by Albert Aunchman

Created on: May 20, 2008

Buckminster Fuller, born in Milton Massachusetts in 1895, became one of the most fascinating and original thinkers of this century. The first of his family to fail to graduate form Harvard University in a hundred years, he managed to have a profound effect on the world around him. He was an inventor, engineer, mathematician, poet and cosmologist.

He was the last of the New England Transcendentalists, and true to his beliefs, rejected established religion and political ideas of the past. He, instead, embraced and idealistic system of thought that saw the essential unity in the natural world and relied on intuition and experimentation to try to understand it. He went beyond the ideas of his New England forerunners, proposing that only a deep understanding of technology could guide humans to conduct that would eventually save society. In 1927 he decided to work always and only for all humanity. He was one of the world's first futurists, thinking always in global terms. In a Time Magazine article (Jan. 10, 1964, Vol.83 no 2) he was called the "first poet of technology," " the greatest living genius of industrial-technical realization in building," "an anticipator of the world to comewhich is different than being a prophet," "a seminal thinker," and "an inspired child." He is lumped together with giants like Edison and Thoreau, men who saw things as no others would and believed that anything could be accomplished, if you set your mind to it. As with most geniuses, these accolades came only recently and for most of his life he was simply perceived as a crackpot.

His first venture in forming a company, The Stockade Building System, resulted in financial failure, which led to his personal bankruptcy. The death of his four year old daughter in 1922, from what he felt was due to inadequate housing conditions, had a profound effect on how he viewed the world. This led to his founding the 4-D Company, in New York, to develop his design concepts. He wanted to create a " design science" that would find the best solutions to problems using a minimal consumption of energy and materials.

This led Fuller to examine what could be called the first "geodesic" dome. This dome was designed just after World War l, by Walther Bauersfeld, Chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, as a planetarium for his new projector. Thirty years later Buckminster Fuller named it "geodesic". Although he cannot take credit for inventing the "geodesic dome", he improved and developed the idea,

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