Expelled from Harvard twice, he became the face of the geodesic dome
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) coined “Spaceship Earth”, collected 28 US patents and made the geodesic dome famous, even though a German engineer had patented one first. Chemists later named football-shaped carbon molecules fullerenes after his spheres, a tribute to a man Harvard threw out twice.
Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1895, the son of a leather and tea merchant and a grand-nephew of the transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller. Summers on Bear Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay taught him to build things from whatever he found in the woods; by 12 he had rigged an inverted umbrella to push a rowboat along. At school he objected to geometry lessons that treated a chalk dot as an empty point, a quarrel that later fed his synergetics.
Harvard expelled him twice, once after he blew his funds carousing with vaudeville performers and again, after readmission, for what it called irresponsibility. In between he was a mill mechanic in Canada and a meat-packing labourer, and in the First World War he served in the Navy as a radio operator and commander of a crash rescue boat. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917, and with her father built the Stockade system of light, fireproof housing, a firm that collapsed in 1927.
That year was a low point. His daughter Alexandra had died of polio and meningitis in 1922, he lost his job, and his second daughter, Allegra, was born with no family savings to fall back on. After a crisis beside Lake Michigan he resolved to find out what one person could do to help humanity by doing more with less, and by 1928 he was lecturing informally at a Greenwich Village café.
Summers teaching at Black Mountain College in 1948 and 1949 revived the dome project. Walther Bauersfeld had won a German patent for a geodesic dome in 1925, and Fuller’s application never mentioned it, but in 1949 he raised a self-supporting 14-foot dome of aircraft tubing and hung students from its frame to prove it. With Shoji Sadao he designed the US Pavilion dome for Expo 67 in Montreal, and Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983.
Source: Buckminster Fuller
