Richard Buckminster Fuller was a renowned 20th century inventor and visionary born in Milton, Massachusetts on July 12, 1895. Dedicating his life to making the world work for all of humanity, Fuller operated as a practical philosopher who demonstrated his ideas as inventions that he called 'artifacts'.
Fuller did not limit himself to one field but worked as a ‘comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist’ to solve global problems surrounding housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty. Throughout the course of his life Fuller held 28 patents, authored 28 books, received 47 honorary degrees. While his most well-known artifact, the geodesic dome, has been produced over 300,000 times worldwide, Fuller’s true impact on the world today can be found in his continued influence upon generations of designers, architects, scientists and artists working to create a more sustainable planet. Fuller's life and career were as diverse as his interests and accomplishments. Ultimately he became a prolific author, a world-traveling lecturer, and a beloved influencer of millions.
During the autumn of 1927, after a series of failures and the death of his young daughter, Fuller contemplated suicide by drowning in Lake Michigan, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment...He experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:
From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.
Fuller spent nearly two years as a recluse, deep in contemplation about the universe and how he could best contribute to humanity. He stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He ultimately chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity".
When speaking to audiences, Fuller would frequently recount the story of his Lake Michigan experience, and its transformative impact on his life.
Dymaxion™ House
One of Fuller’s lifelong interests was using technology to revolutionize construction and improve human housing. In 1927, after inventing an easily built, air-delivered, modular apartment building, he designed the Dymaxion™ House, an inexpensive, mass-produced home that could be airlifted to its location.
He also designed the Dymaxion Car, a streamlined, three-wheeled automobile that could make extraordinarily sharp turns; a compact, prefabricated, easily installed Dymaxion Bathroom; and Dymaxion Deployment Units (DDUs), mass-produced houses based on circular grain bins. While DDUs never became popular for civilian housing, they were used during World War II to shelter radar crews in remote locations with severe climates, and they led to additional round housing designs by Fuller.
The Geodesic Dome
After 1947, one invention dominated Fuller’s life and career: the Geodesic Dome. Lightweight, cost-effective, and easy to assemble, geodesic domes enclose more space without intrusive supporting columns than any other structure; they efficiently distribute stress; and they can withstand extremely harsh conditions. Based on Fuller’s 'synergetic geometry', his lifelong exploration of nature’s principles of design, the geodesic dome was the result of his revolutionary discoveries about balancing compression and tension forces in building.
Buckminsterfullerene
After Fullers death, when chemists discovered that the atoms of a recently discovered carbon molecule were arrayed in a structure similar to a geodesic dome, they named the molecule 'Buckminsterfullerene'.
Model of the C60 fullerene carbon molecule, named after Fuller, which is also informally referred to as a “buckyball”.
World Game
In the 1960’s Buckminster Fuller proposed a 'great logistics game' and 'world peace game' (later shortened to simply, the 'World Game') that was intended to be a tool that would facilitate a comprehensive, anticipatory, design science approach to the problems of the world. The use of 'world' in the title obviously refers to Fuller’s global perspective and his contention that we now need a systems approach that deals with the world as a whole, and not a piece meal approach that tackles our problems in what he called a “local focus hocus pocus” manner. The entire world is now the relevant unit of analysis, not the city, state or nation.
The World Game that Fuller envisioned was to be a place where individuals or teams of people come to compete or cooperate and...
“To make the world work for 100 % of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”