Just yesterday, the L.A. Times children’s section had a piece on the moon landings that began: “Many years ago, before you were born, people went to the moon”.
So what was thought to be a great beginning has now been reduced to a historical footnote.
Damn.
I wonder if anyone in 1950 foresaw employee drug testing?
Well obviously not, but how about in 1975, after recreational drug use was fairly common?
What was that about 1984?
Of course, major news sources screw up. But I’m wondering why you’re doubtful about this partivular piece. What seem dubious to you, exactly?
Personnally, at the contrary, I thought while reading it that it sounded very authentic. In particular when the author states that everybody will exercise a lot, be strong and in good shape, etc… That’s the kind of things people would certainly have expected, given the emphasis on this issue at the beginning of the XX° century, and the fact it was a “modern” concept.
Well, I looked out my east-facing window and all I saw was the brick wall of the building next door. In any case, I believe the sun rose in the southeast.
Thanks, Tuckerfan! Good explanation of Heinlein’s concept of the future of house manufacture.
And possibly, smaller houses could be delivered whole to the site? Medium and large houses in sections to be assembled on site?
Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.
Would that this had come to pass!
Prediction #29: To England in Two Days. Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days. The bodies of these ships will be built above the waves. They will be supported upon runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh. These runners will be very buoyant. Upon their under sides will be apertures expelling jets of air. In this way a film of air will be kept between them and the water’s surface. This film, together with the small surface of the runners, will reduce friction against the waves to the smallest possible degree. Propellers turned by electricity will screw themselves through both the water beneath and the air above. Ships with cabins artificially cooled will be entirely fireproof. In storm they will dive below the water and there await fair weather.
Sounds as though someone had conceived of the hovercraft! And combined it with the submarine!?
My understanding is that the real stalling point for ‘modular housing’ is complying with the myriad building regulations, many of which are in place simply to provide union jobs.
For example, a few years ago an engineering school (MIT, I think). designed a low-cost housing project using truly modular housing, in that the electrical, plumbing, and other systems were all designed with interlocking connectors in the walls themselves. I believe they said they could build the houses for $8,000 each in quantity (this was in the mid-80’s, so adjust accordingly), and they could be freighted out in pieces and assembled on the homesite in a week or so. And they didn’t look like ‘modular’ housing - they looked like typical neighborhood homes, and were better insulated and lower maintenance.
The problems were in the details. Like one zoning district that disallowed press-fit plumbing, insising that all connections be threaded. Then another jurisdiction would have a problem with the electrical, or with the insulation material, etc. Basically, the only way to meet all the regulations is to build houses in more or less traditional methods. This keeps a lot of union workers employed.
And that Dymaxian car looks like a piece of junk. Let’s see if Fuller could have gotten that 30mpg while making the thing maintainable, able to absorb road damage from bumps and such, has 5 mph bumpers and air bags… Plus, the thing looks unstable as hell, which is apparently the case since it rolled twice. But it also looks directionally unstable with a heavy engine at the back over a single wheel, and the steering done in the front with a tiller. Get that thing slightly sideways and it’d swap ends. Remember Unsafe at Any Speed? Nader’s big objection to the Corvair was its rear engine and tendency to swap ends. Not that it really did any more than a Porsche 911, but I digress. And I’d hate to be in a Dymaxian that got T-boned at an intersection. Plus I’ll bet it was unstable to wind.
And no rearward visibility. Yuck. Terrible design.
Sam, where are you getting that the Dymaxion rolled twice? Remember the car was a prototype, and could expected to have some problems, as with all prototypes. Also, the engine drove the front wheels, not the rear wheel. Steering was done by the rear wheel (which had some disadvantages that Bucky planned to fix in later models). There was a problem with wind wander, but again, Bucky had that worked out as best he could in later designs. (Impossible to say for sure, since they were never built.)
Don’t discount the costs and difficulties of just delivery of modular housing. The size of the pieces is limited by lane width and bridge clearance, even with extensions to the limits for oversize loads. Transporting these (in most US states, that is) requires signs and escorts (on police detail pay, generally), and in daytime only. The home site doesn’t have to be far from the factory for any savings to disappear.
Give Heinlein some credit here - he got a lot of things right, and probably more than most of his contemporaries would have. Political whack job he may have been, but from technology he knew.
Whoops! My mistake! I found where the car did roll twice. The first time resulted in minor injuries to a couple of the occupants. (Not bad for a car built before safety features were prominant in designers minds.) Mind you, the design does have some flaws when compared to a modern car, but considering it was built in 1933 on a shoestring budget, it’s pretty amazing. I challenge you to find any prototype vehicle with a drag coefficient of the Dymaxion car (0.19, IIRC) that seats 11 as comfortably as it does.
I’d also argue that if you dropped a modern powerplant into the original Dymaxion, you’d get better fuel economy than what Bucky got with his. Modern engines are vastly more economical to operate than the 1933 Ford V-8 engine that Bucky used for his.
Some of Bucky’s designs were supposed to be air delivered by blimp, zepplin ( :eek: ), or helicopter, thus eliminating the need to haul the thing over road. (This also had the additional benefit of enabling one to have a modern house dropped, ready to occupy, into the middle of nowhere.) Bucky’s Wichita House was designed to fit into a cylinder that could be loaded on to the back of an ordinary flatbed truck for delivery to the homesite and then assembled in a couple of hours.
Bucky called it the “Craft and Graft” industry. 
I don’t understand why someone doesn’t try the MIT designed and built houses in the southern US. There’s no unions to worry about and if there’s a problem with the zoning laws, it wouldn’t be difficult to get them changed. (No bribes necessary, even! Simply make that a condition of locating the factory in the area. If you’re going to be offering jobs that pay better than minimum wage, you’ll get at least one municipality/state willing to take you up on the offer.)
Technically it wouldn’t need any of those things since as a three wheeler, it’d be classified as a motorcycle, but the Dymaxion that Bucky built for Leopold Stokowski had a “bumper ring” which surrounded the car.
Bucky ditched the tiller and installed a conventional steering wheel in the car.
Not entirely true. There was a periscope installed in the car for rearward visibility. Additionally, the car had a big honkin’ spot light which turned with the rear wheel when the car was backing up.
That was a misprint. It was really “Fags will be cultivated over the entire United States.”
::: Makes note to hijack one of Eve’s threads, one of these days… :::
I don’t think he was talking about ICBMs or any other earth-based weapon. He was talking about the fact that people in orbit or on the Moon can basically just drop rocks on any earth location they have a mind to. With big enough rocks, this would have the effect of dropping a bomb, but without the radioactivity. He used this idea in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”.
In 1950, if you moved to a different state, you had to “establish residency” there before you could register to vote. You had to live in the new state for a long time before you could vote there. A person who moved frequently might find that, for most of his life, he was barred from voting. The theory was that you couldn’t cast an intelligent vote about local matters if you were a newcomer. We didn’t wind up “do(ing) away with state lines while retaining the semblance” because we solved the problem another way: the period needed to establish residency was either greatly reduced or entirely eliminated.
Okay, I’d say that Freud probably is “classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer”. I’d say, however, that we don’t have anything like a “growing, changing ‘operational psychology’ based on measurement and prediction.” However, I did just come across something interesting re this subject. Right now, I’m reading “Cosmic Trigger, Volume II: Down to Earth” by Robert Anton Wilson (1991, New Falcon Publications, Tempe, AZ).
On pages 60 and 61, Wilson talks about Cary Grant. Seems Grant had psychological problems for years; felt “empty and dead inside and full of hostilities he didn’t understand… Cary finally found the answer to his problems in the late 1950s. He told interviewers about it over and over again… He had found a shrink who used LSD psychotherapy…” I wonder, when we outlawed LSD, were we passing up something that could have been beneficial to many?
Now, hold on there just a cotton-pickin’ minute!
By 1900, human beings had already been gliding for a couple of decades, and flying in hot-air balloons for over a hundred years! Certainly something as obvious as the zeppelin (which is, in essence, a balloon with a propeller) shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the people of 1900.
ElvisL1ves said:
You’re thinking of modular housing like double-wide house trailers and such, I guess. The project I’m talking about had wall panels that were not much bigger than sheets of plywood. I think they were 8x8 or 8x9. Each wall panel was a sandwich of a fireproof, pre-painted outer surfaces (in fact, I think the paint was impregnated into the material, so it couldn’t be scraped off), and then the inside of the sandwich contained an electrical bus and plumbing lines and heating ducts. You could literally ship a house inside a semi trailer.
You would probably need a few bigger pieces like roofing trusses and maybe some load carrying structural members, but ‘traditional’ houses also need those things, and they are shipped around now. Many newer houses use pre-fab roof trusses, for example, and they’re at least as big as the largest modular components you’d have to ship.
Their plan was to have a catalog of home designs that you could pick from. Each design had a big list of the pre-fab components you had to order to build it. Then you’d pick your colors and options, and order it. A few weeks later, a semi truck rolls up, and a crew pulls out the panels and fastens them together like a big plastic model kit.
There were no doubt other problems with the plan. The devil is always in the details. It’s not clear how easy it would have been to modify the homes to add electrical connectors, for instance. Or what happens if a wall panel gets damaged after the house is built. Or how the homeowners change the paint scheme after the house is built.
It may be that these houses aren’t taking off simply because the market doesn’t want them. Fair or not, there’s a stigma attached to ‘manufactured’ housing. But also, people feel comfortable with traditional construction methods. It’s easy to modify and repair drywall. It’s relatively easy to knock down interior walls and build new ones to re-configure a house. Wood and drywall are effective noise barriers as well. And how much would you really save? When we built our first house 10 years ago, it cost us $143,000. Of that amount, $91,000 was the house itself. But of the house cost, about $20,000 was for the basement, foundation, driveway, and garage pad. Another $15,000 or so was for all the interior appointments - cabinetry, floor coverings, plumbing fixtures. Add in the cost of other pre-manufactured components (which would still cost as much either way) like interior and exterior doors and garage doors, and the actual ‘guts’ of the house probably didn’t cost much more than $40,000-50,000. So if we could replace that with a $15,000 modular construction home, it might have lowered the cost of the house overall from $143,000 to maybe $120,000. A significant savings, but probably not enough for us to take a chance with radical home construction techniques.
Modular housing makes more sense for low-income housing, where you can get property for very cheap or free, don’t build basements, and can achieve economies of scale by designing and building entire neighborhoods.
Cancer too… the Icon Molecule trial getting way in San Diego has extraordinary promise. This is the only current cancer research projects that I am aware that has a chance at nearly solving solid tumor type cancers.
Sam, you’re probably right about the costs of construction working out to be about the same, but many of the manufactured home designs I’ve seen offer better thermal efficiency than the majority of conventionally built houses. Some of Bucky’s designs don’t need air conditioning even in the desert. (There’s a Bucky dome being used as a school in Africa, and the students often complain that it’s “cold.” Of course, “cold” to an African, and “cold” to an American might be two entirely different things.) So while a nice, manufactured mansion might cost about the same as a conventionally built one, the cost to heat and cool the thing could be considerably lower. (Bet someone in living in California during the rolling blackouts would have liked to have such a place.) Also, I have seen (though they aren’t the vast majority of them, admittedly) some designs for modularly constructed homes that one can remodel as easily as a conventional home. there’s a market for these things, just no one with the money to start such a market is willing to do so.
Start out by offering the houses to disaster relief agencies, the military, and field researchers. The one can move on to homesteading type folks, and by building one that was pre-wired with fiber optics, stuffed full of elaborate gizmos, and had other nifty features not found in any home (say walls insulated with aerogels or some such), you could get wealthy gadget-geeks interested in them.