0 Dymaxion Transport Units
1When, in 1927, Fuller had arrived at a working concept of his light-weight, wire wheel structured 4D houses and had discovered the feasibility of delivering them by air to remote places, where their semi-autonomous facilities made a high standard of living possible at negligible land occupancy cost, he turned to the problem of transportation. If a house is to be significantly autonomous, it must not be dependent on roads, railways, even airplane landing strips. A dwelling which could function with maximum effectiveness, wherever it was placed, required a family transport unit that would have the selective maneuverability of birds. It should be able to come in and go out by air, land and take off from a spot; in addition, it should be capable of taxiing on land or water.
2 Late in 1927 he turned his attention to this transport phase of his comprehensive plan. For a long time, in fact, since his Navy crash boat days, Fuller had been turning over in his mind the possibility of an omni-directional transport that could hover in the air, or could be directionally controlled by the jet blasts from gas turbines. The basic idea was locomotion on twin jet stilts, each directionally oriented and throttled as a discrete unit.
3 The airplane shares with the sea gull the ability to create a low pressure area above its wings. The dynamic effect of this partial vacuum is ‘‘lift’’; gulls and planes in flight are sucked skyward. The lift provides the primary support for gliding. Ducks, however, are anatomically unfitted for such aerial roller coasting; their wings are too small to generate a pressure difference sufficient to ‘‘suck-suspend’’ the duck body in mid-air, and to permit it to enjoy the gull’s kind of lazy free-wheeling in the updraft of an atmospheric thermal.
4 The duck, however, has proprietary rights to another aerodynamic facility: the jet. With each thrust of his wings, the duck generates a momentary vacuum sky-hook above each wing; simultaneously, under each wing, a powerful air jet is extruded between the wing and the body. These thrusts compound to form, in effect, continuous columns of air. Although the tiny sky-hooks above the wings provide an intermittent series of advantages—similar in function to a series of gymnasium rings—the duck’s main propulsion advantage comes from the thrust of the columns. These compressional jets function like a vaulter’s pole. The duck rises from the water by making a rapid forward dash with his webbed feet, then vaulting skyward on his own jet-stream stilts.
5 If, while a pole vaulter were at the peak of his jump, Fuller reasoned, we could hand him another pole, somewhat shorter, but whose base lay forward in the line of motion, the vaulter could continue his aerial jaunt. And if this procedure could be continued, each time with the pole somewhat shorter than the preceding, the vaulter could continue to plummet forward, downhill, exploiting gravity to accomplish a horizontal leap far in excess of any available to an ordinary broad jumper. Assume, now, that the man could be streamlined. If such a man took the proper headlong attitude, with respect to air resistance, the amount of up-push required to keep him plummeting forward should be no more than that supplied by his leg muscles to give him his initial altitude.
6 A duck in flight, like other short-wing, high-speed birds, can readily be seen to make its intermittent altitude gains and forward gains in the manner of this hypothetical pole vaulter. When coming in for a landing, the duck merely orients its twin ‘‘throttleable’’ air-jet stilts to a forward position, then allows their air cushion cones to ‘‘melt down’’ to a comfortable landing velocity. If the rate at which a duck’s successive uplift vaulting strokes is sufficiently accelerated, the ‘‘vaults’’ exceed visible pulsation frequency and appear as a continuous translation of vertical advantage to forwardly controlled flight. Similarly, the high velocity of molecular explosions appears superficially continuous in the jet.
7 With the aeronautics of the duck as a prototype principle, Fuller, in 1927, invented what he called his ‘‘4D twin, angularly-orientable, individually throttleable, jet-stilt, controlled-plummeting transport.’’ Explaining the invention at that time to his little daughter, Allegra, he described it as the ‘‘zoomobile’’ which could hop off the road at will, fly about, then, as deftly as a bird, settle back into a place in traffic.
8 In January, 1933, just before the launching of the New Deal, a friend of Fuller’s offered to put up money to enable Fuller to test out some of the 4D Dymaxion ideas.
9 ‘‘I will only take the money,’’ Fuller said, ‘‘under one condition: if I want to use all of it to buy ice cream cones, that will be that, and there will be no questions asked.’’
10 The money was given without restrictions.
11 Deflation, at the depth of the Depression, had reached a point where Bowery restaurants offered a meal for one cent. Fuller found himself, on bank moratorium day, with several thousand crisp greenbacks in his pocket. The relative buying power of this money, at a time when no one else could obtain cash, gave him momentarily the authority of a millionaire. Yet these few thousand dollars were totally inadequate, even under the existing panic sales conditions, to finance .the development of a true Dymaxion House prototype (which his recent estimate for young Dawes had shown to require a hundred million hard dollars). Nor could they be used to develop the jet-stilt 4D transport; alloys were not yet available that would withstand the intense heats of combustion generated by the firing of liquid oxygen—which Fuller then regarded as the most effective propulsion fuel.
12 Yet Fuller realized that in 1933 the inventory of available automotive, marine, and aircraft components made possible some significant preliminary investigations, particularly the practical testing of the ground taxiing capabilities of this unprecedented vehicle whose anatomy was to be like that of some mythological beast, reminiscent of bird, fish, and reptile. This polymorphous transport was certain to involve a cluster of unknown behaviors. The most hazardous of the events faced by both air and sea vehicles are those in which the vehicles make contact with land. While suspended in the fluid media, the stressing forces applied to these vessels are distributed, hydraulically and pneumatically, in an even manner. When the vessels are brought in contact with land, however, the forces often take the form of hard impacts, concentrated on one particular part of the over-all structure.
13 Many questions were posed. How would the vehicle behave when buffeted by heavy cross winds from directions other than that in which it was intended, and aeronautically designed, to go? When landing cross wind, would it ground loop to head into the wind, as do light planes? If so, what could be done about it? How would the car perform on clear ice? How would it behave when taxied over rough country fields?
14 Determined to find empirical answers to these questions, Fuller rented the Dynamometer Building of the then recently defunct Locomobile Company’s factory, in Bridgeport, Conn., a city where the Depression had left idle many skilled mechanics and engineers. He engaged a crew of 27 to work under the engineering direction of Starling Burgess, a world-famous naval architect and aeronautical engineer. A careful screening of more than 1,000 job applicants provided Fuller with a cosmopolitan team of exceptional workmen, including Polish sheet metal experts, Italian machine tool men, Scandinavian woodcraftsmen, and former Rolls-Royce coach-makers. He then set out to design and construct the first Dymaxion car.
15 Although this car, which was demonstrated to the public, July 12, 1933, was intended to be only a road test stage of the projected omni-directional transport, it exhibited a number of significant automotive design innovations—among them front-wheel drive; rear engine and rear steering operation; aluminum-bodied, chrome-molybdenum aircraft steel chassis; 1 ⁄ 8th-inch aircraft shatterproof glass. Mudguards were eliminated. The entire road occupation area was included in the usable interior space. The car featured air nostrils, air-conditioning, and rear view periscopes for both front and back seats. Among other things, it introduced to the automotive field the virtues of complete aeronautical streamlining of fuselage, including belly, within whose fish form all the running gear, with the exception of the lower half of the three wheels and the air scoop, were enclosed. Th two front, differential-coupled wheels were the car’s tractors. The rear wheel was the rudder. As with the pulled (rather than pushed) wheelbarrow, the ruddering tail wheel was lifted over, rather than shoved into the traveled terrain.
16 Fuller was aware that the body design of the 1932 automobile embodied only a negligible advance over that of the old horse-drawn buggies whose lumbering pace never made air resistance an attenuating factor. The air resistance of a vehicle increases at the rate of a second power progression. Speed increases as a first power progression. Thus, doubling speed increases air resistance four times. At speeds up to 30 miles per hour, aeronautical resistance is not an important consideration. At accelerations from zero to 30 miles per hour, tire distortion and mechanical friction are the only significant energy loads. At 60 miles per hour and beyond, however, the greater part of a vehicle’s power is devoted to the rugged tasks of shoving the air apart and wrestling with the vacuum drag in the vehicle’s wake.
17 By giving the Dymaxion car the type of streamlining today found in airplanes, Fuller was able to obtain a speed of 120 m.p.h., using for power an ordinary stock Ford V-8 engine. He thus obtained from a 90 h.p. engine the quality of performance which, in an ordinary 1933 sedan, it was estimated, would have required an engine of over 300 horsepower. In an all-in-motion universe, Fuller observed, all the interactive phenomena always move in the directions of least resistance. Man can by design decrease the resistances in preferred directions. The omni-medium transport must provide minimum resistance conformally, organically, and texturally, that is, minimum frontal cross-section, minimum drag, and minimum internal and external mechanical friction. A body penetrating a liquid, gaseous, or solid medium must open up the medium ahead of its penetration.
18 A penetrating body with rounded shoulders develops a rotation in the boundary layer molecules or atoms of the penetrated medium. These eddying rotations act like little spools winding up the penetrated medium in ever tighter bundles, which tense forwardly to supply their winding requirement, thus exhausting the penetrating medium ahead of the penetrating body. The blunt cigar nose in front of a teardrop silhouette creates a partial vacuum, conical in shape, that flares out in front of the teardrop when the vehicle is in fast motion. The consequence is a sucking forward of the vehicle. However, a long, cone-shaped partial vacuum is also created in the wake of the vehicle; and unless something is done to offset its effects, this cone will negate the pull forward. The model solution to rearward suction is seen in the structure of fish: the conic tail of the streamlined fish form is designed to conform exactly to the space created by the inherent lag in the rate of closure of the penetrated medium. The rate of closing depends on the relative viscosity and inertia of the penetrated medium.
19 The function of man-designed streamlining is to maximize nose pull and minimize tail drag. The tails of fishes slip, wiggle, and cancel out the drag in the fishes’ wake. With no rearward drag, and a vacuum on their nose, sometimes increased by head enlargement, fishes and birds make high capital of their nose pull. Skilled light airplane and glider pilots exploit the combined wing top and nose lift of their craft at efficient design speed, maximizing forward pull.
20 The greater the proportion of a vehicle’s weight above the springs to its weight below the springs, the less is the inertia of the sprung mass disturbed by the motions of the components below the springs. Railroad and automobile designers, in times prior to the Dymaxion, improved the riding quality of their cars by the easy but inefficient expedient of adding weight to the sprung part of the combination. Fuller’s approach was that of the builder of a light plane. He saw that riding comfort could be increased while the total sprung weight was decreased. The solution was to reduce the unsprung proportion to zero.
21 Fuller maximized the car’s springing in a sequence of steps. First, he softened the tires so that the air within the tires became the initial set of springs. He then introduced a series of secondary springs and frames.
22 The first frame, hinge-supported by the front wheels, carried the engine and drive shaft. Frame No. 2 was hinge-and-spring-connected to Frame No. 1, but was supported by the steerable tail wheel. The body, in turn, had its own independent frame which was sprung directly from the front axle, with a balancing spring connected back, abreast the engine, to Frame No. 1. The consequence of this multi-hinged, multi-spring arrangement was that the Dymaxion car could zoom across open fields with the agility of a light plane, yet provide a ride as smooth as any cruise on a highway. Over rough terrain the lower frames moved in hinged harmony, the body frame maintained independent inertial poise.
23 The steerable tail wheel gave the Dymaxion exceptional maneuverability. Although the 19V2 foot car was four feet longer than the 1933 Ford sedan, it could park in a curb area a foot shorter than the space required for the Ford sedan by heading directly into the curb, then tailing in side-wise. It could turn in its own length.
24 One day, when he had the car filled with New Yorker and Fortune editors (the car could carry ten persons in addition to the driver), Fuller made a sharp turn from 57th Street into Fifth Avenue.
25 A traffic officer signalled for him to stop. ‘‘What the hell is this?’’ the cop asked.
26 Fuller opened his window. Then, while patiently explaining to the cop what the Dymaxion was about, he slowly rotated the car in a complete circle around him. The astonished officer demanded a repeat performance.
27 This was noontime in New York in the era before stoplights; a policeman was on duty at each intersection. The cop at 56th Street witnessed the performance at 57th, and demanded a demonstration for his own pleasure. The 55th Street cop was not to be undone by his colleague a block above. Fuller was called on to perform by every cop on duty, from 57th Street to Washington Square. That day it required a full hour to nose this high speed transport a single midtown mile.
28 The Dymaxion was a traffic stopper in New York streets. Once, when parked outside the New York Stock Exchange, it blocked all traffic flow in the financial district, and Fuller was asked by the New York Police Department, as a special favor, not to drive the car below Canal Street.
29 The officials of the 1934 New York Automobile Show invited Fuller to exhibit the car at the show in Grand Central Palace. At the last minute the invitation was withdrawn, supposedly at the request of the Chrysler Corporation. Chrysler had bought the central command show space to dramatize the introduction of the Chrysler Air Flow car. And here was a maximum ‘‘air flow’’ car, to be exhibited by a non-manufacturer—and to be exhibited free.
30 General Ryan, then police chief of New York City, invited Fuller to park the Dymaxion in the street, directly in front of the entrance to Grand Central Palace. The day of the grand opening, Fuller drove up, parked, and again stopped traffic—and stole the show.
31 In the period between 1932 and 1934, Fuller produced three Dymaxion cars, all experimental models whose purpose was to test features related to an eventual omni-directional transport; in this sense they were all prototypes. The first car was sold to Captain ‘‘Al’’ (Alford F.) Williams, then holder of the world’s speed record for seaplanes and manager of the aviation department of the Gulf Refining Company. Williams called the car ‘‘aviation’s greatest contribution to the auto industry’’—and drove it across the country in a nationwide campaign to promote the sale of aircraft fuel.
32 A second car was built on order from a group of English automobile enthusiasts. They commissioned Col. William Francis Forbes-Sempill, an English aviation expert, to come to this country and test the performance of car No. 1. Col. Forbes-Sempill crossed the ocean on the Graf Zeppelin, which on this trip went on to Chicago, because of the Chicago World’s Fair. Capt. Williams sent the Dymaxion to Chicago from Pittsburgh, driven by a racing driver named Turner, to be placed at Forbes-Sempill’s disposal. And when Forbes-Sempill was ready to leave, arrangements were made to have him driven in the Dymaxion to the Chicago airport, from there to be flown to Akron, where the Graf Zeppelin had been moored, after touching down at Chicago. En route, the Dymaxion was rammed by another car. Both cars overturned, but the driver of the Dymaxion car was killed, and Forbes-Sempill severely injured—virtually at the entrance to the World’s Fair.
33 When reporters arrived on the scene, the other car, which belonged to a Chicago South Park Commissioner, had been removed. The newspapers featured only the news about the Dymaxion; the headlines were unfavorable without exception. One read: ‘‘Two Zep-Riders Killed as Freak Car Crashes’’; another: ‘‘Three-Wheeled Car Kills Driver.’’ The New York Times reported that, ‘‘the machine skidded, turned turtle and rolled over several times. Police say it apparently struck a ‘wave’ in the road.’’ No mention was made of the other car.
34 At the coroner’s inquest, postponed until 30 days later (because of Forbes-Sempill’s injuries), it was established that the accident was the result of a collision of two cars racing each other and weaving through traffic at 70 miles an hour. By the time this fact had become record, the smashup had lost its news value. Tire earlier reporting was never amended in the press.
35 Both Williams and Fuller, after carefully inspecting the Dymaxion’s functioning parts and reconstructing the sequence of events, were convinced that the Dymaxion car itself had no design or structural fault which had a bearing on the accident. The car was repaired, and Williams subsequently sold it to the director of the automotive division of the U. S. Bureau of Standards. Ten years later it was destroyed in a fire in the Bureau’s Washington garage.
36 Car No. 2 was completed in January, 1934. Because of the unfavorable publicity, however, it was no longer wanted by the English group. Some time later, when Fuller was entirely out of money, he sold it to a group of his Bridgeport mechanics. Car No. 3 was bought by Leopold Stokowski and his wife, Evangeline Johnson, and placed on exhibition in Chicago during the second year of the World’s Fair. It was eventually sold and resold many times, and for some years disappeared from the news. In 1946 the car turned up in Wichita, Kansas, when it was bought by the local Cadillac distributor. It is rumored to be still in existence, stored in a private garage in Wichita.
37 At the request of Henry Kaiser, in 1943, Fuller redesigned the Dymaxion, making use of the newer products of automotive technology. According to the design which was never built, the new version was powered by three separate air-cooled ‘‘outboard’’ type (opposed cylinder) engines, each coupled to its own wheel by a variable fluid drive. Each of the engine-drivewheel assemblies was detachable. In case of engine trouble, or when an overhaul was desired, the entire assembly was replaced by a spare. The engines themselves were run always at the optimum speed; the speed of the car was controlled by varying the quantity of fluid in the coupling.
38 This engine coupling provided maximum torque with minimum engine size. The engines were of low horsepower—15 to 25. And since only one engine was required to maintain cruising speed, once starting inertia was overcome, the car would average 40 to 50 miles per gallon of gas. When additional power was required for climbing hills or rapid acceleration, the second and third engines cut in automatically.
39 The projected Kaiser Dymaxion was designed to be steered at cruising speeds by the front wheels. The rear wheel steering, intended as an auxiliary to be used for acute turns, was brought into play by a crank handle set in the regular steering wheel. When all wheels were turned in the same direction, the car could move side-wise like a crab into its parking place. When the tail-wheel was turned in a direction opposite to that of the front wheels, the entire car could be rotated in its place like a Lazy Susan. Structured on an aluminum frame, the new Dymaxion’s weight was to be 620 pounds. Five passengers could sit abreast on the single front seat. The tail-wheel was mounted on an extensible boom. At high speed, the boom extended to give the car greater wheel base, and a smoother ride. When the car decelerated, the boom retracted automatically.