20 World Game
1It was in the winter of 1969 that Bucky bought the beautiful yacht Intuition. He had driven from my house in Sarasota to the Morgan Shipyard in St. Petersburg and had seen her and loved her, and bought her, just like that, in an afternoon. She is a seventeen-ton, Morgan-built sloop, twenty-nine feet on the waterline, forty-four feet overall. Her lovely lines make her very fast. However, she is no racing machine, but a comfortable cruising yacht—skillfully crafted of the finest materials, with a roomy, well-furnished cabin and a convenient galley and head—capable of sleeping six in a pinch. Bucky had her fitted out with a superb suit of sails, and all the latest navigational gadgets including a ship-to-shore telephone that when she is there at long last links Bear Island to civilization, though it is used only in emergencies. He loves her like a cherished woman.
2 She was shipped by rail from Florida to Camden, Maine, where she was to be launched that summer of 1969. The night before, Bucky was inspired to write a poem about her—he could not name a boat in less than five thousand words. He sat through the night putting down the ideas that the word intuition quickened in him. Later he worked very hard revising it and amplifying it, and it was published as the title poem of his book, Intuition. The last few lines are, perhaps, the most extraordinary tribute to a sailing ship ever written.
34Again and again,
5Step by step
6Intuition opens the doors
7That lead to man’s designing…
8And because its design
9Permits humanity to live anywhere
10Around our planet’s watery mantle And because this sailing craft
11We are now to launch
12Is the epitome of design competence—As manifest at this moment
13In the forever mounting and cresting wave
14Of design capability—
15We herewith give
16To this world-around dwellable
17High-seas sailing craft
18The name—intuition.
19Intuition was to be launched by a heavy-duty crane to lift her off the big flatbed truck on which she had been transported to the shipyard. The little group of Bucky’s closest kin and friends stood on the pier while Bucky recited those last moving lines; and his niece Sally Abbott, who had come over from Andover, Massachusetts, to perform the champagne-bottle-breaking ceremony, waited tensely.
20 Ironically, Murphy’s law governing mechanical industrial tools—which Bucky refuses to recognize, holding that anything that can go wrong will go wrong—held good. The winch of that beautifully engineered, heavy-duty crane stuck. Intuition hung there a few feet above the planet’s watery mantle until the following day.
21 Also in 1969, Bucky was invited to give the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi. It was very difficult for him, not because he had no confidence in his ability to do so, but because the directors of the Memorial Fund insisted in knowing beforehand what he was going to say, so it had to be written down. It was the only one of Bucky’s major addresses that he read. He solved the problem to some extent by thinking out loud into a tape recorder and having it transcribed. Then, of course, he went over the text and, as he always does with things he writes, made hundreds of corrections and additions in his spider-web handwriting, snaking in and out of the lines, running up the sides of the pages, doubling back to the bottom and flowing over onto the back of the page; and he included many algebraic formulae—a proofreader’s nightmare.
22 The result, though not as spontaneous as his less formal style and more convoluted, was a remarkable and extremely condensed summary of his mathematical discoveries and philosophical thinking. Indira Gandhi, herself, made the introductory speech.
23 Through her, Bucky met and deeply impressed Karan Singh, Minister for Civil Aviation and Tourism in the Indian government. Karan was the former Maharaja of Kashmir, and was one of the first two maharajas to renounce their princely rank and become plain citizens of India. He and his beautiful wife became devoted friends of Bucky. Bucky once asked Karan how they happened to get married. Karan said, “You won’t believe it, but it was a completely arranged marriage.”
24 Bucky explains, “She was a princess of Nepal and he was then the Maharaja of Kashmir, the two extreme limits of the Himalayas, and their marriage was a dynastic matter. But it turned out to be very fortunate because they are both truly beautiful people and get on very well. Of course, they both became commoners.”
25 Karan Singh asked Bucky to design three new airports for the Indian government, at New Delhi, Bombay, and Madras. It was a challenge Bucky could not refuse, though it meant spending a month in India twice a year.
26 Bucky and Shoji Sadao have gone to India six times in the last three years. Of all the things Bucky has done—including his rapid passage from time zone to time zone (he carries three watches, one set at the time in the place he is, one at the time in the place he will be next, and one at Philadelphia time), the Indian trips were the most wearing. In summer it is often above 100ř, and though most of the modem buildings are air-conditioned, whenever he went outside he was exposed to the infernal, humid heat. Bucky says, “I don’t seem to mind the heat when I am there, but I find that it does play tricks on my insides.” Which is his understated way of saying that it drains him physically.
27 In addition, there were enormous frustrations. At innumerable long meetings no one could make up their minds, and objections were raised to many of Bucky’s brilliant intuitive solutions of the problems they encountered. In such group discussions his hearing aid howls and screeches at the multiple voices and he misses half of what is said. Though he dearly loves and admires his Indian friends, they are a difficult people to pin down. With their Asian politeness they at first agree to every proposal; and the next day they have second thoughts, then third thoughts, fourth thoughts, and tenth thoughts.
28 Despite the hard going, the final schematic plans were finished and accepted by the Indian government in the spring of 1973. But Bucky expects to have to return to India to advise on the actual building.
29 In compensation for his work, Bucky asked only that he be paid enough to cover his overhead for his research projects in the United States—that is, his total capability to earn money prorated for thirty-day periods. By the spring of 1973, he had received nothing beyond his expenses. For the Finance Ministry suddenly announced that they were going to tax his Indian earnings 60% as excess profits. “There was no profit, as such,” says Bucky, “only enough to carry my research overhead. And the contract expressly stated that I was to be paid in dollars. To cut it down by 60% on a technicality would mean a serious loss to my research projects.
30 “Finally, things got so bad that I went to Indira and Karan; and they immediately went after the Finance Ministry who have agreed to behave fairly well. But they have paid me nothing so far.”
31 Bucky has organized two main institutions for implementing his grand strategy. The first he calls “The World Game”; the second is the Design Science Institute. The World Game is based on the techniques of the war games with their anticipatory forecasts carried out by the general staffs of the leading military powers of the world so as to be able to get there first with the most firepower. But in the World Game nobody loses, and all humanity wins. Its object is to make an inventory of the entire earth’s physical and metaphysical resources and the needs of all its peoples; and then, with the aid of computers, to devise strategies to meet those needs abundantly.
32 The game was first played by Bucky and twenty-six students early in 1969 at the New York Studio School in a very amateurish way without computers. Bucky then set it up in his workshop in a two-story brick building at Southern Illinois University, where he began to compile the World Resources Inventory. As always, Bucky’s planning considerably exceeded his financial resources. It included a world airocean map the size of a football field, which would be wired to serve as a giant visual display to show data concerning the world’s raw and industrial resources, world conditions and events, together with world-trending and peoples’ migrations and necessities.
33 Connected with it would be a $16,000,000 complex of high-velocity digital computers to evaluate the findings and strategies and display them on the map so that viewers from the balconies around the great dome building in which it would be housed could have a bird’s-eye view of the exact condition of the planet at any given moment. This set-up was to serve as the central brain into which World Game extension groups throughout the earth would feed their information and ideas.
34 Bucky reckoned the total cost of the installation at $30,000,000. The fact that this amount of money was nowhere in sight did not dampen his ardor or give him a moment’s pause. He believed that when its value became apparent to people everywhere the money would be made available. Meanwhile, he began on a more modest but still costly scale financed mainly by his own earnings.
35 As first organized Bucky had a staff of twenty, whose salaries he paid himself with help from SIU, assisted by numerous students at SIU and other universities throughout the United States and all around the world. The first World Game seminar was conducted by Bucky and Edwin Schlossberg, a young Ph.D. candidate at Southern Illinois, from June 12 to July 31, 1969. They worked toward developing research and design teams of students to deal effectively with the data and concepts necessary to the success of the great enterprise. Schlossberg said enthusiastically, “We were working at the frontier and each student was working at his frontier.” 1
36 Scenario Energy
37 Using Bucky’s system of “energy slaves” (the amount of energy in kilowatt hours one man could generate in one year) they discovered that the “bare maximum” needs of the world in the year 2000 amounted to 1,242 energy slaves per capita per year or 15,000 kwh and 800 metric tons of coal or its equivalent (present U.S. need: 7,000 kwh per person). Once they knew what mankind would need they began to consider ways to provide it.
38 For this purpose they made huge charts of all possible sources of energy, including atomic reactors and undeveloped hydroelectric sources in Africa and South America. They combined these with the development of wind, tidal, and solar energy and the possibility of doing more with less, and came up with the temporary solution of a world-around electric power grid which would enable electric power to flow around the world following the peak power load of each continent, thus utilizing the 50% of production capacity that now stands idle half the time.
39 Bucky found that the most promising new source of energy was wind power. He says: “The National Science Foundation has already made the pronouncement that wind power is our greatest resource for power—wind power is sun power, you know. It is going to take the place of fossil fuels and is quite adequate to meet all the needs of humanity. We will use power generated by windmills with the fuel cells that have come out of the NASA space program. These have 85% efficiency, compared to an internal combustion engine which has less than 25% efficiency. The windmills will generate electricity which will be used to separate hydrogen from water electrolytically and the hydrogen will be used to drive all our cars with no pollution at all. Meanwhile, the NASA-type fuel cells, also using hydrogen, will release all the electrical energy we need.”
40 Bucky promptly began inventing more efficient windmills. As he points out, the use of windmills was discontinued just about the time when the aeronautical arts began to explore the principles of aerodynamics. Using this now advanced technology, he has been able to design far more efficient methods of utilizing wind power. Working with Hans Meyer, one of the world’s great aeronautical engineers, Bucky built several test models on Little Sprucehead Island, including the Venturi model which is cowled like an airplane engine. Hans Meyer says, “To date [1972] we have developed a low-cost, highly efficient blade system and power transmission, and are now beginning work on hydrogen generation and compressed air storage.” 2
41 The Science Center in Philadelphia is presently backing the production of the first complete circuit of this kind. Bucky’s students there are working on it under his direction and that of other scientists. At any moment now the citizens of Philadelphia will see a huge new Fuller windmill arise like a futuristic version of the trademark of the Netherlands on top of the new Electrical Building of University City Science Center.
42 Many other World Game “scenarios” have been developed throughout the years, involving enormous amounts of research, in agriculture, housing, transportation, clothing, and communications. (Incidentally, Bucky calls the press “our most polluted resource.”) Though Bucky has never gotten his own personal $16,000,000 computer, he has spent a great deal of his own money buying computer time; and many sensible solutions have come out of the World Game, though no one has as yet been sensible enough to try them. However, an enormous amount of information on world resources and their improved use through ephemeralization has been stored in the World Resources Inventory ready for the world when it is ready to utilize it.3
43 Bucky says: “We are moving from the Industrial Age into the Age of Cybernetics. This is the most difficult transition in history because it has to be accomplished consciously, whereas the other transformations through which mankind has passed have been accomplished inadvertently.”
44 Just as the World Game was beginning to accomplish great things, Bucky’s situation at Southern Illinois became extremely difficult. The wave of student riots, which had originated in Berkeley in 1965–66, finally reached Carbondale in 1970, forcing the resignation of Bucky’s dear friend and sponsor there, President Delyte Morris.
45 Bucky attributes this cycle of violence, which exploded like a string of firecrackers on campuses throughout the country, less to the hot war in Vietnam than to the cold war among the superpowers. He says, “With NATO, Russia, the United States, and China spending two hundred billion a year getting ready for Armageddon, we find very large funds—quite a few billions—assigned to making it impossible for the opposing economy to maintain any war production capability. And with the highly scientific technology involved, you cannot possibly have war production if you don’t have universities. So huge sums of money were applied by both sides to try to destroy one another’s universities, to destroy the students’ confidence in the systems of education.
46 “They found that the university presidents were the most vulnerable of all the targets, because the president is just a money-raising man today, and he doesn’t belong to the faculty and he does not belong to the students. They literally shot down a great many of the university presidents. I would not blame either side alone. The CIA was doing it in Russia, and they were doing it here. The Russians themselves pointed out to me that they had a much greater advantage because our free press, which they didn’t have, was used to build up enormous momentum.
47 “President Morris was a victim of this situation. He tried very hard to satisfy the demands of the students at SIU, but they did not want to be satisfied; they just simply wanted him out. They made things more and more impossible for him. They vandalized his house and worked up scandals, and finally got him pushed out.”
48 When President Morris left, the whole ambience of SIU changed very rapidly. This was in part due to the financial crunch in which SIU, like all other great universities, found itself. During the fifties and sixties state legislatures and the federal government had been exceedingly generous with funds for institutions of higher education because the electorate equated education with success for their children. The ugly riots, the burning and vandalizing of university buildings, the threats to the very stability of the American system of government from the revolutionary attitude of the campuses, disillusioned the voters. They became less than enthusiastic about supporting a system which seemed to be turning their children, not into successful citizens, but into radical monsters out to destroy the values they still held dear. Responding to this 180ř change in the wind of popular opinion, the legislatures tightened their purse strings as inflationary pressures sent educational costs soaring.
49 For example, the Illinois Legislature had voted $3,000,000 to finance Ducky’s research, provided it was matched by another $9,000,000. This offer was quickly withdrawn. Worse still, the hundreds of tenured professors whom President Morris had brought in became fearful for their salaries; for even though they had tenure, that was only a kind of contract with the university which could do nothing unless the legislature provided funds. Like other faculties everywhere they became panicky, looking out only for themselves.
50 So Bucky found that instead of being considered an asset, he had become a liability in the eyes of those newcomers to the faculty. He sensed that they were organizing to ease him out, and themselves take over the momentum of his World Game and the Design Department he had developed for SIU without the expense of the large budgetary support he was getting. There was even a move on foot to take away the building provided for him by contract with the university. By thus cutting expenses, they hoped to ensure their own salaries. Bucky says, “I found it a very unfriendly situation.”
51 This was something he could not bear, for despite his worldwide acclaim he still needed above all to be wanted. He says: “I found the community liking me very well—loving me. The old-timers could not have been more supporting, but I found it very unfortunate that I would suddenly be in university politics, which I have always avoided altogether.”
52 In this stressful situation, Bucky thought of his friend John Rendel-man, who had been the vice-president and the lawyer for SIU who had made the actual contractual arrangements with him. Rendelman had become president of the new SIU campus at Edwardsville, Illinois, near St. Louis. Bucky talked to him and conferred with the Board of Trustees of SIU. They all agreed that it would be appropriate for him to move his headquarters to the Edwardsville campus. Then, just as he was rather unhappily moving, a brilliant new prospect opened before him.
53 Martin Meyerson, president of the University of Pennsylvania, is a remarkable educator who has worked his way upward through the ranks of educational administrators over a period of some thirty years. Because of his wisdom and genuine empathy with the students he is one of the few academics who came through the bitter years of violence with an enhanced reputation. Originally from the Harvard School of Architecture and Planning, Meyerson went on to become the head of planning for the city of Chicago. Bucky met him there in 1948 when he went to teach at the Chicago Institute of Design. There was an immediate mental accord between them, and Meyerson asked Bucky to speak to his planners on several occasions.
54 Thereafter, they went their different ways, Bucky to MIT and on around and around our planetary spaceship; Meyerson eventually became dean of the School of Environmental Design at the Berkeley Campus at the University of California and then, because of his empathy with the students, chancellor of that riot-rocked institution. Throughout it all, he and Bucky continued their friendship, which was warmly renewed on the Doxiadis cruises—Meyerson went on eight of those scientific safaris, Bucky on all ten. Meanwhile, in 1971 Meyerson became president of the University of Pennsylvania, where, in Bucky’s words, “He is very greatly trusted and loved by the community and the students and the faculty and the trustees.”
55 And Bucky added: “I found Martin a phenomenal man—I could understand how he could get on with the students. When Martin is sitting in the chair at any kind of meeting I have never known such comprehension of what is really going on; such a sympathetic attitude, but also an economy in getting people to the point without hurting them or offending them. He can really run meetings so they come out in logical ways and truly represent the consensus.”
56 Meyerson had long wanted Bucky to be associated with a university he headed, and when rumors of the dissension in Carbondale reached him, he saw his chance. In this endeavor he was strongly seconded by President Harris Wolford of Bryn Mawr, who for several years had been urging Bucky to become associated with that college.
57 Their first attempt was abortive. When asked how much money he needed to conduct his World Game and other research projects, Bucky, with magnificent disregard of the financial facts of life replied casually, “Oh, three or four hundred thousand a year.”
58 In some distress, Pennsylvania’s representatives went to see Sonny Applewhite, who had retired as chief of personnel of the CIA to devote his life to organizing and editing Bucky’s masterwork and mathematical testament, Synergetic Geometry. “It is something I have to do for Bucky,” he says.3Synergetic Geometry, as is usual with Bucky’s projects, is calculated to revolutionize mathematics and it took five thousand words just to summarize it.
59 Meyerson’s representatives said to Applewhite: “We need Bucky, and we believe he needs us. But in these times we cannot finance such astronomical sums. Can you persuade him to be more reasonable or think of some way this thing can be arranged.”
60 Applewhite was sympathetic and helpful. “One thing you could do is to find him a very nice place to live. He and Anne need a proper home and that might be an inducement.” 4
61 Eventually, the matter was worked out to the complete satisfaction of all concerned. Meyerson and Wolford, with some suggestions of support from the Rockefeller Foundation—which incidentally never materialized—developed a consortium which included Swarthmore and Haverford. Bucky had lectured at Haverford several times with Chris 3 Applewhite to the author.
62 * Ibid.
63 Morley, whose father had at one time been its president. The first time Bucky presented the airocean map was at Haverford in the late thirties, and he also unveiled some of his new mathematical concepts there.
64 These four institutions became his sponsors. They were members of University City Science Center, being built as part of the redevelopment of what Bucky calls “a junky part of the city” in the thirties blocks along Market Street, by a consortium of twenty-six universities and colleges from an area extending as far south as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. One of the new buildings, almost a block long, houses the great computers to service the twenty-six members of the consortium.
65 The four sponsors joined in arranging for Bucky to come to Science Center as what they appropriately call World Fellow in Residence. Science Center became his “immediate host,” with offices in one of the new buildings. They also agreed to undertake the not inconsiderable business of moving tons of his research material, including the World Resources Inventory and the Chronofile, from Carbondale. They also agreed that he should have access to those marvelous computers for the World Game. Those were the splendid auspices under which Bucky made what he expects will be his final move.
66 It proved to be an exhilarating change of venue. In contrast to the unhappy situation that had developed in Carbondale, he found himself greeted by the universities, the City of Philadelphia, and the State of Pennsylvania in “the most extraordinary way.” The university presidents not only arranged for him to lecture at all their campuses, but honored him with large banquets and small intimate dinners at which they made sure he would meet all their trustees and the ranking members of their faculties, as well as the community leaders of Philadelphia. Bucky’s immense popularity with the student bodies, and the faculties as well, was extremely gratifying both to him and to those who had arranged to bring him there.
67 In April 1973, at a function in City Hall attended by two hundred leading citizens, Mayor Frank L. Rizzo made Bucky an honorary citizen of Philadelphia, an honor never before accorded to anyone except foreign heads of state. As the mayor presented Bucky with what looked like a slim gold cigarette case containing the beautifully designed insignia of his citizenship, he said with a grin, “If you get into trouble with my police just flash this on them and they will go away.”
68 Bucky says, “Of course, I would never use it for that; but I must admit that in the old days I often used my badge as an honorary captain of the Aviation Division of the New York City police to get out of trouble.”
69 Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania also recognized Bucky’s arrival in his state by sending the chief of the state troopers to escort him to Harrisburg for a luncheon at which he asked Bucky to become a member of the State Art Commission.
70 At the suggestion of Harris Wolford of Bryn Mawr, Bucky was asked to take part in planning Philadelphia’s role in the celebration of the Bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Bucky says: “It is of great importance in Philadelphia because, of course, this is where it was done. The people here are completely committed to the idea of saying something to the world; they would like what they do to be metaphysical instead of physical, an expression of the same kind of thinking that had gone on before.
71 “Quite a long time ago, I had proposed to them that a Declaration of Interdependence would be the only thing that the world would be impressed with today.
72 “An interesting development was that M. Carey Thomas, the first woman president of Bryn Mawr, in her latest years when the League of Nations was being formed, had written a Declaration of Interdependence of the World. President Wolford brought it out, and the committee asked me to lead them in the writing of the new Declaration of Interdependence.”
73 Perhaps the most exuberant welcome Bucky received was a front page story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 1, 1972; it really went overboard in an amusing way. The headline was:
74“man of tomorrow is ours today”: “Buckminster Fuller a Modem Day Ben Franklin”
75 “He has been called a visionary, a prophet, a genius and …a crackpot…He is a scientist, humanist, inventor, poet and engineer.
76 “And now, Philadelphia—ready or not—he’s here…”
77 “Luring the 77-year-old Fuller away from Southern Illinois University is regarded in academic circles as a coup roughly of the same magnitude as the Philadelphia Eagles acquiring last year’s entire Pro Bowl team for a couple of seventh-round draft choices…Possibly a slight exaggeration!