Music: 1937 Have You Met Miss Jones? | Ray Brown Trio 1987
Video: 1933 Dymaxion Car | Buckminster Fuller | Isamu Noguchi | Starling Burgess
1930s playlist: t.ly/TxIW
Ray Brown - bass
Gene Harris - piano
Micky Roker - drums
"In 1932, Fuller asked the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who was also a drinking buddy, to prepare sketches. They show a car shaped like an elongated teardrop with a rear third wheel that would lift off the ground and a tail fin that unfolded.
Fuller found an angel to invest in the car. Philip Pearson, a stockbroker who had gotten out of the market just before the 1929 crash, put up enough money to get the project off the ground. Fuller promised the car would have a top speed of more than 120 miles an hour and gas mileage of 30 miles a gallon. He took over the closed Locomobile factory in Bridgeport, Conn., and hired Starling Burgess, a builder of racing yachts, to build the Dymaxion. Fuller opened the plant in March 1933.
Despite Fuller’s talk of borrowing construction methods from the aircraft industry, Burgess built the car using many of the nautical methods applied to a racing boat. The chassis was aircraft-grade steel, but the body was an ash wood frame with aluminum tacked to its sides and a roof of taut, painted canvas.
Fuller said the Dymaxion was not even really a car.
'I knew everyone would call it a car,' he said in the 1960s, but really it was 'the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin orientable jet stilts flying device.' The jets he wanted had not been invented in 1933, he said, so he simply used a Ford V-8 instead. Such compromises rarely bothered Fuller, who always saw the Dymaxion, as he saw much of the world, as a kind of provisional prototype, a mere sketch, of the glorious, eventual future."
(www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/au...)
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"He called himself a 'comprehensive anticipatory design scientist' ...
Yes, greatest title of all time!
... There is something inflated about it.
Oh absolutely, it's grandiose, which is both a little bit ridiculous and deeply necessary for the project he wanted to undertake. I think that this line of his sums it up:
'To make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.'
That’s really what comprehensive anticipatory design science was about."
(www.wired.com/2016/03/buckmin... (interview with Jonathan Keats, author of You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (2016))
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"'I was privileged to collaborate with Bucky for the last 12 years of his life and this had a profound influence on my own work and thinking. Inevitably, I also gained an insight into his philosophy and achievements,' shared Lord Norman Foster.
Recreating the legendary futuristic Dymaxion Car, Foster’s No. 4 version was a lengthy and expensive two year project, but was obviously a labor of love. Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic three wheeled car was brief, with a mere three actually built. Incredibly efficient the streamlined body with long tail-fin averaged 35 miles to the gallon.
Why remake the Dymaxion now?
It was an interesting exercise for us. Like everything else he did, the car was pure Bucky. He was a friend of Henry Ford, which insured that he would get Ford parts for 30 percent of their true cost. So he took the flathead v8 engine, the wheels, the steering wheel, the transmission, and turned it 180 degrees. So you can make a like-by-like comparison between the Dymaxion car and Fords from 1913 to 1933. But the Dymaxion was three times the volume. It had the potential of taking up to eleven rather than four. It was significantly faster, and consumed half the fuel. It was truly doing more with less.
What is the car’s relevance to automobiles today?
First of all, the maxim of doing more with less is more urgent and imperative today than it’s ever been. In a way the Dymaxion was the classic people-mover before its time. The three wheel configuration caused a lot of debate. Was it a stable configuration? Not withstanding the size. It does produce this extraordinarily dramatic turning circle. There is a vintage movie of Bucky pirouetting the car around this policeman. It just nudges the policeman as it circles around him. I’ve driven it in an airfield and explored exactly that capability. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a show stopper."
(www.archdaily.com/121530/vide... (2011 interview with Lord Norman Foster))
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See also www.lanemotormuseum.org/colle... (2015 replica of Car No. 1)
2 апр 2021
