L. Steven Sieden
Seattle, Washington, Earth
July 1, 2011— 28 years after Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller’s death on July 1, 1983
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF DR. R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Fuller’s distinguished New England lineage included his aunt, the well-known transcendental feminist Margaret Fuller. The family’s history in America dated back to Fuller’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, British Navy Lt. Thomas Fuller, who traveled to the American colonies in 1630. Like previous generations of Fuller men, Bucky’s father, Richard Buckminster Fuller Sr., graduated from Harvard, but he was the first Fuller male in eight generations who did not become a minister or lawyer. So, it would seem that Bucky’s future path was established well before he was born.
As a Fuller man, he was expected to graduate from Harvard and become a minister or a lawyer. Bucky, however, had other ideas, and nothing could be farther from his life path than those two professions. Over the course of his life he often criticized organized religion (not spirituality) and the competitive corporate system, which he felt was dominated by greedy lawyers.
Bucky was a headstrong person who knew what he wanted and was willing to take enormous risks to achieve his goals, which were comprehensive and included the welfare and success of all life on the planet he named Spaceship Earth. Still, even in the last years of his life, he remained a humble “average man.” Despite the fact that he was a highly respected and honored global elder who had been presented with hundreds of awards and dozens of honorary degrees, he insisted that everyone call him “Bucky.”
From the early 1930s through his death in 1983, Bucky was an increasingly well-known global visionary with a twofold mission.
1) To demonstrate and document what one individual could achieve that could not be accomplished by any institution or organization no matter how affluent or powerful.
(2) To advocate and work for the success of all life on the planet he named Spaceship Earth using his Comprehensive, Anticipatory Design Science.
Long before the term ecology became a household word, he asserted that humankind was on the verge of an enormous shift in which resources had to be consciously recycled in order to survive and thrive. He also collected the data to prove that when we recycled resources we were doing more with less and, thus, would be able to eventually do so much more with so much less that we could support everyone on Earth.
Bucky’s contribution to humankind has yet to be fully appreciated. The fact that he consciously documented every aspect of his life provides us with an enormous amount of practical information. By examining his 56 Year Experiment on behalf of all humankind, we can begin to more clearly uncover what works and what doesn’t in living a life that makes a conscious positive difference.
This biography separates the multitude of Bucky’s experiences into four distinct periods. The first of those periods was from his birth in 1895 through 1927. That was a time of experimentation and learning. He extended himself and his environment outward in search of limits; often learning from the painful lessons most people would categorize as failure.
It was also a time of youthful exuberance and disappointment. Fuller suffered the loss of his father, graduated from Milton Academy, twice enrolled at and was expelled from Harvard University, and worked as an apprentice millwright in Canada.
Then he served as an officer in the Navy during World War I, married Anne Hewlett, and experienced the birth and untimely death of their first daughter. As a businessman, he held managerial positions in several diverse corporations and organized his own construction company. He used that company, Stockade Systems, to attempt establishing and propagating a radical new form of construction that failed financially after a few years. As a result of that endeavor, by 1927 he had lost all his money as well as the investments of his friends and family.
1927 marked the major shift in Bucky’s life and path as well as the beginning of the second period of his life, which lasted until 1947, when he invented the geodesic dome. With the loss of his construction company and the birth of his second daughter, Allegra, Bucky found himself stranded with a young family in 1927 Chicago. He had no money, no job no formal education beyond high school, a reputation as an unsuccessful businessman, and no prospects for the future.
Extremely dejected, he seriously considered drowning himself in Lake Michigan. It was then that Bucky had the famous mystical experience that transformed his life. He realized that he did not belong to himself and, consequently, did not have the right to end his own life.
In that cosmic flash, Bucky suddenly understood that he (like every human being) belonged to Universe, and he committed himself to an experiment that provided the foundation and context for his every action and decision during the next fifty-six years. He decided to embark upon a lifelong experiment to determine and document what one average, healthy individual with no college degree and no money could accomplish on behalf of all humankind that could not be achieved by any nation, business, organization, or institution, no matter how wealthy or powerful.
With no apparent means of support for his family much less his experiment, Bucky resolved to use the only person available for observation. Thus, R. Buckminster Fuller adopted the alias “Guinea Pig B,” one person under the constant scrutiny of himself.
During the twenty years from 1927 through 1947 a more mature Fuller devoted a great deal of his time to a formidable search for Nature’s coordinating system. The discoveries he made in that investigation eventually became his radical Synergetic Mathematics, a mathematical system based on what he observed in Nature rather than man-made ideas and concepts. That system also became the foundation for Bucky’s most famous invention, the geodesic dome, and other of his insights and creations.
Following his commitment to work on behalf of all humankind and to never again work for a living, the initial problem Bucky took on was the issue of housing the expanding population of Spaceship Earth. He worked sporadically on the mass-producible Dymaxion House from 1927 until Beech Aircraft and the United States government joined him to produce a prototype in 1944.
During the 1930s Bucky held positions at Phelps Dodge and Fortune magazine, and these provided him with an opportunity to study Earth’s resources and Nature’s efficient operating strategy of doing “more with less” resources. Once he realized the significant benefit of Nature’s way of doing everything, he adopted it as a primary aspect of his work and life. Years later, he would bring the phenomenon of doing more with less into the popular culture as “synergy,” a term he singlehandedly moved from the obscurity of the chemistry lab into the light of public awareness.
In 1947, during one of his many stints as a visiting college professor, he combined his mathematical skills with his knowledge of construction and Nature’s coordinating system to produce his most famous invention—the geodesic dome. The creation of the geodesic dome also ushered in the third significant period of his life, which spanned from 1947 through 1976 as he continued his explorations while attaining celebrity status for his work with geodesic domes.
In the 1955 at the age of sixty, Fuller could have retired on his licensing fees from the geodesic dome, but he had no interest in gaining great wealth or slowing down. Instead, he expanded his effort to create success for all humankind.
He personally designed and supervised the construction of most of the significant geodesic domes built during that