THE FUTURE OF transportation did not proceed according to plan. Touted as the greatest advance since the horse and buggy when it rolled out of the factory in 1933, the first car that Buckminster Fuller built burned up in a fire a decade later. A second one was shredded for scrap metal during the Korean War. As for the third of Fuller’s three prototype Dymaxion vehicles, there were rumors that a Wichita Cadillac dealer acquired it in the 1950s and warehoused it as an investment. The rumors were wrong. In 1968, some Arizona State University engineering students found it parked on a local farm. Repurposed as a makeshift poultry coop, the last vestige of Fuller’s futuristic transport was slowly succumbing to the corrosive effects of rain and chicken poop.
The farm belonged to a man named Theodore Mezes, who had bought the three-wheeled car for a dollar some decades earlier. The students gave him $3,000 and hauled it home, but they couldn’t make it run. So they resold it to Bill Harrah, a casino mogul with a museum full of Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows. He had the aluminum shell refurbished and the windows painted over so that people couldn’t see the ruined interior. In Harrah’s collection—later rechristened the National Automobile Museum—the Dymaxion car cruised into automotive history.
And there it might have remained indefinitely, a restored icon of Fuller’s stillborn vision, if a former colleague hadn’t decided to conceive a new one. The colleague was Sir Norman Foster, architect of Wembley Stadium and the Beijing Airport. As a young man, Foster had collaborated with Fuller on some of Fuller’s final architectural projects—mostly unrealized—and Foster wasn’t shy about using Fuller’s name to add intellectual heft to his subsequent commercial success.
Money was no issue. Foster hired the British racing car restorers Crosthwaite & Gardiner, and had the original Dymaxion shipped on special loan to East Sussex from Reno, Nevada. Construction took two years, more than twice the time that Fuller required to build the original. The back axle and V-8 engine were stripped from a Ford Tudor sedan, the same source that Fuller had used. These were flipped upside down on the chassis so that the back wheels powered the car from the front end. A third wheel—controlled by steel cables stretching from the steering wheel to a pivot at the back of the automobile—acted as a sort of rudder. Atop the chassis, a zeppelin-shaped body of hand-beaten aluminum was wrapped around an ash-wood frame. To this aerodynamic shell, several attributes from the other two Dymaxion cars were added, most prominently a long stabilizing fin. Adapting the best qualities from Fuller’s three prototypes, Foster’s Dymaxion Car No. 4 was the idealized vehicle that Fuller never had the funding to build: the closest metal could get to the Dymaxion legend. Or was it?
Foster has never used the Dymaxion No. 4 as practical transportation (let alone at the 120 mile-per-hour speed that Fuller boasted his Dymaxion could handle). The truth is that Fuller’s streamlining is unwieldy in crosswinds, the rear-wheel steering is ropy even on a dry and windless day, and the system of rudder cables is sluggish and unstable. None of which would have surprised Fuller. He refused to let anyone pilot a Dymaxion without special lessons, and he injured his own family when a failed steering component caused his car to flip en route to a Harvard reunion. He may have privately been relieved when his company collapsed shortly after the third prototype was completed. “I never discussed it with daddy, but I think the accident turned him away from the car,” Fuller’s daughter Allegra told the design writer Jonathan Glancey in 2011. “I think he thought that if the car did this to his wife and child then maybe it wasn’t the thing to do.”
Foster had no such compunction. His modern Dymaxion faithfully recapitulated Fuller’s unresolved design flaws, an unabashed tribute to Bucky’s genius that perversely enshrined everything wrong with the original vehicles. As Foster confessed to the New York Times in a 2010 interview, the car is “so visually seductive that you want to own it, to have the voluptuous physicality of it in your garage.” In fact, the sheer stylishness of the thing was so mesmerizing that even Fuller himself lost sight of the ideas that made it truly revolutionary—far more than a futuristic mode of transport. Before the Dymaxion car became the Dymaxion car, it was a machine designed to mobilize society, rocketing people away from virtually every assumption about life in the twentieth century.
Mezes’s chickens had the right instinct. The iconic object must be destroyed for the Dymaxion vision to be restored.
IN 1932, BUCKMINSTER Fuller made a simple drawing comparing a standard car body to a horse and buggy. His picture showed that both vehicles had essentially the same geometry. The hood and passenger compartment of an automobile were two rectangles roughly proportional to a horse with a tall carriage in tow. The car’s grille and windshield were flatly vertical. Absolutely no consideration was given to airflow.
For the rest of his life, Fuller dwelled on this point, persistently bringing it up in public lectures and repeatedly impressing it on fawning biographers.1 Whereas boats and airplanes were streamlined, designed for maximum efficiency, Fuller insisted that the automobile was still saddled with an equestrian past that he singlehandedly sought to overcome with his Dymaxion.
He was deceiving himself. For as long as there have been automobiles, engineers have been obsessed with wind resistance, and have been determined to diminish it with streamlining.
Racers led the way. Fuller was just four years old when Camille Jenatzy’s 1899 Jamais Contente—essentially a four-wheel rocket with a man seated on top—became the first land vehicle to travel a mile per minute. Seven years later, Francis and Freelan Stanley more than doubled Jenatzy’s record with a steam-powered car that proved too aerodynamic: Hitting a bump, the dirigible-inspired auto took off and flew one hundred feet before crashing, vividly showing that the aerodynamics of flight and driving are not one and the same.
Though neither of these vehicles was practical for everyday transport, another racing car did become the prototype for most automobiles from the 1910s through the 1930s. Designed for one of the first long-distance speed contests, the 1909 Prince Henry Benz integrated the streamline form pioneered by Jenatzy into a four-seat touring car.2 The hood and passenger compartment formed a single continuous line, a major improvement on the modular construction that automakers inherited from the coach-building trade. Looking fast even while parked, the so-called torpedo tourer was immensely popular and widely copied. Only the Ford Model T retained the old angularity for the sake of economy. And as streamlining became the rage in everything from buildings to fountain pens, even Henry Ford conceded defeat. To recapture his declining market, he launched the streamlined Model A in 1928.
By then, the torpedo tourer was technologically passé. As early as 1920, the Hungarian-born Zeppelin designer Paul Jaray was testing ways in which to bring concepts learned from airship research to the road. Wind tunnel tests showed that the aerodynamic ideal for a dirigible was a teardrop shape that guided airflow around the hull with minimal turbulence. Jaray flattened the teardrop to direct air over the top, ensuring that the tires of his cars remained firmly on the road.
Resembling little zeppelins on wheels (with the curved glass passenger compartment on top, rather than below), Jaray’s prototypes achieved astonishing results. The standard measure of aerodynamic efficiency is known as coefficient of drag (abbreviated C d ), with lower numbers signifying sleeker shapes. A brick has a Cd of 2.1. A 1920 Model T has a Cd of 0.80. A 2006 Bugatti Veyron has a Cd of 0.36. Jaray achieved a Cd of 0.23. Over the next decade, companies including Audi and Mercedes commissioned prototypes. Requiring complex curves beyond the capacity of conventional manufacturing, none went into production until 1934, when a Czech company called Tatra introduced the luxurious T77. Advertising billed it as “the car of the future.” Several hundred were hand built, and that was the end of it.
The same year, Chrysler launched a car with a similar approach to aerodynamics, if not elegance. Touted as “the first real motor car since the invention of the automobile,” the Airflow was designed in a wind tunnel by chief engineer Carl Breer, who retained Orville Wright as a consultant. The model was singularly unpopular. Approximately 11,000 Airflows sold in the first year, and a total of 53,000 were manufactured before the car was discontinued in 1937. The Airflow was just too radical for mass-appeal: Accustomed to the long hoods of torpedo tourers (which parted air like the bow of a ship), most people found the Airflow’s rounded nose to be insufficiently streamlined in appearance. Breer countered that conventional cars of the period were actually most aerodynamic running in reverse, a claim supported by scientific research, but Chrysler’s competition had a more effective response: In 1936, Ford introduced the Lincoln Zephyr, which integrated a more limited set of aerodynamic principles into a car that appeared swift to drivers accustomed to roadable torpedoes.
Styled by the Dutch-American car designer John Tjaarda, the sleek Zephyr easily outpaced the stubby “Airflop.” Nearly 175,000 of them were built. Yet Tjaarda’s impact may actually have been far greater than that. A rounded rear-engine version shown at industry events in the early 1930s might have inspired Ferdinand Porsche’s aerodynamic 1932 Kleinauto—which became the best-selling car in history as the Volkswagen Beetle. Regardless of who influenced whom—and Porsche likely influenced Tjaarda in return—streamlining was well-traveled territory by the time Fuller introduced the Dymaxion in 1933.3 Practically nobody was designing cars like buggies.
His vehicle was impressively aerodynamic. With a Cd of 0.25, it was comparable to a twenty-first-century Toyota Prius, far superior to the Airflow (Cd 0.50), the Beetle (Cd 0.49), the Zephyr (Cd 0.45)4, and even the T77 (Cd 0.38, later reduced to 0.33). However, Fuller was far from unique in his quest for aerodynamic perfection, and his approach was far from realistic. Compared to the Dymaxion, the Airflow was practically as conservative—and the T77 was practically as manufacturable—as a Ford Model A. The only truly unconventional car to be mass-produced in the prewar period was the Volkswagen, and that came courtesy of Adolf Hitler’s central planning. Even if Detroit had decided to manufacture the Dymaxion, there is every reason to believe it would have failed in the marketplace,5 or would have been so thoroughly compromised that people would have been better off driving a Zephyr.
NO CAR ON the street is as aerodynamic as a boxfish in a coral reef. Ungainly in appearance, with a body that looks like a psychedelic minivan, the boxfish has a Cd of 0.06, just 0.02 greater than the drag coefficient of a perfect streamline.
Mercedes-Benz engineers knew none of this when they visited the ichthyology department of Stuttgart’s State Natural History Museum in 1996. They were seeking a natural model on which to base a new car design, and were keen to observe the sleek shapes of dolphins and sharks. Staff scientists suggested that they look at the boxfish instead. Though dolphins and sharks have less drag, their slender bodies are not exactly roomy, and the open sea bears little resemblance to a congested city. More appropriately proportioned for a passenger vehicle, the boxfish is also remarkably maneuverable, propelling itself through crowded corals with minimal effort: The creature can swim six body lengths per second, stabilized by vortices that allow it to turn with a slight twitch of the fin.
Over the following decade, Mercedes developed a concept car with the boxfish’s boxy contours. Most every alteration for the road added drag, evincing how spectacularly well the boxfish is adapted to its niche. Nevertheless, a four-passenger Mercedes prototype achieved a Cd of 0.19, and fuel efficiency of 70 miles per gallon, some of the best figures on record. Presenting the “Bionic Car” at the 2005 DaimlerChrysler Innovation Symposium, Mercedes head of research Thomas Weber dubbed it “a complete transfer from nature to technology.”
The process is commonly known as biomimesis or biomimicry, and it isn’t exclusive to boxfish or Mercedes. In recent years, the nose cones of Japanese bullet trains have been peaked like kingfisher beaks, and buildings in Zimbabwe have been ventilated like termite mounds. For Buckminster Fuller, the inventive genius of nature was self-evident, as was the applicability of natural solutions to man-made problems.6 His logo for the Dymaxion car was a flying fish—a chimera prominently displayed on his factory workers’ uniforms—because the vehicle design was partially inspired by both fish and birds. “I saw nature used an enormous amount of preferred direction streamlining,” he explained in his epic 1975 lecture, Everything I Know. Fish and birds were shaped for efficient movement, just as he sought in his Dymaxion vehicle. He also followed these creatures’ lead in his decision to turn his car with a single back wheel. “That’s the way nature does it,” he said. “She doesn’t have the fish with its tail out front trying to steer.”
In his observation of nature, and his adaptation of natural design, Fuller was an ancestor to Thomas Weber at Mercedes and the broader field of biomimesis. Yet, as in the realm of aerodynamics, he was really just part of a broader movement.7 In fact, the airships that so impressed Fuller and his fellow aerodynamicists were themselves naturally inspired: Early in the nineteenth century, the aeronautics pioneer George Cayley designed some of the first streamlined dirigibles based on the shapes of trout. Nature is “a better architect than man,” he wrote in a notebook entry dated June 20, 1809.
By the time Fuller dropped out of Harvard, the utility of natural forms was almost rote. As D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson summed up in his encyclopedic 1917 book On Growth and Form, “The naval architect learns a great part of his lesson from the streamlining of a fish; the yachtsman learns that his sails are nothing more than a great bird’s wings, causing the slender hull to fly along; and the mathematical study of the streamlines of a bird, and of the principles underlying the areas and curvatures of its wings and tail, has helped to lay the very foundation of the modern science of aeronautics.”
The Chrysler Airflow was conceived in this spirit. Carl Breer first came up with it in 1927, while driving from Detroit to his summer home on Lake Huron, when he mistook a formation of Army Air Corps planes for migrating geese. His error made him attentive to nature as a source of aerodynamic design, and that insight became central to the Airflow’s identity: “Old mother nature has always designed her creatures for the function they are to perform,” ran an ad in the February 1934 issue of Fortune. “She has streamlined her fastest fish … her swiftest birds … her fleetest animals to move on land. You have only to look at a dolphin, a gull, or a greyhound to appreciate the rightness of the tapering, flowing contour of the new Airflow Chrysler. By scientific experiment, Chrysler engineers have simply verified and adapted a natural fundamental law.” Fuller couldn’t have put it better with respect to his Dymaxion.
Yet no amount of hype would have compensated for the fact that biomimesis undercut the Dymaxion’s functionality on the road. Breer’s Airflow only notionally followed natural models. (The ad men seem to have taken greater inspiration than the engineers.) In contrast, Fuller was adamant that his car comply with the logo he had designed. He insisted on rudder steering against the better judgment of his chief engineer, the renowned yacht and plane designer Starling Burgess, and he tried to justify his decision by repeatedly showing off—fish and birds take note—how easy it was to park. Fuller failed to appreciate the vast differences between animals and cars. Most obviously, fish and birds travel through only one medium—water or air—whereas an automobile must simultaneously negotiate both air and land. A rudder is not designed for steering by traction. A fish tail isn’t a wheel.8
The grand challenge of biomimesis is to conceptually dissect a complex organism, severing useful traits from the living system in which they evolved, and transplanting them to a system that can be engineered. George Cayley did this brilliantly with the gliders he invented, the first to support heavier-than-air human flight. Before Cayley, people sought to fly by mimicking birds literally, flapping artificial wings that failed to keep them aloft. Discerning that birds simultaneously generate both lift and thrust with their complex wing movement, Cayley isolated the forces involved. Lift could be achieved by an artificial wing’s geometry—no need for motion—and thrust could be provided by a separate fan or propeller or jet engine. That was the scheme followed by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, and it still applies to modern F-16s, an extraordinary intellectual lifespan that testifies to the deftness with which Cayley extracted flight from its natural context.
Cayley’s success explains why Fuller’s flying fish floundered and failed. In a more subtle way, his process also helps to explain why the Bionic Car was never manufactured. The Mercedes engineers took relevant traits from a suitable creature, and appropriately morphed them into the body of an automobile. But like Fuller, they were too literal. They ignored crucial differences between the niche of a fish and that of an automobile. The automotive industry is built on yearly changes to car models. A naturally fit body would be an economic catastrophe because it would defy the consumerist logic of annual restyling. Until the whole fiscal ecology of cars is changed—eliminating the underlying causes of planned obsolescence—bionic vehicles will be little more than biomimetic mascots in environmentally friendly marketing campaigns.
There is one aspect of the Bionic Car that has been applied industrially: The chassis geometry was inspired by how bones grow. Bones balance the opposing qualities of lightness and rigidity by adding or subtracting tissue in response to strain, dynamically finding the minimal structure necessary for functional support. This process can be simulated in Soft Kill Option (SKO) software, which determines where struts can safely be taken away. The chassis weight may be reduced by as much as 30 percent.
After experimenting with SKO on the Bionic Car, Mercedes’s parent Daimler has used the software to optimize engine supports in buses, and the process has also been taken up by competitors, including General Motors. Unlike body design, the chassis is never seen by most consumers, so style plays no role. More important, SKO shares a common characteristic with Cayley’s gliders and most successful examples of biomimesis: They are thoroughly denatured, analytical, and reductionist.9
Such qualities have little in common with the organic, outdoorsy image of biomimicry as a wellspring of green technology. In the 2005 TED Talk that made biomimicry a corporate buzzword, self-appointed biomimicry guru Janine Benyus summed up the field with three questions: “How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? How does life make things disappear into systems?” The mission statement for her corporate consultancy, Biomimicry 3.8, is even more explicitly environmentalist, promising “to increase respect for the natural world and create well-adapted and life-friendly products and processes.” Noble as this goal may be, it’s somewhat naive. (Consider the environmental impact of airplanes, not only in terms of carbon emissions but also on the populations of birds that inspired plane flight in the first place.) Extracted from its natural context, even the most “natural” technology can wreak havoc on the habitat that nurtured it.
Yet biomimicry need not be rigidly reductionist. Like nature, biomimesis can also run wild. In Fuller’s development of the Dymaxion car, streamlining was just the skin, and the rudder was a vestigial tail. Buckminster Fuller’s original ambition was nothing less than to invent a new type of human ecosystem.
IT WAS NEVER meant to be a car. At various stages, Fuller called it a “4D transportation unit,” an “omnimedium plummeting device,” and a “zoomobile.” One of the earliest sketches, dating from 1927, described it as a “triangular framed auto-airplane with collapsible wings.” The wings were supposed to inflate like a “child’s balloon” as three “liquid air turbines” lifted the teardrop-shaped three-wheeler off the ground.
The notion of a hybrid vehicle was not completely implausible when Fuller began designing his Dymaxion. The aviator Glenn Curtiss exhibited a prototype Autoplane at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917, and the engineer René Tampier actually got his Avion-Automobile airborne at the 1921 Paris Air Salon. However, their technology was conventional: fixed wings powered by spinning propellers. Fuller’s vision called for jet engines to provide instantaneous lift, no runway required.10
As so often was the case for Fuller, the requisite materials didn’t yet exist. In the late 1920s there were no alloys strong enough to withstand the heat and compression of jet propulsion (let alone inflatable plastics sturdy enough to support a plane in flight). So Fuller opted to start by building “the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin orientable jet stilts flying device,” as he explained to Hugh Kenner decades later.11 Fuller also told Kenner that he “knew everyone would call it a car.” By the early 1930s, even Fuller himself was doing so, and after his three prototypes were built, he never seriously returned to the omnimedium zoomobile concept.
Yet the thinking behind his transportation unit was groundbreaking, even more pioneering than the jet stilts themselves. Fuller was conceiving an alternate way of living. To his biographer Athena Lord, he memorably compared that life to the freedom of a wild duck.
The zoomobile was a byproduct of Fuller’s earliest ideas about architecture, which were inspired by his time in the navy. The sailor “sees everything in motion,” he wrote in a 1944 article for American Neptune. “Sailors constantly exercise their inherent dynamic sensibilities.” For Fuller, this was the natural way of life, intruded upon by landlubbers with their manmade property laws and heavy brick buildings.
For a seaman, like a bird or fish, there was no earthly reason why a home ought to have a permanent fixed address. Fuller envisioned nothing less than an Air Ocean World Town, in which housing could be temporarily docked in any location, transported by Zeppelin. To achieve this, he needed the housing to be modular and self-sufficient,12 and he required a way for people to get around without roads. Zoomobiles promised complete air-ocean mobility for a global population unconstrained by cities and even national boundaries.
In other words, Fuller was trying to facilitate a self-organizing society, much as he had observed in natural environments. Naturally inspired, his global human ecosystem would allow people to live more harmoniously with nature. Yet his utopia was not a return to some imagined primeval idyll, for he never considered humans to be like other animals. Man is “adaptive in many if not any direction,” he wrote in his 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. “Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, and then takes them off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk upon land, for birds and fish are specialists.”
To foster a human ecosystem in which self-organization would come naturally for mankind, Fuller had to extend human capabilities beyond what was technically possible in the 1930s. He needed new materials and techniques to fully decouple us from our primate past.
We should be grateful that he didn’t pull it off. To set billions of people loose in private jets would be an ecological disaster. As Fuller later came to appreciate, there are environmental advantages to cities, where resources can easily be shared.
However, the practical flaws in Fuller’s plan are trivial compared to the conceptual promise. His world, like ours, was built on political and economic hierarchies with overarching control over resources. Through their tremendous leverage, those hierarchies have profoundly altered our environment, increasingly for the worse. Nature can inspire different social structures, self-organizing and universally local. If we want to make the most of Fuller’s ideas, we need to move beyond zoomobiles and aerodynamics. From flocks of wild ducks to boxfish in coral reefs, we can sample different relationships as the basis of different political and economic systems, no jet stilts required.
Even the simplest organisms can suggest alternatives to current power structures. For instance, slime molds can solve complex engineering problems without a central nervous system: Set a slime mold atop a map of the United States with dabs of food in place of cities and the organism will find an optimal way to spread itself from coast to coast, forming a feeding network closely resembling the layout of our interstate highways. Slime molds achieve this feat through distributed decision-making, in which each cell communicates only with those nearest. The creature uses a form of consensus different from anything ever attempted by a government.
Slime molds can provide a new model for democracy, a novel method of voting that could prevent political gridlock. Imagine an Electoral College system in which there were many tiers, such as states, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, households, and individuals. Individual votes would be tallied resulting in a household consensus, households would be tallied resulting in a block consensus, blocks would be tallied resulting in a neighborhood consensus, etcetera. (Like states in the present Electoral College, households, neighborhoods, and cities with larger populations would have more votes, but all votes for a household, neighborhood, or city would be cast as a unit.13) Equivalent to individual cells in a slime mold colony, people would interact most with those closest to them. Their interactions would be intimate and intense, driven by a palpable sense of mutual responsibility. Real discussion would replace mass-media rhetoric. National decisions would emerge through local confluences of interest. Political gridlock is caused by the buildup of factions and the breakdown of meaningful communication. Slime molds don’t have that problem. By emulating them—schematically, not biologically—we can be as fortunate.
Slime molds suggest just one opportunity. At the opposite extreme, the global cycling of chemicals such as methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide may provide models for more equitable distribution of wealth and a less volatile world economy.
Maintained by natural feedback loops involving all life on Earth, the methane, nitrogen, and carbon cycles optimize the use of global chemical resources. There is no waste; every substance is valuable in the right place. That’s because organisms have coevolved to exploit one another’s refuse. (The most familiar example is the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants and animals.) Humans can likewise cycle resources through reciprocal relationships. A minor example of this—already being tested in some cities—is the installation of industrial computer servers in people’s homes, where the machines can provide warmth while keeping cool. These so-called data furnaces simultaneously save the expense of heating for families and air conditioning for cloud service providers. A global online marketplace for needs could facilitate many more such exchanges, making waste into wherewithal, transforming want into wealth. The world economy is vulnerable because of vast and increasing income disparity, reinforced by constraints on exchange that must be channeled through banks, mediated by money. Resource cycling requires no such funnel, and inherently tends toward equilibrium. We might even expect to see the coevolution of supply and demand between communities, much as happens with communities of bacteria.
With the zoomobile, Fuller pioneered a form of biomimesis that is not reductionist but systemic. Once established, the system is feral, evolutionary, experimental. In contrast to Henry Ford’s cars or George Cayley’s flying machines, the results are unpredictable. Ultimately, it’s about setting up an environment for the organic development of a different kind of society.
Fuller the sailor was never fixed in his thinking. “I did not set out to design a house that hung from a pole, or to manufacture a new type of automobile,” he informed Robert Marks in The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. At his best, his mind was as free as a zoomobile. “I started with the Universe,” he said. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”
1. “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,” wrote Robert Marks in The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, a 1960 biography written with Fuller’s close collaboration. Nearly three decades later, in 1989, Fuller disciple Lloyd Steven Sieden went even further in Buckminster Fuller: An Appreciation, asserting that “automobiles were still regarded as horseless carriages [in the early 1930s], and they maintained the box-like shape of carriages well into the 1940s.”
2. In a 1970 paper for the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians, C. Edson Armi argues that the rules of the German-sponsored Prince Henry tour practically mandated that touring cars become aerodynamic. Previously, races were short, and touring competitions were strictly tests of endurance.
3. The debate over who influenced whom has been going on for practically as long as these cars have been on the road. “Well, sometimes I looked over his shoulder and sometimes he looked over mine,” Ferdinand Porsche said of Hans Ledwinka, the designer who transformed Jaray’s aerodynamic ideas into the Tatra. It could be the motto of the whole industry.
4. The Zephyr was aerodynamically superior to the Airflow despite all the styling compromises, and despite the fact that Tjaarda designed it using “guessamatics,” unaided by a wind tunnel. In the 1930s, the science of aerodynamics was still far from scientific.
5. The industry seems to have realized it, too. Licensing negotiations with General Motors, Ford, Pierce-Arrow, Curtis-Wright, and Cord all fell through.
6. His mechanical jellyfish was his first of many examples, inevitably all of his own creation.
7. Once again, his loyal biographers carried the party line. According to Sieden, “Through his extensive observation of Nature, Fuller came to appreciate the impeccable streamlining of birds and fish, as well as the design of those creatures which results in maximum efficiency and low resistance in motion. Because of that understanding, he was amazed to discover that designers of land vehicles had made little or no effort to adapt Nature’s unmistakably successful, aerodynamic designs.”
8. In any case, Fuller didn’t really have his biology right. For instance, most birds steer primarily with their wings.
9. The vast majority have been in software (e.g., artificial intelligence based on the brain’s neural networks) but there have also been applications in chemistry and physics. For instance, some portable color displays are iridescent like butterfly wings.
10. Fuller was biomimetically inspired by ducks. Rather than soaring like a hawk, the duck “propels the air out from under his wing,” Fuller explained in Everything I Know. “It’s a jet.”
11. Since this was a standard part of Fuller’s personal myth—as mentioned earlier—he had many ways of phrasing it. The account he gave Kenner is characteristic.
13. For city ordinances and officials, the highest-level tally would be neighborhoods. For federal matters—which might include legislation as well as presidential elections and the occasional Constitutional amendment—the ultimate tally would be of the fifty states.