Engineers From The United States

"It would take an enormous crew of experts to determine the efficiency of different orientations of windows, different arrangements of shade trees, etc... To ignore these efforts and only to reward the purchase of "off the shelf hardware" is to further the disease of narrow minded quantification."

"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."

"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."

"When small children first start paying attention to... their allowances they briefly commit their... minds to their few coins and... chores... without... considering the budget of the family's household. We can't allow our entire civilization to be similarly ignorant for long. We must ask who's keeping score and why they have such peculiar methods."

"The effect of clothes and blankets on heat loss is naturally investigated by everyone."

"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."

"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."

"[I]t's more satisfying to develop and manufacture less expensive items which pay for themselves. It makes me sleep better at night."

"Tests done at Zomeworks on 45° sloped skylights with our insulating Skylids installed beneath a single pain of glass show a reduction of heat loss of about 75%... The louvers average 3" thick, have aluminum skins and are filled with figerglass—most of the heat loss occurs through air leaks..."

"The Beadwall seems to be the perfect answer for superior insulation against heat loss."

"A particularly attractive use of insulating panels is to have them double as reflectors—during the day they bounce additional energy through the same window they will insulate at night. Often it is most cost-effective to have a movable reflector outside a south window or skylight that is changed seasonally... not daily."

"SUMMARY 1) It is best to have a way to prevent both heat gain and heat loss. 2) Be skeptical of mechanical seals. 3) Do not use single glazing unless it is a mild climate or the movable insulation is controlled by a reliable automatic means. 4) Do not install anything you cannot fix. 5) Look for two uses for one material. 6) Break the area to be insulated into pieces so that an air leak in one area will be isolated. 7) Always use strong, durable materials outside."

"I care about the spirit of innovation... I'm an inventor, but it's a bad time for people to do that. Many of us who developed the ideas behind direct gain heating—and have been successful—our ideas have been co-opted by the government, and it's disappointing that the government does not now turn to us for new ideas. ...They're stacking the decks against the little guy ..."

"Drop City, Colorado, a rural vacant lot full of elegant funky domes and ditto people, has been well photographed and poorly reported in national magazines. Visitors and readers... assumed that the domes were geodesic Fuller domes, which some... are. But most... were designed by another guy who designed by another geometry: Steve Baer."

"[I]f folks don’t like the idea once they’ve given it the once-over, we’ll be glad to buy the plans back at the full $15.00 purchase price."

"Ten years later Zomeworks has moved to a newly renovated showroom (once the home of Martineztown dance hall)... [P]anels insulate many of the windows at night... attached by small magnetic clips... only one of the passive solar devices developed by Zomeworks..."

"[T]he devices are cheap. A thermosyphoning solar water heater... costs less than half as much as most solar water heaters. A solar preheater... is even less."

"The company... manufactures... "skylids" (insulated shutters for skylights that open and close with the sun) and "beadwalls" (double pain windows that fill and drain with beads to let the sun in or keep the cold out)."

"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."

"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 ."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[[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."

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

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"If you... remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is no credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs to solar energy which is now drying clothes."

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