Inventors

"I don't think that building everything out of stones and living in animal skins is necessarily... healthier... I'm saying... life can be much more satisfying for an individual if he feels that he is in control of his destiny... Society and the tools of society, should be organized to give each one of us that feeling."

"Peter Van Dresser... built a solar heater here in New Mexico in 1956 or '58. We published his book, Landscape for Humans. One of the greatest forces... has been Harold Hay from California. ...I ...heard him in ’68 at the Solar Energy Conference. I had... a design and... modest success... Harold showed everyone... dead simple methods of doing the same job. He... completely changed my head around on how to attack these problems. ...[W]e’ve worked together a lot since then trying to bring some reforms into the Solar Society."

"I want to build buildings and design systems that are beautiful and simple and that really work. ...It’s not ...exotic or earthshaking to fill 55-gallon drums with water, paint them black and place them in the walls of a home for use as solar collectors ...but it works."

"We started making playground climbers–using the 31–zone truss which is... explained in the Zome Primer –and... we were working on solar heating experiments."

"[T]he philosophical tactics and... approach taken by the giant corporations and... power groups miss the point... A pencil can break on you and you can sharpen it with your thumbnail and go right on... but if a circuit board or a resistor or condenser quits somewhere inside this recorder, we’re stopped and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. ...[Y]et we increasingly use tape recorders instead of pencils."

"[W]hen you're experimenting, about 80% of the ideas you try are failures... But we put all these concepts together and they performed the first time. ...[W]e had pretested most of the ideas we incorporated into this [our] home. We'd never used aluminum-skinned, honeycomb-cored structural sandwiches and... no one had... fabricated a complete building from the material... but every architectural and engineering book mentions the possibility... The 55-gallon, water-filled drums... [W]e... knew the amounts of energy... such... could pick up."

"[W]e left and... moved to Albuquerque where I worked as a surveyor and... welding trailer frames for Fruehof and Holly had a job and we didn’t spend much... I began to experiment more and more with structures."

"Each of the regular polyhedra is thus a convenient core from which to define the regular thirty-one zone star. The geometric regularities insure simplicity in the connections. Any one of the regular polyhedra can be used with the same pattern of flanges or holes on each of its faces as a connector for the thirty-one zone structural system."

"There is a mistake-proof flange joint for both A and C connections if one hierarchy is introduced. You must always orient the joint to suit A lines."

"I found out that the people at were building domes and I went up there and helped... Then they came down and helped me. ...We built the first structures from car tops. We chopped the tops out of over a thousand cars... ...[W]e paid 25 cents apiece for them. ...They’re a good building material ...except that getting stuff from junkyards ...is ...bad for your ...mentality. You... become a parasite on something you criticize... You’re feeding on something you hate."

"[T]here's Dave Harrison's bead wall. I teach... classes at the University of New Mexico and Dave... one of my students... said. "...I've got this idea of building a wall out of two panes of glass... and you can blow Styrofoam beads between the panes at night to insulate the wall." ...Here's a problem ...nobody has thought of a way to solve. I've tried... and... Harold Hay has... and... a lot of others... Dave Harrison has the answer! ...[A] ...low-tech ...answer ...simple ...easy to understand, that a heating and ventilating man in any town can fix... [W]e’ve made a deal with Dave so that he’ll get a big part of any royalties we realize..."

"Right after we started Zomeworks, Day Chahroudi came out from California. He’d read the Dome Cookbook and he came walking up the road one afternoon with a rucksack on his back. ...[W]hen he started telling me his ideas about how things worked—physics ...I was so impressed by his ...approach to engineering problems that I persuaded him to stay ...He did and ...soon he developed a solar tracker... very simple and easy to build."

"Legislation aimed at encouraging the use of solar energy equipment by subsidizing... certain hardware must end by being pathetic and blundering."

"The joint must... be strong and inexpensive. If the joint is a ball and the A, B and C connections are... holes which the members screw into... holes of the same type... and the ends of all structural members are identical. ...[Y]ou can't make mistakes..."

"I went to in Massachusetts for a couple of years and I went to UCLA for a year or two and then I went back to Amherst... I never quite fit... that... college thing. ...I joined the Army in 1960 and got married and Holly and I went to Germany... after I got out of the Army, I went to school in ."

"Holly had... toys made from polyhedra and she built one of these things and... it... blew my mind... I... found some mathematics books that described the geometry of polyhedra and convex figures. This wasn't too difficult since I had always been fascinated by math. It was the subject I had spent the most time on in school and... was studying at the time."

"So many... good ideas... worked... but they couldn’t keep working. Some of the first buildings we put up weren’t good buildings because they leaked. Many of those first solar heaters weren’t... very good..."

"[W]e started Zomeworks. Barry Hickman and Ed Heinz and I issued stock like a corporation and got a lawyer... [I]t was quite an abrupt change from just casually working together on a project the way we had before."

"When you start experimenting with, say, solar heating by covering collectors with glass or plastic and feeling the warm air blow out of them... well, it’s so exciting that you just get hooked and can’t stop."

"I read this book of ’, Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy, and it just lit up my brain."

"We built and did solar heating experiments... solar heated a dome in 1967 with a big chimney—a rock storage bin—down the side of a hill. Many of those first things didn’t... work... well. I didn’t know what I was doing."

"At one time an individual could fix everything in his life with his thumb nail or his teeth. ...I believe the ground rules can be transformed so that technology simplifies life instead of continually complicating it."

"The Skylid has no switches or wires or motors... Instead, the unit contains a series of louvers. Each... is supported and balanced so that it hinges easily around its center and... the louvers are connected with a tie rod so they’ll open and close simultaneously. ...[M]ounted on one of the panels are two canisters—one on the outside and one inside ...connected by ...tubing. ... ...with a very low ...can expand ...in one canister and ...condense in the other with a temperature difference of... 1 degree Fahrenheit. This shifting of the Freon’s weight will open and close the... louvers... and the... sun—even the shade of a cloud—produces... enough temperature variation to boil the Freon from one container to the other. ...[A] locking chain... secure[s] the panels anywhere from full open to full close... to override the automatic mechanism."

"The and the are duals of each other—the vertices of one match the face midpoints of the other and vice versa."

"The icosahedron and the dodecahedron have five fold symmetry. They cannot occur as crystals."

"Five fold symmetry does appear among other symmetries in nature."

"Stretching zones allows... buildings of different shapes using the same kinds of components."

"Zonohedra have bands of parallel edges. Any such band... can be stretched to alter the shape of the zonohedron. Stretching the band... does not alter any angles."

"The forms possible using this system are limitless; there is no attempt here to explore these possibilities—the examples shown are small probings. The booklet describes the mathematics of the process that creates these limitless forms."

"[[w:Recursion|[R]ecursive]] growth... In the case of... five fold symmetry there isn't uniformity. ...Instead of reproducing itself... it becomes steadily more intricate."

"This booklet had first an elementary explanation of the geometry of Zonohedra, then a more difficult account of the growths of the thirty-one zone star. This system, based on the 31 lines that pass through the center of an and either a vertex, edge midpoint of face midpoint is new and unusual."

"The coherence proof demonstrates that if one builds a structure using the A and B lines of the 31 zone star (...C lines ...used only within ...forms defined by ...A and B lines) and always follow the rule... no matter how far or intricately one builds, two extensions of two entirely different limbs of the same structure can always be locked back together in a perfect fit with a combination of our simple parts."

"A few years ago Peter Van Dresser mentioned the Clothesline Paradox."

"Solar energy advocates are continuously humiliated by being shown "energy pies." Slices are assigned to coal, gas, oil, hydroelectric and even nuclear. but is evidently too small to appear."

"[C]oal, oil and natural gas are all solar energy products... and hydroelectric power is solar energy..."

"The graphs which demonstrate a huge dependence on fossil fuels are fine in one respect. They are alarming. But they are... [m]isleading... [in] that they blind people to obvious answers and prime them to a frenzy of effort in poor directions. Attention... to such... trains people to attempt to deliver what is shown in these accounting systems rather than what is needed."

"If you drive to... buy a newspaper the gasoline consumption appears. If you walk—using food energy—the event has disappeared from sight..."

"The 's energy study shows the U.S.'s energy consumption in 1968 at... 62 quadrillion BTU ...[T]he average daily caloric intake is... 10,000 BTU/day/person—about 1.2% of the total consumption listed by the Bureau of Mines. But this... doesn't appear... on the graphs. Nuclear energy with 1% does... The food is solar energy. Why is it not included?"

"Why wouldn't it be fair to expand the slice—4% (1973—Bureau of Mines) given to hydroelectric power by a similar factor of efficiency—for the solar energy consumed in raising the water to its working head?"

"Every time the sun shines on the surface of a house and especially when it shines through a window there is "solar heating"...According to the NSF/NASA Energy Panel of 1972 the percentage of thermal energy for buildings supplied by the sun was too small to be measurable. ...Shouldn't we recalculate the energy consumption of every building assuming it were kept in the shade all day and... attribute the difference to solar energy? ...I would guess the average shaded fuel consumption to be 15% higher..."

"Zomes can cluster together like soap bubbles. Their zones can be stretched, shrunk, or omitted completely to make the various zomes' different shapes and sizes. The zomes can also pack several layers deep."

"The regular polyhedra are like seeds from which growths may appear. They are the connecting joints for the zonohedra."

"I have applied for a patent on this structural system. The patent is assigned to Zomeworks Corporation. The predecessors of this system are the octet truss and the MERO space grid system. The relative potentials of these systems are discussed briefly by a comparison of their geometric possibilities."

"The more you examine properties of objects and phenomena the more you find yourself presented with a few terms, usually simple, from a long series of terms. Often you cannot touch the terms which are further or lower in the series, but you can define the properties which they have. One gets the feeling of living in a container—one of an infinite number—to which are shunted objects and phenomena which have passed through one filter but can't pass through another; a great process like that which takes place in a gravel yard, only we are unable to see gravel other than that of our own size but sense that it exists in endless different piles beyond—everything from sand to planet sized boulders."

"We have associated the thirty-one zone star throughout with the icosahedron and... dodecahedron. It also fits perfectly with the three smaller regular polyhedra. The , the and the fit inside the icosahedron and... dodecahedron. Their vertices touch a vertex, an edge midpoint or a face midpoint of the larger figure. This regular match... positions the smaller figure so that regular patterns on the large figure project inwards as regular patterns on the small figure. In each case either five or ten small figures fit at once within the larger..."

"If you purchase certain kinds of hardware to exploit solar energy it will be accounted for and credit will be given to the sun. If you depend on more customary old-fashioned uses of solar energy, growing food, drying clothes, sun bathing, warming a house with south windows, the sun credit is totally ignored."

"[W]e would be much better informed if alongside every graph showing our use of oil, coal and uranium there were also an indication or the total energy received from the sun. Since we can't do without it, let's not omit it from our accounts."

"In the case of the United States a conservative estimate of the solar energy received in one year might be... Twenty nine thousand three hundred quadrillion Btu as opposed to the 62 quadrillion shown as used during 1968 by the U.S. Bureau of Mines."

"A sniper scope or camera... that shows... temperatures as... colors would be an enormous help to the investigator. 30 minutes with such... could be as valuable as a week's work... without it. ...[N]ature ...treats you to such a view of the window or skylight with a pattern of frost. ...[S]eals ...[are] the entire problem."

"The , because of its shape and the arrangement of its structural members is extremely strong, but its uses are limited because of the inflexibility of its shape. It is always part of a sphere... any variation would destroy the structural properties... It is complicated in structure and simple in shape. Zomes are simple in structure and complicated in shape."