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 Buckminster Fuller wrote: The year I was born, Marconi invented the wireless, but it did not get into any practical use until I was twelve years of age, when the first steamship sent an SOS, when it was in distress, by wireless. Think of it. Great many miles–and the world began to know the ship was in distress, and a ship then rushed to its aid. Absolutely unexpected. My father and mother were saying, "Wireless? Nonsense!" And, when I was three the electron was discovered and nobody talked about that; it wasn’t in any of the newspapers. Nobody was interested in the electron, they didn’t know what was the electron or whether it was discovered. I was brought up that humanity would never get to the North Pole. Absolutely impossible. They’d never get to the South Pole. On Mercator maps, it didn’t even show anything up–the northernmost points were a very rugged kind of a line, if you see it, with nothing beyond that. When I was fourteen, man did get to the North Pole. When I was sixteen, he got to the South Pole. The "impossibles" were happening. Like all other little boys, I was making paper darts that you make at school–boys must’ve been making them for a very long time. And we were hoping it might be able to get to flying. Parents would say, "Darling, it’s very amusing for you to try that, but it’s inherently impossible for man to fly." So when I was seven, the Wright brothers suddenly flew, and my memory is vivid enough of seven to remember that, for about a year, the engineering societies would try to prove it was a hoax, that it was absolutely impossible for man to do that. So then, not only was there radio, but when I was twenty-three–which I guess many in this room are not twenty-three yet,–when I was twenty-three, the human voice came over the radio for the first time. That’s an incredible matter. I was forty-five when we had our first television. It couldn’t be a more recent matter, and yet, nobody thought at that time, they didn’t know you were going to have transistors. They didn’t know man was going to have satellites going around the earth, they didn’t know we were going to have radio relay satellites, with programs coming out of any part of the Earth to any other part of the Earth. Not one of these steps was ever anticipated by any of the others. (10/11/03)
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