Fuller, R. Buckminster (1895-1983), inventor, designer, and environmentalist (original) (raw)

R. Buckminster Fuller.

Oil on canvas, c. 1981, by Ruth Munson.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Fuller, R. Buckminster (12 July 1895–01 July 1983), inventor, designer, and environmentalist, often referred to as “Bucky,” was born Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr., in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller, an importer of leather and tea, who died in 1910, and Caroline Wolcott Andrews. He was the grandnephew of author and literary critic Margaret Fuller. Crossed eyes and poor vision kept Fuller from seeing objects clearly during his youth, but he perceived and etched on his mind the large designs and patterns of nature, especially those he encountered in summers on Bear Island, eleven miles off of Camden, Maine. After graduating from Milton Academy in 1913, he attended Harvard University but was expelled in his first year, after he skipped an examination to date a show girl in New York and used his tuition money to take her entire chorus line to dinner.

After his mother consulted his uncles, Fuller was sent to Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, to be an apprentice mechanic in a cotton mill–machinery factory run by a distant relative. Impressed by Fuller’s mechanical ability, the chief engineer convinced him to keep a notebook of his design sketches. Harvard reinstated Fuller in 1914, only to expel him again in 1915, officially for cutting classes but actually, Fuller later stated, “for general irresponsibility” (Ideas and Integrities, p. 11). Securing a job in New York City with Armour and Company, he thrived while learning the meat-packing business. In 1917 he married Anne Hewlett; they had two children.

Poor eyesight kept Fuller out of the army in World War I, but the navy, when offered the use of his family’s cabin cruiser Wego, accepted him. He was soon patrolling the Maine coast at the head of the Bar Harbor flotilla. Later, while located at Newport News, Virginia, he designed a combined winch, mast, and boom for rescue boats, which, by speedily pulling overturned aircraft out of the water, ultimately kept hundreds of pilots from drowning. Impressed by this invention, the navy in 1918 sent Fuller to its academy at Annapolis for three months of intensive officers’ training.

That same year Fuller worked with Atlantic troop transport operations and compiled their official statistics. Then as the communications officer on the George Washington, which carried President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, Fuller helped install the radiotelephonic equipment for the world’s first wireless transatlantic telephone conversation. When he returned to New York in 1919, he resigned from the navy to be with his young daughter who had contracted both infantile paralysis and spinal meningitis. Fuller blamed her subsequent death partly on drafty houses and vowed to improve housing conditions. His first venture, the manufacturing of a lightweight, innovative building material, invented by his father-in-law, the architect James Monroe Hewlett, taught him how difficult it was to introduce new ideas and materials. Fuller and Hewlett lost control of their Stockade Corporation in 1927.

Despite the birth of his second daughter, Fuller, unemployed in Chicago and drinking heavily, contemplated suicide in 1927. He was saved by an experience on the shore of Lake Michigan. “You belong to Universe,” a mystical voice said, before telling him he had no right to kill himself and insisting that he use his talents to help others (Sieden, p. 88). Deeply moved, he spent the next two years in libraries (refusing to speak unless he had something important to say), formulating general ideas on serving humanity and searching for local and immediate ways to implement them. As a result, he helped introduce the concept “that every aspect of man’s physical environment was connected to every other” (New York Times, 3 July 1983). Working to express this interconnectedness mathematically in what he would later call synergetic geometry, he adopted the term “fourth dimension” (4D), used in physics and mathematics, in addition to length, width, and depth, to discuss phenomena that depended on four variables (for instance, time is a fourth dimension for locating points in space). He founded the 4D research company; distributed his essays “4D” and “4D Timeline” (published as 4D in 1930), outlining his design philosophy; and used aircraft technology to plan large multi-deck apartment houses and single-family dwellings. His job, Fuller decided, was to identify a problem, develop a way to solve it, and wait—perhaps as long as twenty-five years—for public awareness to catch up.

Fuller’s first creative period, roughly 1927 to 1946, concentrated on housing and transportation. In 1929 he acquired “Dymaxion” as a trademark when a wordsmith, hired by Chicago’s Marshall Field Department Store, renamed Fuller’s futuristic 4D House, which the store was displaying. The word combined dynamic, maximum, and tension, and expressed Fuller’s “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input” (McHale, p. 17). Enclosed by six aluminum and glass walls and divided into a living room, library, utility room, two bedrooms, and a covered patio, Fuller’s newly named Dymaxion House was suspended by six cables from a central mast that contained a staircase, electric power cables, and plumbing. Seen by more people than his housing prototypes, Fuller’s three Dymaxion cars (the first was built in 1933) caused excitement and foretold changes in car design. He used high-strength, lightweight materials for his streamlined, high-speed, three-wheeled, eleven-passenger Dymaxion cars (with rear motors, front-wheel drive, and single rear-wheel steering). The design of these extremely maneuverable vehicles—which were interim models of a design planned for both air and land travel—was based on the “maximum efficiency and low resistance in motion” of birds and fish (Sieden, p. 146).

Although industry sometimes backed his research, Fuller learned that he could not count on it to mass produce his inventions. Working first for the American Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company (1930–1932) and later for the Phelps-Dodge Corporation (1936), he refined his fully equipped, dye-stamped bathroom units until they could be plugged into a home like a refrigerator. Fearful of losing jobs, the plumbing establishment kept these units from being mass produced. To finance the development of his inventions, to continue his studies of structural principles, and to explore world economic planning, Fuller supplemented his uneven cash flow with inherited funds and even cashed insurance policies. In 1940, however, he realized a substantial profit when he utilized circular metal grain bins for his inexpensive Dymaxion Deployment Units, which the U.S. government bought to house troops and protect radar equipment in remote areas.

Fuller was eager to utilize resources efficiently. To popularize ecology and emphasize the dangers of pollution, he purchased in 1930 and edited anonymously for two years an architectural magazine called T-Square, which he renamed Shelter. During his tenure from 1938 to 1940 as Fortune magazine’s science and technology consultant, its tenth-anniversary issue, featuring Fuller’s charts and graphs comparing the resources of the United States with those of the world, was so successful that it sold out three printings. In his visual designs, he strove to make complex relations understandable, creating new formulations, such as using “energy” units rather than tonnage or man-hours. Despite the recognition he had gained, Fuller was not always taken seriously. Blaming that fact partly on his habits of drinking and partying, he gave up alcohol and tobacco in 1941. During World War II, from 1942 to 1944, while directing mechanical engineering for the U.S. Board (later Office) of Economic Warfare, he perfected his Dymaxion World Map. Published in 1943 by Life magazine in a huge 3,000,000-copy issue, it eliminated the distortions of the common Mercator projection by dividing the world into a regular spherical icosahedron of twenty equilateral triangles, then transforming it into a planar icosahedron, and finally cutting it apart to produce a flat map that could be centered on any point.

Fuller’s first creative period closed with the development of his Wichita House. Its prototype was built in 1945 and 1946 at the Beech Aircraft plant, where it was to be produced by assembly-line techniques. The project put into practice his plan, worked out while in the Office of Economic Warfare, to convert the aircraft industry into a postwar housing industry. A circular structure of aluminum, steel, and plexiglass—with a ventilator in its low-slung roof giving ten complete changes of air per hour—the house was an updated version of his earlier Dymaxion House. Of those viewing its spacious furnished prototype, 3,700 registered to buy it. In limited production each house would retail for $6,500; in full production (500,000 per year) that cost would be cut nearly in half. The financial backers of the Wichita House were satisfied with its prototype and, to cash in on the postwar housing boom, wanted to rush into production. Fuller, however, insisted on two more prototypes; when his backers refused, the plan was abandoned, and Fuller vowed never again to work on a project dependent on speculative capital.

The abrupt ending of Fuller’s Wichita project freed him to focus on his geodesic/tensegrity domes, which dominated his next creative period, 1947 to 1969. They were modeled on patterns he had long discerned in nature, and for two years he explored the mathematics (primarily spherical geometry) and the techniques involved in their construction. Fuller called his domes geodesics, the Greek name for the arcs of great circles, since they utilized the strength of the tetrahedron (a three-sided pyramid with a base) by creating a hemisphere of triangular struts forming trusses held in place by tension. Although a prototype—made from venetian blinds in the summer of 1948 with the help of students at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College—collapsed, the next summer’s dome of aluminum aircraft tubing stayed upright. That summer Kenneth Snelson, a sculpture student, illustrated the engineering principles of the geodesic dome with a model, which, held in place by taut wires, balanced tension to produce maximum strength. Fuller named the phenomenon “tensegrity” from the words “tension” and “integrity.” In 1958 biologists and physicists confirmed that geodesic/tensegrity domes replicated structural patterns occurring naturally at the most fundamental level in viruses and atomic nuclei. Nearly four decades later, in 1996, three chemists—Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Richard E. Smalley of Rice University and Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, England—won the Nobel Prize for their 1985 discovery of spherical molecular forms of carbon, which they called “fullerenes” or “buckyballs.”

In the 1950s Fuller’s geodesic domes inspired students on campuses all over the world and spread rapidly. They appeared at the Ford Motor Company River Rouge headquarters, at U.S. Marine Corps bases, and at radar installations (where they were called radomes). For a U.S. display at a 1956 International Trade Fair in Kabul, Afghanistan, a 100-foot-diameter geodesic dome was delivered by one cargo plane and erected in forty-eight hours. In assembling his domes, which exceeded 300,000 in his lifetime, Fuller used the innovative, efficient, and safe top-down construction method he had devised for his Dymaxion Deployment Units (always working at ground level, the top was hoisted on a mast to add lower sections). To manufacture his domes, Fuller in 1955 set up Synergetics, Inc., and Geodesics, Inc., but by 1966 he had licensed, for a 5 percent royalty under his patents, approximately 200 companies to build 3,000 geodesic domes.

Fuller’s most impressive geodesic design was the 250-foot-diameter, twenty-story, three-quarter sphere U.S. Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo in 1967. With a monorail entering its glimmering shell (composed of thousands of triangular plexiglass panels programmed by a computer to open or shut, according to the weather), the pavilion was a “totally dynamic” structure. Attracting and delighting 5.3 million fairgoers in six months, it won Fuller worldwide acclaim. He also created models of even grander schemes, including a floating city for Japan in the early 1960s; a revamped version of it for Baltimore later in that decade; in 1971, a model of Old Man River City, with a geodesic dome one mile in diameter, which he hoped would revitalize East St. Louis, Illinois; and a two-mile diameter dome for midtown Manhattan, which by eliminating snow removal costs would pay for itself in a decade. None of these was built, but their creativity and his outstanding versatility led contemporaries to compare Fuller to Leonardo da Vinci.

Using games, lectures, and writings, Fuller devoted his last period to saving “Spaceship Earth,” a term he coined in 1951 to encourage people to view themselves as passengers on a single-system planet with a common interest in its survival. Rejecting Malthusian notions that growing population threatened finite resources, he optimistically preached that the problem was not supply but maldistribution and waste of resources. In 1969, hoping to present to the public a dramatic summary of the material he had collected and the insights he had formed, he developed “World Game,” contrasting it with war games and concentrating on “livingry” rather than weaponry. His goal was to convince players, and through them the public, that what had become a “One-Town World” could support all its people if technology were employed on a worldwide basis. Divided into competing yet cooperative research and design teams, players in World Game seminars used Fuller’s archives on the world’s resources (dating back to his days at Fortune). The task of these players was to find ways to better conserve and allocate resources. Twenty-six students played a “pilot” World Game in early 1969 at the New York Studio School, but later that year Fuller conducted with the help of Edwin Schlossberg, who was then a young Ph.D. candidate, a full-fledged, two-week World Game seminar at Southern Illinois University. Other World Game seminars, with graduate students the chief participants, were held at various university campuses. These games exposed waste and inspired efforts to eliminate starvation, disease, homelessness, and poverty.

Fuller’s lectures were as famous as his geodesic domes. In these packed “thinking-out-loud” sessions, sometimes lasting six or more hours, he was energized by eye-to-eye contact with the very students whose radicalism frightened his generation. To give these lectures—whose number per year often topped 100 and reached 150 in 1974—he engaged in what he called “toing and froing,” rounding the globe fifty-seven times. He visited and revisited 544 different universities and colleges, and on these campuses he was the hero of those in the counterculture, who discovered that his concerns coincided with many of their own. Focusing in these encounters on the future, Fuller shared his faith that rational technological planning could solve its problems.

A prolific and versatile author and poet, Fuller received an appointment as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard from 1961 to 1962. Although his score or more books (many written with collaborators) sold more than a million copies, they were often complex and difficult to understand. His last books were not exceptions. In Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) and Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1979), Fuller fused his geometric-mathematical concepts with his understanding of the fundamental coordination of nature. His Critical Path (1980) and Grunch of Giants (1983) summed up his personal philosophy, observations, and solutions for future problems.

By focusing his great energy and intellect on promoting “the total use of total technology for total population” at the fastest possible pace, Fuller captured the attention of his contemporaries and completed numerous inventions for which he secured more than 2,000 world patents (Marks and Fuller, p. 9). He was on the cover of Time magazine in 1964; received more than 100 awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1983); held at least twenty-five academic appointments (the most lengthy one was at Southern Illinois University, where he and his wife lived in a geodesic dome); and was awarded forty-seven honorary degrees. Fuller died in Los Angeles, California. Throughout his life Fuller drew sustenance from the memory of his great aunt Margaret Fuller. Because, like him, she grappled with the Universe, a contemporary admirer used her celebrated statement to pair them across the generations:

“I’ll accept it,” Said the famous spinster.“I’ll explain it,” Said the bold Buckminster. (quoted in Applewhite, p. 146)