Buckminster Fuller's unintentionally hilarious e=mc^2 telegram from 1936

[pokerfan]

In 1936, artist Isamu Noguchi was working on his mural History Mexico when he forgot the equation for E=mc². Rather than just wing it, Noguchi instead asked his friend Buckminster Fuller for the formula. Here's the futurist/Dymaxion automaker/geodesic dome connoisseur's comically detailed response, which came to Mexico by telegram:

EINSTEINS FORMULA DETERMINATION INDIVIDUAL SPECIFICS RELATIVITY READS QUOTE ENERGY EQUALS MASS TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT SQUARED UNQUOTE SPEED OF LIGHT IDENTICAL SPEED ALL RADIATION COSMIC GAMMA X ULTRA VIOLET INFRA RED RAYS ETCETERA ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY SIX THOUSAND MILES PER SECOND WHICH SQUARED IS TOP OR PERFECT SPEED GIVING SCIENCE A FINITE VALUE FOR BASIC FACTOR IN MOTION UNIVERSE STOP

SPEED OF RADIANT ENERGY BEING DIRECTIONAL OUTWARD ALL DIRECTIONS EXPANDING WAVE SURFACE DIAMETRIC POLAR SPEED AWAY FROM SELF IS TWICE SPEED IN ONE DIRECTION AND SPEED OF VOLUME INCREASE IS SQUARE OF SPEED IN ONE DIRECTION APPROXIMATELY THIRTY FIVE BILLION VOLUMETRIC MILES PER SECOND STOP

FORMULA IS WRITTEN QUOTE LETTER E FOLLOWED BY EQUATION MARK FOLLOWED BY LETTER M FOLLOWED BY LETTER C FOLLOWED CLOSELY BY ELEVATED SMALL FIGURE TWO SYMBOL OF SQUARING UNQUOTE ONLY VARIABLE IN FORMULA IS SPECIFIC MASS SPEED IS A UNIT OF RATE WHICH IS AN INTEGRATED RATIO OF BOTH TIME AND SPACE AND NO GREATER RATE OF SPEED THAN THAT PROVIDED BY ITS CAUSE WHICH IS PURE ENERGY LATENT OR RADIANT IS ATTAINABLE STOP

THE FORMULA THEREFORE PROVIDES A UNIT AND A RATE OF PERFECTION TO WHICH THE RELATIVE IMPERFECTION OF INEFFICIENCY OF ENERGY RELEASE IN RADIANT OR CONFINED DIRECTION OF ALL TEMPORAL SPACE PHENOMENA MAY BE COMPARED BY ACTUAL CALCULATION STOP

SIGNIFICANCE STOP

SPECIFIC QUALITY OF ANIMATES IS CONTROL WILLFUL OR OTHERWISE OF RATE AND DIRECTION ENERGY RELEASE AND APPLICATION NOT ONLY OF SELF MECHANISM BUT OF FROM SELF MACHINE DIVIDED MECHANISMS AND RELATIVITY OF ALL ANIMATES AND INANIMATES IS POTENTIAL OF ESTABLISHMENT THROUGH EINSTEIN FORMULA



http://io9.com/5834167/telegrams-from-buckminster-fuller-were-unintentionally-hilarious

[Lint Head]

1. This is great. I love this quote.

The gravestone of Buckminster Fuller is the quote "call me trimtab"

The engineer Buckminster Fuller is often cited for his use of trim tabs as a metaphor for leadership and personal empowerment. In the February 1972 issue of Playboy, Fuller said:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab.
Buckminster Fuller

wikipedia

[pokerfan]

2. I was fortunate to see him speak at my college

in the late seventies. It was an amazing talk. And I have a copy of his Synergetics somewhere.

[TheMadMonk]

3. And what was the price for the transmission of this missive?

I came into this world on the very end of the telegram era, and my recollection is they were not cheap.

[pokerfan]

4. Bucky would have loved the internets...

"Don't fight forces, use them."

[krispos42]

6. Imagine the poor guy that had to take this down and transmit it...

...and the other guy that had to decode and transcribe it.

What's morse for "Wait, what?" :D

[TheMadMonk]

7. Would actually be a restful change of pace.

More likely to affect subsequent transmissions as the pace switched back to getting as many short messages off to as many recipients as possible in an hour.

My question pertained purely to the monetary cost of such a message.

[Terry in Austin]

5. He invented the Dymaxion Answer

We refer to it nowadays as "male answer syndrome" -- somebody asks you what time it is, you tell them how to build a watch.

:7