986.082 I was born cross-eyed on 12 July 1895. Not until I was four-and-a-half years old was it discovered that I was also abnormally farsighted. My vision was thereafter fully corrected with lenses. Until four-and-a-half I could see only large patterns__houses, trees, outlines of people__with blurred coloring. While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair until I was four.

Despite my newly gained ability__in 1899__to apprehend details with glasses, my childhood's spontaneous dependence upon only big-pattern clues has persisted. All that I have to do today to reexperience what I saw when I was a child is to take off my glasses, which, with some added magnification for age, have exactly the same lens corrections as those of my first five-year-old pair of spectacles. This helps me to recall vividly my earliest sensations, impressions, and tactical assumptions

986.083 I was sent to kindergarten before I received my first eyeglasses. The teacher, Miss Parker, had a large supply of wooden toothpicks and semidried peas into which you could easily stick the sharp ends of the toothpicks. The peas served as joints between the toothpicks. She told our kindergarten class to make structures. Because all of the other children had good eyesight, their vision and imagination had been interconditioned to make the children think immediately of copying the rectilinearly framed structures of the houses they saw built or building along the road. To the other children, horizontally or perpendicularly parallel rectilinear forms were structure. So they used their toothpicks and peas to make cubic and other rectilinear models. The semidried peas were strong enough to hold the angles between the stuck-in toothpicks and therefore to make the rectilinear forms hold their shapes__despite the fact that a rectangle has no inherent self-structuring capability. 986.084 In my poor-sighted, feeling-my-way-along manner I found that the triangle__I did not know its name-was the only polygon__I did not know that word either-that would hold its shape strongly and rigidly. So I naturally made structural systems having interiors and exteriors that consisted entirely of triangles. Feeling my way along I made a continuous assembly of octahedra and tetrahedra, a structured complex to which I was much later to give the contracted name "octet truss." (See Sec. 410.06). The teacher was startled and called the other teachers to look at my strange contriving. I did not see Miss Parker again after leaving kindergarten, but three-quarters of a century later, just before she died, she sent word to me by one of her granddaughters that she as yet remembered this event quite vividly. 986.085 Three-quarters of a century later, in 1977, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which eight years earlier had put the first humans on the Moon and returned them safely to our planet Earth, put out bids for a major space-island platform, a controlled-environment structure. NASA's structural specifications called for an "octet truss" __my invented and patented structural name had become common language, although sometimes engineers refer to it as "space framing." NASA's scientific search for the structure that had to provide the most structural advantages with the least pounds of material__ergo, least energy and seconds of invested time-in order to be compatible and light enough to be economically rocket-lifted and self-erected in space__had resolved itself into selection of my 1899 octet truss. (See Sec. 422.) 986.086 It was probable also that my only-insectlike, always-slow, cross-referencing strategy of touching, tasting, smelling, listening, and structurally testing by twisting and pounding and so forth__to which I spontaneously resorted__made me think a great deal about the fact that- when I broke a piece of glass or a stone or a wooden cube apart, it did not separate naturally into little cubes but usually into sharp pointed shapes. In the earliest of my memories I was always suspicious of the integrity of cubes, which only humans seemed to be introducing into the world. There were no cubical roses, eggs, trees, clouds, fruits, nuts, stones, or anything else. Cubes to me were unnatural: I observed humans deliberately sawing ice into large rectilinear cakes, but window glass always broke itself into predominantly triangular pieces; and snowflakes formed themselves naturally into a myriad of differently detailed, six-triangled, hexagonal patterns. 986.087 I was reacting normally in combining those spontaneous feelings of my childhood with the newly discovered knowledge of the time: that light has speed (it is not instantaneous, and comes in smallest packages called photons); that there is something invisible called electricity (consisting of "invisible behaviors" called electrons, which do real work); and that communication can be wireless, which Marconi had discovered the year I was born__and it is evident that I was reacting normally and was logically unable to accept the customarily honored axioms that were no longer "self-evident." 986.088 My contemporaries and I were taught that in order to design a complete and exact sphere and have no materials left over, we must employ the constant known as pi (pi), which I was also taught was a "transcendentally irrational number," meaning it could never be resolved. I was also informed that a singly existent bubble was a sphere; and I asked, To how many places does nature carry out pi when she makes each successive bubble in the white-cresting surf of each successive wave before nature finds out that pi can never be resolved? . . . And at what moment in the making of each separate bubble in Universe does nature decide to terminate her eternally frustrated calculating and instead turn out a fake sphere? I answered myself that I don't think nature is using pi or any of the other irrational fraction constants of physics. Chemistry demonstrates that nature always associates or disassociates in whole rational increments.... Those broken window shards not only tended to be triangular in shape, but also tended to sprinkle some very fine polyhedral pieces. There were wide ranges of sizes of pieces, but there were no pieces that could not "make up their minds" or resolve which share of the original whole was theirs. Quite the contrary, they exploded simultaneously and unequivocally apart. 986.089 At first vaguely, then ever more excitedly, precisely, and inclusively, I began to think and dream about the optimum grand strategy to be employed in discovering nature's own obviously elegant and exquisitely exact mathematical coordinate system for conducting the energetic transactions of eternally regenerative Universe. How does nature formulate and mass-produce all the botanical and zoological phenomena and all the crystals with such elegant ease and expedition? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next Section: 986.090 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 1997 Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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