Buckminster Fuller

Fuller grew up on Bear Island, Maine, the grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist critic, and so nearsighted as a small child that he thought trees were fuzzy masses of green rather than individual leaves. Harvard expelled him once for spending his tuition on a vaudeville troupe and, after his family bought his way back in, expelled him again for what it called irresponsibility. He worked in a textile mill and a meatpacking plant, then served in the Navy through World War I as a radio operator. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917 and, with her father, started a company building lightweight houses of compressed-fiber blocks. Their first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922 of complications from polio and meningitis, in a damp apartment Fuller suspected had contributed to her death.

The building company failed in 1927, the year his second daughter, Allegra, was born, and Fuller stood on the shore of Lake Michigan one night, broke and unemployed, weighing whether to walk into it. He decided instead, he said afterward, to treat his own life as an experiment in what a single person could do for everyone else. What followed was 28 patents and a vocabulary of his own coinage: the three-wheeled Dymaxion car of 1933, one of which crashed and killed its driver at the Chicago World's Fair, the mass-producible Dymaxion house, of which only two were ever built, and the geodesic dome, patented in 1954, light enough to enclose a football field in aluminum tubing and later used for everything from Army radar shelters to the Montreal Biosphere of 1967.

Fuller is remembered as the man who invented the geodesic dome, and he was not. A German engineer, Walther Bauersfeld, patented the same structural principle in 1922 for the Zeiss planetarium in Jena, more than two decades before Fuller filed his own patent, which made no mention of Bauersfeld's work. Fuller's defenders point out that he independently worked out the mathematics and did far more to spread the design — his critics note that the credit, the fame and the money all attached to his name regardless. He kept close count of his own life instead — a diary he called the Dymaxion Chronofile, filed every 15 minutes of every day from 1920 onward, eventually running to more than 270 feet of paper, an archive of a man documenting himself as scrupulously as he tracked the structures he built.

Fuller had a heart attack while sitting beside his wife's hospital bed as she lay dying of cancer, and died within the hour. Anne died 36 hours later, and they are buried together at Mount Auburn Cemetery under a stone that reads simply Trim Tab, his own metaphor for how one small, well-placed choice can steer something enormous. Chemists Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley named a newly discovered carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene in 1985 because its structure echoed his domes, winning them the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Fuller had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom five months before he died. The buckyball outlasted the argument over who actually invented its namesake shape.

Buckminster Fuller's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Dymaxion House invention
  A prefabricated, mass-producible home — only two were ever built 1929
• Dymaxion Car invention
  Three-wheeled and aerodynamic — one prototype crashed fatally 1933
• Dymaxion Map invention
  A world map projection designed to minimize continental distortion 1943
• Geodesic dome patent
  U.S. Patent 2,682,235 — later used for the Montreal Biosphere 1954
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth book
  His best-known statement of his design philosophy 1968
• Critical Path book
  One of his last major books 1981

• 1917 aged ~22 Marries Anne Hewlett and joins the Navy
• 1922 aged ~27 His daughter Alexandra dies at three Complications of polio and meningitis, in housing Fuller suspected was to blame.
• 1927 aged ~32 His building company fails and he considers suicide on Lake Michigan He described the decision that followed as turning his life into an experiment.
• 1933 aged ~38 The Dymaxion car prototype crashes at the Chicago World's Fair The driver was killed. Fuller said a second vehicle caused the rollover.
• 1954 aged ~59 Receives the geodesic dome patent
• 1967 aged ~72 The Montreal Biosphere opens as the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67
• February 23, 1983 aged 87 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• July 1, 1983 aged 87 Dies of a heart attack at his dying wife's bedside Anne died 36 hours later.

• Isamu Noguchi 1904–1988
  Sculptor and designer whose works blend Japanese and American modernist traditions. early collaborator
• Walt Disney 1901–1966
  Animator and business magnate who created Mickey Mouse and built the world's largest entertainment empire. built on his idea at Epcot
• Willem de Kooning 1904–1997
  Abstract expressionist whose gestural paintings helped define the New York School. fellow Black Mountain College faculty
• Robert Rauschenberg 1925–2008
  Mixed-media artist whose Combines broke down boundaries between painting and sculpture. studied at Black Mountain College under him