conscience, no surprise. Life’s prayer can only you accept Your strange divinity still kept…
16Life that puts all things in rhyme May make you poet, too, in time But there were days, oh tender elf, When you were poetry itself…
17 When Bucky finished, tears were flowing down his face, dimming his round glasses. Morley was deeply moved. Bucky says, “That was the beginning of our having a very, very extraordinary friendship.”
18 At that time Morley had a charming little house at Roslyn, Long Island, which he called The Knothole. Bucky often went there with him, and he as often came to Martin’s Lane where he and the Hewletts immediately took to each other. Bucky was asked to join the Three Hours for Lunch Club. He says, “I made this transition because the event of Greenwich Village was over, and suddenly there was the Three Hours for Lunch Club and a group of extraordinarily interesting writers and poets, people like Don Marquis and F.P.A., and many others, with whom I drank copiously.” It was very good for Bucky, the more so as he was working on his first real book in which he put in permanent form many of the philosophical and technological ideas that were to make him famous. It was called Nine Chains to the Moon, meaning all of humankind, because he reckoned that if all the people then living stood upon each other’s shoulders they would make nine complete chains between the earth and the moon. Bucky wrote, “If it is not so far to the moon, then it is not so far to the limits [of Universe]—whatever, whenever or wherever they may be.” 2 The book was dedicated to Alexandra and Allegra with Christopher Morley’s beautiful line: Your strange divinity still kept.
19 Bucky worked on the book all through the summer of 1936. There can be no attempt to give a condensation of it here; the interested reader can go out and buy it for a small sum in any bookstore in America or England—it is selling faster than ever. However, certain of the ideas which are essential to Bucky’s thinking can be briefly touched upon.
20 Inevitably, the first chapters are a plea for improving man by improving his environment, particularly his housing. Bucky very astutely described the difficulties a man would encounter if he went about acquiring an automobile the way he builds a house.
21 First the man (Bucky calls him Mr. Murphy) would bring the automobile designer “a picture of how he would like the car to look, perhaps like ‘a jinricksha of the Tang Dynasty …or a British coronation coach.’ ” That being decided, Mr. Murphy and the designer would choose all the different parts—motor, flywheel, frame, differential, etc., from manufacturers’ catalogues. When they had made their selections they would get four or five local garages to bid for the job, and pick one of the bidders because of his price or because he had “built grandfather’s velocipedes.” Naturally, as soon as they started building, Mr. Murphy would have to get a bank loan, and a building permit from the local town council, and insurance; all of these people would insist on changes and bury him in red tape, and probably demand a bit of graft on the side. Then the craft unions would have their say.
22 If the car ever got built it would cost at least $50,000 and probably would not run, or if it did, would do so badly. It is easy to see that is no way to build an automobile. Bucky felt it was no way to build a house. His own prescription for mass-produced housing was now only about fifteen years ahead of the times, as evidenced by the tremendous torrent of factory-built trailer-houses that has ravaged the countryside since World War II.
23 Another important concept, central to Bucky’s philosophy, was expounded in the chapter called “The Phantom Captain.” It begins with Bucky’s famous mechanistic description of Man—“a self-balancing, adapter-base biped,” etc. But Man is far more than that. All the elegantly designed, intricate mechanical structure is merely an “imbecile contraption” without the guidance of the Phantom Captain, who has neither weight nor sensorial tangibility. The Captain is the metaphysical fragment of the universal intelligence which is in every human being, the real persona of each individual, of which the perceivable body is merely a mechanical extension, hardly more closely associated with him than the steering wheel of the automobile he drives.
24 Bucky calls the brain the Captain’s executive officer: there simply to supply him with information and transmit his orders to the body’s mechanism. When the corporeal man-mechanism wears out, the Captain simply “abandons ship,” and continues as an indestructible pattern of integrity.
25 The Captain has not only “an infinite self-identity characteristic but, also, an infinite understanding,” understanding being an intuitive, non-graphable awareness of perfection, or of infinity, or of truth, which serves as a universal yardstick relative to which any sense experience may be evaluated. But, since perfection is never attainable in reality, it becomes a time direction. This indicates the meaning of the phrase Never Never Land. “Children dream truly,” Bucky notes.
26 Although Bucky, at that time, may not have read Emerson’s famous essay, his Phantom Captain closely resembles the great transcendentalisms “oversoul.” Emerson says, “The soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; it is not a function, like the power of memory…but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or will, but the master of intellect and will. …A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.” 3
27 Bucky devoted considerable space in the book to Albert Einstein, who had “a powerful influence” on him and upon whose thinking he had based much of his own philosophy. He had been tremendously impressed by an article Einstein had published in the New York Times in 1930 in which he said that scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe. Einstein’s beautiful, nonanthropomorphic concept of God as the great orderer of the universe moved Bucky deeply, and the great scientist’s statement that fear and longing were the principle motivations of man impressed Bucky so strongly that he used them a great deal in Nine Chains.
28 In another chapter, which Bucky called “=Mrs. Murphy’s Horsepower,” he was, perhaps, the first person to explain Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity succinctly (in a ten-dollar telegram to Noguchi) in terms that a layman—a highly intelligent layman—could understand. Also, he outlined its possible application to everyday life and described what he felt the world would be like when Einstein’s discoveries were applied practically. All this led first to a terrible disappointment, and then to one of the greatest intuitive experiences of Bucky’s life.
29 Bucky finished Nine Chains in the autumn of 1936. He showed it to Christopher Morley, who was amazed and enthused by its profundity and originality. Morley, who had published some forty books with Doubleday, was just moving to J. B. Lippincott. He said to Bucky, “I think Lippincott should publish this.”
30 With Bucky’s consent Morley told Frank Henry of Lippincott about Nine Chains. Lippincott agreed to publish it. Bucky thinks that this was less because they felt any enthusiasm for the book, or even understood it, than because they wanted to please their new author, Morley, who was such a valuable “property.” In fact, to show how little they comprehended it they eventually brought it out in a copper-colored jacket, thinking it appropriate since by that time Bucky was working for Phelps Dodge, the great copper mining company.
31BEssays, Emerson.
32 The copy editor in charge of the book came to the chapter containing Bucky’s “tentative” cosmic inventory and then to the chapter on Einstein. As a result Bucky received a letter from Lippincott saying that it was well known that Einstein had said that there were only ten men in the world capable of understanding his ideas. The editors had looked at the list, and other lists of savants, and had failed to find Bucky’s name on any of them. Therefore, they felt they would be guilty of “charlatanry” if they published his book, and were very sorry they must decline to go ahead with it.
33 This was a devastating blow to Bucky. Like all new authors, he had fantastically high hopes for this book into which he had poured so much thought and, yes, emotion. In his fervid imagination he had pictured it sweeping the world with a new revelation of truth. Now to be accused of charlatanry was like lye on his brain.
34 In desperation he sat down and wrote to Lippincott saying, “almost facetiously,” that Doctor Einstein was now living in Princeton and why did they not send the typescript to him? Bucky says, “Really, I did not think any more about it.”
35 One day months later, when Bucky was working at home, he received a telephone call from Doctor Morris Fishbein, who said, “Doctor Einstein is coming in from Princeton to spend this weekend with me in New York. He has your typescript and would like to talk to you about it, if you are free to meet him here.”
36 Bucky says, “So you can imagine, I did not have any other engagement.”
37 That evening Bucky went to Doctor Fishbein’s residence on Riverside Drive. It was one of those old-fashioned apartment houses with an ornate marble-floored lobby and a creaking elevator that carried him to the proper floor. There he was shown into a long drawing room with a high ceiling and tall windows overlooking the river. Doctor Einstein, looking smaller than life like a very wise gnome, was sitting at one end of the room surrounded by people standing around him against the walls and even extending out into the hall. As Bucky was taken through the crowd and introduced to the great scientist, he says, “I felt as I had never felt of anyone before; there seemed to be almost an aura about this man.”
38 Einstein rose immediately saying, “We must talk together,” and led Bucky to a smaller study. There was a table with the typescript of Nine Chains lying upon it underneath a lamp. Einstein sat down beside the table and Bucky sat on the opposite side. Einstein began the conversation by telling Bucky that he had read the book and approved of his analysis of how his philosophy affected his formulations, and that he was going to advise Lippincott to that effect.
39 Then Doctor Einstein said, and Bucky remembers every word exactly because this was one of those highly charged moments of life when the spoken word is deeply recorded on the memory cells by the powerful current of emotion: “Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive anything I have ever done as having the slightest practical application. [He was, of course, referring to Mrs. Murphy’s Horsepower.] I evolved all this in the hope that it might be of use to cosmogonists and to astrophysicists in gaining a better understanding of the universe, but you appear to have found practical applications for it.”
40 One can easily understand how powerfully these words affected Bucky. For he had been called a nut and a crackpot so often, had been treated with contemptuous amusement by serious scientists and philosophers and engineers, and called a charlatan by his own publisher. And, now, the greatest scientist in all the world not only acknowledged the accuracy of Bucky’s exposition of his recondite theories and philosophical principles, but actually declared that he had contributed a new understanding of the practical possibilities of Einstein’s discoveries to the great man himself. It was the ultimate accolade.
41 Years later, when the secrets of the Manhattan Project were revealed in that apocalyptic flash of light over Hiroshima, Bucky thought of that good and gentle man with whom he had talked in a quiet room over Riverside Drive; thought of the innocence of that extraordinary intellect which had unlocked the secret of the atom, yet had not conceived its fearful uses. By then Bucky knew the story of Einstein’s going to President Roosevelt to warn him of the appalling potential which Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch had discovered by applying Einstein’s energy equation to producing theoretical fission. Bucky thought of the unprecedented secret research which Einstein’s talk with Roosevelt had set in motion, resulting in that first practical application of Einstein’s principles to earthly affairs in the sky above a small, unsuspecting Japanese city.
42 “Because of our talk that evening,” Bucky said, “I had this extraordinary insight into the agony this beautiful man must have suffered, knowing he had brought this thing about; and now, for all the rest of his days, he was in terrific pain because of his responsibility as a scientist.”
43 Having clarified Einstein, at least for an informed readership, Nine Chains touched, though only briefly, on Bucky’s theory of energetic-synergetic geometry and then proceeded with an outline of the whole history of the human race, and how it came under the dominance of its rulers—the priests and the Great Pirates. Using man’s basic motivations of longing and fear, the priests, understanding a little more about general principles than their disciples, used this knowledge to exploit the fears of the masses through the application of those principles to primitive magic, while manipulating them through their longing for a better world by promising them heaven. Meanwhile, the Great Pirates, through their command of the sea, operated outside man-made laws, which did not extend much beyond the beaches, thus becoming outlaws and gaining dominance by their control of world trade.
44 Bucky describes the gradual enlightenment of the masses, while at the same time their rulers managed to retain their autocracy by keeping always one jump ahead of them so that the improvement in living conditions, brought about by man’s increasing advantages gained by ever more sophisticated tools produced by industrialization, accrued mainly to them. The whole system was, according to him, based on the assumption of scarcity, of there never being enough to go around.
45 The tremendous advances of science and its application of industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, Bucky passionately believes, rendered this fear of scarcity irrelevant for the simple reason that, if properly managed and utilized, present industrial and agricultural techniques could easily provide not only enough of everything for every living inhabitant of the earth, but ample means for a much larger population. This is only obstructed by outworn traditions, fear of change, and lack of imagination or the will of mankind to succeed as Universe clearly intends them to do.
46 Bucky considers that these obstructions are placed in the way of progress by the economic system built upon the ownership of land and the “false” accounting methods foisted on the masses by the masters of capital. In order to acquire land, the basic essential of existence in an agricultural economy, people had to give collateral to the warrior chiefs who had seized it by force. In primitive societies this collateral was in the form of cattle which, since they multiplied naturally, produced “dividends” for the lenders. This, at least, made some sense. Later, when the borrowing took the form of money or capital, the lenders demanded and received interest. To Bucky’s mind this was both false and immoral because money does not regenerate itself by natural increases. He hates the interest system with the fanatic intensity with which the twelfthcentury Roman Catholic Church regarded usury, as it was then called.
47 By this means the former rulers, the priests and the Great Pirates, metamorphosed into capitalists while still controlling the productive capacity of the world through a hydra-headed monster which Bucky calls “Fincap” (finance capital).
48 Though Bucky’s recording of history is, in the words of one of his greatest admirers, “wildly erratic” in regard to particulars, the general principles he derives from his study of it have a certain validity from which viable conclusions and new directions for the course of mankind can be charted.
49 These are but a few of the ideas distilled from Bucky’s brain into the pages of Nine Chains, and its present recognition as a classic derives from the fact that Bucky had succeeded in completely clearing his mind of the barnacle growth of generally accepted “facts” that were factitious. After his deliberate “unlearning,” he viewed the universe with the clear eyes of a highly intelligent child whose vision was not distorted by preconceived prejudices. What he saw was, indeed, remarkable.
50 With Einstein’s letter in their hands Lippincott went ahead with Nine Chains, which was published in 1938. It did not then make the big combustion that Bucky had envisioned in his euphoric moments. In fact, it fell into the literary pool with the impact of a withered leaf. Newsweek gave it a fine review: “A three-ring circus—high wire acts, blaring bands, clowning and all—with one man as the whole show…This book is at once a guide book and a dream book of the future, a purge of the past, a debunker of architecture, economics, politics…this ruddy-faced, gray-haired inventor is no nut. Great stuff!”
51 The other reviews ranged from feeble to derisive. Nobody much bought it. For Bucky was, as usual, too far out. But people were beginning to catch up with his ideas. Nine Chains would become a classic, as Bucky became a w'orld pundit.