Inventions by R. Buckminster Fuller

Produced on the premises of Beech Aircraft, this 1944 mass-production dwelling machine prototype was ordered and paid for by the U.S. Air Force. The prototype, along with its 100 percent spare parts, cost $54,000 and after World War II was turned over by the government to a privately organized two-hundred-thousand-dollar corporation formed by about 300 subscribers -- averaging a $666 gamble. This corporation hoped to organize the mass production of the physically realized and three-times-refined government-paid-for prototype. Beech Aircraft had its production engineering department plan the tooling and complete an estimate of producing the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine at a rate of 20,000 per year. Beech then made a firm offer to produce them at that rate for $1,800 each, delivered in Wichita minus the kitchen equipment and other electrical appliances to be provided by General Electric on a rental basis of $200 a year. Beech required, however, that a ten-million-dollar tooling cost be provided by outside finance. This was not raised because there existed no high-speed, one-day, "turnkey" -- no marketing, distributing, and installing service industry. Prepayment checks for 37,000 unsolicited orders had to be returned. The hopefully-into-mass-production gamble of the private corporation occurred despite my two-fold warning that (1) experience had by then taught me that the gains accruing to my work apparently were distributable only to everybody and only as techno-economic advantage profits for all humanity and (2) that while I was producing an important prototype dwelling machine suitable for mass production at a low cost, there existed as yet no distribution and maintenance service industry (and that the latter would require a development period taking another third of a century).

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