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Source: New Knowledge 109

bines the greatest possible living space with the smallest possible
surface. It therefore has optimal insulation, optimal heating and
cooling, and superb acoustics. It also can be built with lightweight
materials, requires no foundation and a minimum of suspension, and
can still withstand an earthquake or the fiercest gale. Around 1940,
Fuller put a Dymaxion House on the campus of a small New
England college. And there it stayed. Very few Dymaxion Houses
have been built—Americans, it seems, do not like to live in circular
homes. But around 1965, Dymaxion structures began to be put up in
the Arctic and Antarctic where conventional buildings are impracti-
cal, expensive, and difficult to erect. Since then they have increas-
ingly been used for large structures such as auditoriums, concert
tents, sports arenas, and so on.
Only major external crises can shorten this lead time. De Forest’s
audion tube, invented in 1906, would have made radio possible
almost immediately, but it would still not have been on the market
until the late 1930s or so had not World War I forced governments,
and especially the American government, to push the development of
wireless transmission of sounds. Field telephones connected by wires
were simply too unreliable, and wireless telegraphy was confined to
dots and dashes. And so, radio came on the market early in the 1920s,
only fifteen years after the emergence of the knowledge on which it
is based.
Similarly, penicillin would probably not have been developed
until the 1950s or so but for World War II. Alexander Fleming found
the bacteria-killing mold, penicillium, in the mid-twenties. Howard
Florey, an English biochemist, began to work on it ten years later. But
it was World War II that forced the early introduction of penicillin.
The need to have a potent drug to fight infections led the British gov-
ernment to push Florey’s research: English soldiers were made avail-
able to him as guinea pigs wherever they fought. The computer, too,
would probably have waited for the discovery of the transistor by Bell
Lab physicists in 1947 had not World War II led the American gov-
ernment to push computer research and to invest large resources of
men and money in the work.
The long lead time for knowledge-based innovations is by no
means confined to science or technology. It applies equally to innova-
tions that are based on nonscientific and nontechnological knowledge.
The comte de Saint-Simon developed the theory of the entrepre-
neurial bank, the purposeful use of capital to generate economic