“CALL ME TRIMTAB”

— Buckminster Fuller

Inscription on his headstone. On a ship the trimtab is a small but crucial part of a the rudder mechanism, which controls the direction of the vessel; on an aircraft it is a small adjustable tab on the trailing edge of the elevator control surface set by the pilot to trim the aircraft in a steady and level orientation. This use for his epitaph comes from statements he had made in life, including an interview with Barry Farrell in Playboy (February 1972): 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 trimtab. 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 trimtab. 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 Trimtab. He is also quoted at the Buckminster Fuller Institute http://challenge.bfi.org/faq/ as having said: When I thought about steering the course of the "Spaceship Earth" and all of humanity, I saw most people trying to turn the boat by pushing the bow around. I saw that by being all the way at the tail of the ship, by just kicking my foot to one side or the other, I could create the "low pressure" which would turn the whole ship. If ever someone wanted to write my epitaph, I would want it to say "Call me Trimtab".

From 1980s onwards

Source: Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Buckminster Fuller / Quotes / From 1980s onwards

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Buckminster Fuller 171

American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inv… 1895–1983

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