Buckminster Fuller, Intellectual Outlaw (original) (raw)

Photograph courtesy CSU Archives / Everett

When Richard Buckminster Fuller was in New Zealand a year ago, he spent several rewarding hours at the University of Auckland with a friend of his, a cultural anthropologist who also happens to be Keeper of the Chants of the people he belongs to, the Maoris. These chants go back more than fifty generations and constitute, in effect, an oral history of the Maoris, and Fuller, a man who is intensely interested in almost everything, undertook to persuade his friend that it was high time they were recorded on tape and made available to scholars, himself included. The anthropologist said that he had often thought of recording them, but that, according to an ancient tradition, the Keeper of the Chants was allowed to repeat them only to fellow-Maoris. Fuller thereupon launched into an extensive monologue. It was buttressed at every point by seemingly irrefutable data on tides, prevailing winds, boat design, mathematics, linguistics, archeology, architecture, and religion, and the gist of it was that the Maoris had been among the first peoples to discover the principles of celestial navigation, that they had found a way of sailing around the world from their base in the South Seas, and that they had done so a long, long time before any such voyages were commonly believed to have been made—at least ten thousand years ago, in fact. In conclusion, Fuller explained, with a straight face, that he himself had been a Maori, a few generations before the earliest chant, and that he had sailed off into the seas one day, lacking the navigational lore that gradually worked its way into the chants, and had been unable to find his way back, so that he had a personal interest in seeing that the chants got recorded. We have Fuller’s assurance that the anthropologist is now engaged in recording all the chants, together with their English translations.

The somewhat overwhelming effect of a Fuller monologue is well known today in many parts of the world, and while his claim to Maori ancestry must remain open to question, even that seems an oddly plausible conjecture. An association with the origins of circumnavigating the globe would be an ideal background for his current activities as an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, and comprehensive designer whose ideas, once considered wildly visionary, are now influential in so many countries that he averages a complete circuit of the globe each year in fulfillment of various lecture and teaching commitments. Fuller, who was seventy last July and whose vigor seems to increase with his years, gives every indication of enjoying to the hilt his more or less constant “toing and froing,” as he calls it. He often points out that man was born with legs, not roots, and that his primary natural advantage as a species is mobility. Fuller has adapted himself so well to the extreme mobility of his present life that he considers it preposterous to be asked where he lives. A New Englander by birth and heritage, descended from eight generations of Boston clergymen and lawyers, he has had his official base of operations since 1959 in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is a professor at Southern Illinois University in what he has designated as the field of “design science,” and where he and his wife occupy a plywood geodesic-dome house built according to the patented specifications of the best known and most successful of his many inventions. By agreement with the university, though, he spends only two months of the year, at most, in Carbondale, and much of that is in brief stopovers between jet flights to other cities, often on other continents. Perpetual mobility, he feels, is a perfectly satisfactory condition for a “world man,” which is what he firmly believes all of us are rapidly becoming.

The worldwide enthusiasm for Fuller’s ideas is by no means confined to university students, though they are currently his most fervent supporters. Professional mathematicians will undoubtedly question some of the premises of his “Energetic-Synergetic Geometry” when he finally gets around to publishing the definitive book on it that he has had in preparation for thirty-five years, but it is no longer possible to question the practical application of these same principles in such eminently satisfactory structures as the geodesic dome, which has been recognized as the strongest, lightest, and most efficient means of enclosing space yet devised by man. Over the last decade, moreover, scientists in other fields have been finding that Fuller’s research into nature’s geometry has anticipated some important discoveries of their own. Molecular biologists have now established that his mathematical formula for the design of the geodesic dome applies perfectly to the structure of the protein shell that surrounds every known virus. Several leading nuclear physicists are convinced that the same Fuller formula explains the fundamental structure of the atomic nucleus, and is thus the basis of all matter. As more and more people discover the comprehensive relevance of Fuller’s ideas, he finds himself increasingly involved in all sorts of new areas. The government, for example, recently appointed him a “Distinguished Scientist” at the United States Institute of Behavioral Research, in Washington. While this sort of recognition is highly gratifying to one who has always been something of a maverick, working outside the scientific Establishment, it has come as no particular surprise to him. Fuller long ago reached the conclusion that nature has a basic coördinate system, and he has been convinced for a good many years that the discovery of that system would eventually reunite all the scientific disciplines.

To the younger generation, the most stimulating thing about Fuller is probably his exhilarating contention that we have arrived at the threshold of “an entirely new philosophical era of man on earth.” For the first time in history, he argues, man has the ability to play a conscious, active role in his own evolution, and therefore to make himself a complete success in his environment. According to Fuller, this dazzling prospect was opened to us by Einstein’s concept of energy as the basis of the universe. “Einstein shattered the Newtonian cosmos,” he said recently. “In the famous first law of dynamics, Newton had said that a body persisted in a state of rest or constant motion except as it was affected by other bodies; he was assuming that the normal condition of all things was inertia. Einstein realized that all bodies were constantly being affected by other bodies, though, and this meant that their normal condition was not inertia at all but continuous motion and continuous change. The replacement of the Newtonian static norm by the Einsteinian dynamic norm really opened the way to modern science and technology, and it’s still the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history.”

More specifically, the new era was made possible by the phenomenal acceleration of science and technology in the twentieth century—a process that really began, Fuller says, during the First World War, when industry suddenly moved, in his words, “from the track to the trackless, from the wire to the wireless, from visible structuring to invisible structuring in alloys.” A good example of this process can be found in the performance of chrome-nickel steel, an alloy that was used for the first time in the First World War, to make cannon barrels more durable; because of an invisible molecular pattern that is created when chromium, nickel, and iron are combined, the resultant alloy held up under conditions of intense heat that would have quickly melted all three of its components separately. Most of the major advances in science and technology since 1914 have been in this invisible realm, which Fuller calls “synergy”—a term that can be defined as the behavior of whole systems in ways unpredictable by the individual behavior of their sub-systems. So far, Fuller maintains, the newest technology has been applied principally to the development of military power, or weaponry, rather than to housing and education and other aspects of what he calls “livingry.” Nevertheless, the shift of industry to the new invisible base has brought about such spectacular gains in over-all efficiency, such demonstrated ability to produce more and more goods and services from fewer and fewer resources, that mankind as a whole has inevitably profited. According to a statistical survey that Fuller made some years ago for Fortune, the proportion of all humanity enjoying the benefits of the highest technology had risen from less than six per cent in 1914 to twenty per cent in 1938. Today, Fuller places forty-four per cent of mankind in the category of technological “have”s, and it is his frequently stated conviction that by devoting a larger share of their industrial budget to world livingry the “have”s could very quickly bring the entire human race into contact with the highest technology, at which time the weighty problems that oppress us now—war, overpopulation, hunger, disease—would simply cease to exist.

To achieve this utopia, Fuller proposes a worldwide technological revolution. Such a revolution would not be led by politicians, and, in fact, would take place quite independently of politics or ideology; it would be carried out primarily by what he calls “comprehensive designers,” who would coordinate resources and technology on a world scale for the benefit of all mankind, and would constantly anticipate future needs while they found ever-better ways of providing more and more from less and less. One big question, of course, is whether the political and economic convulsions of the present era will allow the comprehensive designers time to carry out this kind of revolution. Fuller thinks that there is still time, but he also thinks that time is rapidly running out for humanity, and it is this belief that keeps him in virtually constant motion around the world, talking to students and training them to think comprehensively as they continue his search for nature’s basic patterns.

It is probably fitting that Fuller, as a true world man, should have no real home these days—or, rather, that he should feel at home wherever he happens to be. There is, however, one spot on the globe that comes reasonably close to being a fixed point in his life. Whenever possible, he tries to spend some part of each summer in Maine, on Bear Island, which has been owned by members of his family since 1904, and he has often referred to this place as the source of most of his ideas. “My teleological stimulation first grew out of boyhood experiences on a small island eleven miles off the mainland, in Penobscot Bay of the state of Maine,” he writes of Bear Island in the first chapter of “Ideas and Integrities” (Prentice-Hall), a recent volume of essays that constitutes his intellectual autobiography. With this statement in mind, I wrote to Fuller last spring in England, where he was just completing a one-month visiting professorship in the Department of Architecture at Bristol University, to ask if I could spend a few days with him on Bear Island. He wrote back immediately, inviting me to select a date in August for my visit.

Bear Island, I knew, has been preserved in virtually the same state of development as when Fuller’s grandmother bought it, in 1904—no telephone, no electricity, no running water—and this strikes some of Fuller’s friends as an odd setting for a man whose life is devoted to making the highest technology serve a hundred per cent of humanity. At the same time, I thought, it could be an ideal setting for someone like Fuller, who has always been interested in finding out how nature really works. The island lies approximately in the middle of East Penobscot Bay, about twelve miles east of Camden. Visitors usually take a boat over from Camden, on the mainland, but I had been staying with friends farther Down East and had therefore arranged to come over from the town of Sunset, which is only five miles from Bear on Deer Isle and can be reached by bridge from the mainland. Fuller and several members of his household had spent the afternoon buying groceries and other provisions in Stonington, the nearest town of any size on Deer Isle, and I met them all on the Sunset dock. In addition to Fuller, there was Mrs. Alphonse Kenison, a younger sister of Fuller’s, who has missed only three summers of her life at Bear Island, and who, more than anyone else, has kept the place going through the years; his niece Persis and her husband, Robert Alden, a young New York radio-network executive, and their two children; another niece, Persis’s sister Lucilla Marvel, and two of her children; and Pearl Hardie, a Maine native who lives for much of the year on Bear Island, where he acts as caretaker of the half-dozen buildings on the island and man of all work, as his father did before him. For the first time in years, Fuller’s wife, Anne, had not come to Bear Island this year; she was visiting their daughter, Mrs. Robert Snyder, in California.

Fuller put down a carton of canned goods he had been carrying, and came to greet me, smiling warmly and exposing what looked like a recently chipped front tooth. He is a rather stocky man, powerfully built, and with a massive squarish head and a stubble of white hair cut so short that it stands straight up, and he looked, I thought, about twenty years younger than someone who had celebrated his seventieth birthday the month before had any business looking. His face was almost unlined, and it was also deeply tanned from a recent Aegean cruise. Somewhat heavy features and owlish eyes, magnified enormously by thick lenses, which he has worn since boyhood, can make him appear a bit severe, and at times even forbidding, but that impression is immediately dispelled by his open, toothy, and utterly ingenuous smile.

Fog began rolling in as we finished loading the supplies aboard a motor launch, which was operated by Mr. Hardie, and by the time we had left Sunset Harbor, it was too thick for us to see much of Penobscot Bay. During the trip over, though, Fuller enthusiastically identified each landmark as it materialized through the mist. “There’s Eagle,” he told me, pointing out a large, wooded island. “And there’s John Quinn’s boarding house, where we stayed that first summer of 1904—the summer my father fell in love with Bear Island and talked his mother-in-law into buying it for the whole family. Nothing changes here, you see—that house looks exactly the same as it did then. I really think if my grandmother were to come back tomorrow she’d recognize almost everything.” He went on to say that his grandmother, Caroline Wolcott Andrews, had also bought two neighboring islands, Compass and Little Spruce Head, which formed part of the same deed, but that it was on Bear, with its fine natural harbor, that they had built a large house in 1905, bringing in all the necessary materials and labor from Boston aboard the schooner Polly, a hundred-year-old vessel that had served as a privateer in the War of 1812. “I used to row over to Eagle and back every day for the mail when I was a boy here,” Fuller said. “Four miles a day, often in very bad weather. It made me awfully tough—something I’ve never lost, by the way.”

Although he scarcely looked it, Fuller admitted to me that he was feeling a little run down at the moment. His schedule had been particularly demanding lately, and he had arrived only the day before—several days later than he had planned. From Bristol he had gone to Paris, to address an international assembly of architectural students, and from there to Athens, where he took part in a symposium sponsored by Constantinos Doxiadis, the Greek city planner, on board a chartered cruise ship; then he had flown back to the United States for a round of engagements, the most recent of which had been a conference at Princeton on how to improve the level of scientific education in the nation’s secondary schools. Fuller told me that for the first time in his life—perhaps because he had turned his ankle rather badly one evening on the Greek yacht while dancing the Twist—he had actually begun to feel his age. “I gained twenty pounds on this last trip,” he added confidentially. “It’s one of the really big problems on this kind of schedule—big, rich dinners everywhere, and all that airline food. I really need a few weeks of this Bear Island atmosphere.”

Approaching Bear Island in the fog, we could catch only occasional glimpses of its rocky shoreline. The island is about a mile long and half a mile wide, and is heavily wooded with spruce, pine, and white birch. Rounding the northernmost point, where the land rises sharply to a high bluff, we caught sight of the shingled roof of a large house, and a minute or so later Fuller pointed to an opening in the trees where we could just make out the shadowy arcs of an unfinished geodesic dome that had been, I was told, a family summer work project two years before. “I think it’s marvellous coming in with the fog this way,” Fuller said as we nosed slowly into the quiet harbor. “With any luck, it will clear tomorrow, and then you’ll be able to see where you are. We have a seventy-five-mile sweepout here, so there’s quite a lot to see.” (Like many other unfamiliar words that crop up in Fuller’s casual conversation, “sweepout” is a term borrowed from one of the scientific disciplines—in this case, astronomy; he used it to mean the range of activity that the eye could take in on all sides of Bear Island on a clear day.)

On the dock to meet the boat were a number of small children, most of them members of Mr. Hardie’s family, and several adults, including Mrs. Leslie Gibson, another niece of Fuller’s, and Professor Sidney Rosen, from the University of Illinois, and his wife. Professor Rosen, a science teacher who also writes biographies of great scientists for young readers, had been assigned by his publisher to write one of Fuller, and he was there to gather material for it. All the small children immediately began clamoring for Fuller’s attention. (They all called him Uncle Bucky, and I have observed that nearly all adults who have spent more than five minutes with him find it natural to call him Bucky.) He had to ask the children to repeat their questions several times into his ear, which he cupped patiently with one hand—his hearing, damaged during the First World War, has deteriorated quite a bit in recent years. This difficulty did not appear to discourage the children in the least, or to make even the youngest ones shy of him. After a certain amount of confusion, the supplies were transferred from the launch to a weathered jeep driven by Fuller’s sister, Mrs. Kenison, and the rest of us walked up to the main house, on the bluff.

When most of us had assembled in the big house before dinner, Fuller came downstairs carrying a large blue bullhorn, which he had purchased during his stay in England. He explained that he had found it a great boon at conferences and seminars, where he used it not as a loudspeaker but as a directional antenna; the horn had an electronic amplifier that worked both ways, he said, and by pointing the cone at a speaker across the room, holding the voice box near his good ear, and pressing the amplifier button, he could hear perfectly. “I used to be a real menace at conferences,” he told us. “I had to have everything repeated. People kept telling me I should get a hearing aid, but, you see, I’ve tried that several times, and it has convinced me that nobody really knows anything about how we hear. Hearing aids are non-selective—they just amplify all sounds. But I hear some sounds perfectly well—maybe even better than you do—and when those are amplified for me, it’s actually painful. With this marvellous device, though, I can be selective. I can pick up sounds just by pointing.” He held the horn to one ear and pointed it at Professor Rosen, across the room. “Say something in your normal voice, Sidney,” he demanded. Rosen said something too low for me to catch. Fuller said he could hear him perfectly. He passed the bullhorn around the room, so that everyone could try it out, and he slung it around his neck on a white cord when we went to dinner, which was served, like all meals at Bear Island, a few hundred feet from the main house in a farmer’s cottage that was on the property when Fuller’s grandmother bought it. It turned out that there was not enough room at the crowded table to use the bullhorn comfortably, so he soon gave up trying. The sound of many voices reflected off a low ceiling apparently made it almost impossible for Fuller to hear what anyone said, and, sitting at one end of the table watching the others but taking little part in the conversation, he looked, in the flickering light of kerosene lamps, a little sombre and withdrawn.

When dinner was over, though, he suggested to Professor Rosen and me that we stay on at the table and listen to a few things he had to tell us. As I knew from previous meetings, there is no such thing as an ordinary conversation with Fuller. One question is enough to set him talking for an hour or more, and often a question is not even necessary. His talk follows a process that the cyberneticists call “positive feedback,” in that each idea sets off a whole flock of related ideas in something like geometric progression; Fuller seems never to have forgotten anything he ever knew, and his command of statistical detail is awe-inspiring. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of these monologues is that, no matter how long and labyrinthine the digressions that crop up along the way, he invariably returns sooner or later to the primary subject of his discourse, and everything turns out to have been relevant. On that particular evening, he talked for a little longer than three hours. His voice gathered strength and momentum as he went along, and he could clearly have continued for another three hours if his listeners had been up to it. The main subject was his own system of mathematics, which he has been evolving for nearly half a century, and which underlies all his work in other fields.

Fuller began by telling us about meeting C. P. Snow in England two years ago. He said he was sympathetic to Snow’s view that there is a gap between the “two cultures” —the sciences and the humanities—but he did not agree that this gap had been caused by a spontaneous aversion to industrialization on the part of literary men. In Fuller’s opinion, scientists had caused it. Soon after the discovery of electromagnetics, in the nineteenth century, he said, scientists had decided that because electrical energy was invisible, it could not be represented to the layman in the form of models, and so they had decided to stop trying to explain what they were doing in terms that the layman could understand. “That’s really the great myth of the nineteenth century,” he said. “I told Snow the basic reason for the split was that science gave up models.”

Having made sure that this point was firmly established, Fuller set off on a survey of his self-education in mathematics. “At Milton Academy, in Massachusetts, where I went to school, I just loved mathematics,” he said. “I found I could get A in it whether or not they liked my face. I was severely cross-eyed then, and not a favorite student ever, and I really believed I was getting bad marks in my other subjects because the teachers didn’t like me. But they couldn’t do that in mathematics. At the same time, there were certain things that the mathematics teacher was saying and doing that I didn’t think were really valid, but it was a game you could learn to play, and you could do it right and get your A. For example, we’d been taught fractions, and one day the teacher—it was a woman—said, ‘I am now going to teach you a better way. It’s called decimals.’ She didn’t say why she hadn’t shown us the better way to begin with. She showed us that an eighth is point one two five, and a quarter is point two five, and a third is point three three three, and so on with threes, out the window and over the hill. I noticed that some of these numbers went out the window and others stayed in the classroom, and I didn’t think she really knew what she was talking about. I thought she was very pretty and appealing, and if that’s the way she wanted to play the game, I’d play it her way, because I’d been brought up to believe that adults knew all the answers and that you were just supposed to shut up and learn, but I also thought she wasn’t on any very profound team.

“Later on, we came to geometry. The teacher made a point on the blackboard, then erased it and said, ‘That doesn’t exist.’ She made a row of points, and said, ‘That’s a line, and it doesn’t exist, either.’ She made a number of parallel lines and put them together to form a plane, and said it didn’t exist. And then she stacked the planes one on top of the other, so that they made a cube, and she said that existed. I wondered how you could get existence out of nonexistence to the third power. It seemed unreasonable. So I asked her, ‘How old is it?’ The teacher said I was just being facetious. I asked her what it weighed and I asked how hot it was, and she got angry. The cube just didn’t have anything that I thought was existence, but I thought I was probably being unfriendly, and so I shut up. I got A’s in all my science work, and when I got to Harvard I didn’t go on with mathematics, because it was so easy—just a sort of game you played. I thought I’d take something really difficult, like government or English.

“I was kicked out of Harvard. I spent my whole year’s allowance in one week, and I cut classes and went out quite deliberately to get into trouble, and so naturally I got kicked out. I was sent to work in a factory in Canada making cotton-mill machinery, and I did very well there. It was a very important phase of my life, for I met shop foremen and machinists, and got to know a lot about their tools and about metals in general. I did so well that Harvard decided I was really a good boy and took me back the following year, but obviously I couldn’t stay at Harvard very long. [In his autobiography, Fuller wrote that what really bothered him at Harvard was the social institutions.] So I cut classes and got fired again. This time, I enlisted in the Navy, where again I began to do very well. Well, one day in 1917 I was standing on the deck of my ship looking back at the wake—it was all white because of the bubbles—and I began wondering idly how many bubbles there were back there. Millions, obviously. I’d learned at school that in order to make a sphere, which is what a bubble is, you employ pi, and I’d also learned that pi is an irrational number. To how many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? And I reached the decision right at that moment that nature didn’t use pi. I said to myself, ‘I think nature has a different system, and it must be some sort of arithmetical-geometrical coördinate system, because nature has all kinds of models.’ What we experience of nature is in models, and all of nature’s models are so beautiful. It struck me that nature’s system must be a real beauty, because in chemistry we find that the associations are always in beautiful whole numbers—there are no fractions. And if nature can accomplish all those associations in beautiful whole numbers to make all her basic structures, I thought, then the system will turn out to be a coördinate system and it will be very, very simple. And I decided then, in 1917, that what I’d like to do was to find nature’s geometry.”