82 Facts About Buckminster Fuller

1.

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist.

2.

Buckminster Fuller served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983.

3.

Buckminster Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates.

4.

Buckminster Fuller was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, on the occasion of the 50-year reunion of his Harvard class of 1917.

5.

Buckminster Fuller was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968.

6.

Buckminster Fuller became a full Academician in 1970, and he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects the same year.

7.

Buckminster Fuller received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him on February 23,1983, by President Ronald Reagan.

8.

The unusual middle name, Buckminster Fuller, was an ancestral family name.

9.

Buckminster Fuller used to sign his name differently each year in the guest register of his family summer vacation home at Bear Island, Maine.

10.

Buckminster Fuller spent much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine.

11.

Buckminster Fuller was dissatisfied with the way geometry was taught in school, disagreeing with the notions that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented an "empty" mathematical point, or that a line could stretch off to infinity.

12.

Buckminster Fuller often made items from materials he found in the woods, and sometimes made his own tools.

13.

Buckminster Fuller experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats.

14.

Later in life, Buckminster Fuller took exception to the term "invention".

15.

Buckminster Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.

16.

Buckminster Fuller attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and after that began studying at Harvard College, where he was affiliated with Adams House.

17.

Buckminster Fuller was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest".

18.

Between his sessions at Harvard, Buckminster Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry.

19.

Buckminster Fuller served in the US Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as commander of the crash rescue boat USS Inca.

20.

Buckminster Fuller recalled 1927 as a pivotal year of his life.

21.

Barry Katz, a Stanford University scholar who wrote about Buckminster Fuller, found signs that around this time in his life Buckminster Fuller had developed depression and anxiety.

22.

In 1927, at age 32, Buckminster Fuller lost his job as president of Stockade.

23.

The Buckminster Fuller family had no savings, and the birth of their daughter Allegra in 1927 added to the financial challenges.

24.

Buckminster Fuller drank heavily and reflected upon the solution to his family's struggles on long walks around Chicago.

25.

Buckminster Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life.

26.

Buckminster Fuller felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light.

27.

Buckminster Fuller stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life.

28.

Buckminster Fuller ultimately chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity".

29.

Buckminster Fuller accepted a job decorating the interior of the cafe in exchange for meals, giving informal lectures several times a week, and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the cafe.

30.

Buckminster Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949, serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949.

31.

Buckminster Fuller had been shy and withdrawn, but he was persuaded to participate in a theatrical performance of Erik Satie's Le piege de Meduse produced by John Cage, who was teaching at Black Mountain.

32.

For half of a century, Buckminster Fuller developed many ideas, designs and inventions, particularly regarding practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation.

33.

Buckminster Fuller documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously by a daily diary, and by twenty-eight publications.

34.

Buckminster Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited funds, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion car project.

35.

Buckminster Fuller lectured at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 1949, where he met James Fitzgibbon, who would become a close friend and colleague.

36.

In 1962, the artist and searcher John McHale wrote the first monograph on Buckminster Fuller, published by George Braziller in New York.

37.

Nevertheless, his time in Carbondale was "extremely productive", and Buckminster Fuller was promoted to university professor in 1968 and distinguished university professor in 1972.

38.

From 1972 until retiring as university professor emeritus in 1975, Buckminster Fuller held a joint appointment at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he had designed the dome for the campus Religious Center in 1971.

39.

Buckminster Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity.

40.

Buckminster Fuller hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity".

41.

Buckminster Fuller referred to himself as "the property of universe" and during one radio interview he gave later in life, declared himself and his work "the property of all humanity".

42.

In 1976, Buckminster Fuller was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

43.

Buckminster Fuller's last filmed interview took place on June 21,1983, in which he spoke at Norman Foster's Royal Gold Medal for architecture ceremony.

44.

Buckminster Fuller died on July 1,1983,11 days before his 88th birthday.

45.

Buckminster Fuller was a Unitarian, and, like his grandfather Arthur Buckminster Fuller, a Unitarian minister.

46.

Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist, aware of Earth's finite resources, and promoted a principle he termed "ephemeralization", which, according to futurist and Buckminster Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, was defined as "doing more with less".

47.

Buckminster Fuller coined the word synergetics, a catch-all term used broadly for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, and more specifically, the empirical study of systems in transformation; his focus was on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components.

48.

Buckminster Fuller was a pioneer in thinking globally, and explored energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design.

49.

Buckminster Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities had become unnecessary.

50.

Buckminster Fuller was influenced by Alfred Korzybski's idea of general semantics.

51.

Buckminster Fuller wrote that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra.

52.

Buckminster Fuller developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space.

53.

An examination of the geodesic design by Walther Bauersfeld for the Zeiss-Planetarium, built some 28 years prior to Buckminster Fuller's work, reveals that Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome patent is the same design as Bauersfeld's.

54.

The Buckminster Fuller Dome is referenced in the Hugo Award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, in which a geodesic dome is said to cover the entire island of Manhattan, and it floats on air due to the hot-air balloon effect of the large air-mass under the dome.

55.

The Omni-Media-Transport:With such a vehicle at our disposal, [Buckminster Fuller] felt that human travel, like that of birds, would no longer be confined to airports, roads, and other bureaucratic boundaries, and that autonomous free-thinking human beings could live and prosper wherever they chose.

56.

Buckminster Fuller associated the word Dymaxion, a blend of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension to sum up the goal of his study, "maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input".

57.

Buckminster Fuller focused on the landing and taxiing qualities, and noted severe limitations in its handling.

58.

Buckminster Fuller blamed the accident on a second car that collided with the Dymaxion.

59.

One of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Houses is on display as a permanent exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

60.

In 1967, Buckminster Fuller developed a concept for an offshore floating city named Triton City and published a report on the design the following year.

61.

In 1969, Buckminster Fuller began the Otisco Project, named after its location in Otisco, New York.

62.

Buckminster Fuller referred to these buildings as monolithic ferroconcrete geodesic domes.

63.

Buckminster Fuller wore thick-lensed spectacles to correct his extreme hyperopia, a condition that went undiagnosed for the first five years of his life.

64.

Buckminster Fuller's hearing was damaged during his naval service in World War I and deteriorated during the 1960s.

65.

In public appearances, Buckminster Fuller always wore dark-colored suits, appearing like "an alert little clergyman".

66.

Buckminster Fuller learned the importance of physical appearance as part of one's credibility, and decided to become "the invisible man" by dressing in clothes that would not draw attention to himself.

67.

Buckminster Fuller carries an ear trumpet, of green plastic, with WORLD SERIES 1965 printed on it.

68.

Buckminster Fuller's smile is golden and frequent; the man's temperament is angelic, and his energy is just a touch more than that of [Robert] Gallway.

69.

Buckminster Fuller reportedly kept this Dymaxion sleep habit for two years, before quitting the routine because it conflicted with his business associates' sleep habits.

70.

Buckminster Fuller was described as "tireless" by Barry Farrell in Life magazine, who noted that Fuller stayed up all night replying to mail during Farrell's 1970 trip to Bear Island.

71.

Buckminster Fuller documented his life copiously from 1915 to 1983, approximately 270 feet of papers in a collection called the Dymaxion Chronofile.

72.

Buckminster Fuller kept copies of all incoming and outgoing correspondence.

73.

The enormous R Buckminster Fuller Collection is currently housed at Stanford University.

74.

Buckminster Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and said it was important to describe the world as accurately as possible.

75.

Buckminster Fuller often created long run-on sentences and used unusual compound words as well as terms he himself invented.

76.

Buckminster Fuller used the word Universe without the definite or indefinite article and always capitalized the word.

77.

Buckminster Fuller wrote that "by Universe I mean: the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated Experiences".

78.

The words "down" and "up", according to Buckminster Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience.

79.

Buckminster Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition.

80.

Buckminster Fuller invented the word "livingry", as opposed to weaponry, to mean that which is in support of all human, plant, and Earth life.

81.

In June 2008, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe", the most comprehensive retrospective to date of his work and ideas.

82.

Buckminster Fuller is briefly mentioned in X-Men: Days of Future Past when Kitty Pryde is giving a lecture to a group of students regarding utopian architecture.