1947—Invents Geodesic Dome. First teaches at Black Mountain College.
1948—Teaches at MIT.
1949—Begins extensive travels responding to speaking invitations worldwide.
1952—Begins work on Ford Motor Dome in Detroit. Constructs first Geoscope with students at Cornell University. Receives Award of Merit, American Institute of Architects.
1954—Receives patent for Geodesic Dome. Receives first of his eventual forty-seven honorary degrees, Doctor of Design from North Carolina State University. Asked to design a geodesic dome to cover Dodger Stadium.
1955—First Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line Radomes are installed in Northern Canada.
1956—Becomes visiting lecturer at Southern Illinois University.
1957—Union Tank Car Dome in Louisiana and Kaiser Hawaii Symphony Dome are erected.
1958—Makes the first of many annual circuits traveling around the world speaking (primarily at universities).
1959—Appointed professor and awarded honorary doctor of arts degree at SIU, Carbondale IL. Sets up global headquarters at SIU.
He and Anne move into a Carbondale geodesic dome home.
1961—Granted patent for octet truss he first built in 1899 at the age of four.
1962—Appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University.
Establishes “Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs” (World Game) at SIU. Granted patent for tensegrity structure.
1963—Publishes the books No More Secondhand God, Ideas and Integrities, and Education Automation. Appointed to NASA’s Advanced Structures Research Team, which adopts his octet truss and geodesic dome as primary space structures.
1964—Subject of Time magazine cover story. Publishes Design Science Decade: World Inventory, Human Trends and Needs.
1966—Completes design for USA Pavilion at ’67 Montreal World’s Fair. Inaugurates World Game at SIU.
1967—Featured in Saturday Review cover story. Montreal Expo Dome draws record attendance of 5.3 million people in six months. Elected to honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa (Harvard) on the occasion of the fifty-year reunion of the Class of 1917 (from which he was expelled in his first year). Granted patent for star tensegrity.
1968—Elected to National Academy of Design and World Academy of Arts & Sciences. Appointed Distinguished University Professor at SIU
1969—Leads first public World Game workshop. Delivers Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture. Publishes Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Utopia or Oblivion.
1970—Publishes I Seem to Be a Verb. Installed as Master Architect for Life by Alpha Ro Chi Architectural Fraternity.
1971—Presents proposal for “Old Man River City” in East St. Louis, and it is accepted.
NBC broadcasts documentary Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth.
1972—Appointed “World Fellow in Residence” by a consortium of Philadelphia institutions.
Publishes Intuition and Buckminster Fuller to the Children of Earth. Delivers over one hundred twenty “thinking out loud” lectures around the world. Is featured as interview in Playboy magazine.
1973—Establishes publication and research office in Philadelphia.
Granted patents for floating breakwater and tensegrity dome. Moves to Philadelphia.
1974—Delivers over one hundred fifty “thinking out loud” lectures around the world. Granted a New York State architect’s license.
1975—Publishes Synergetics, The Geometry of Thinking. Is elected International President of the World Society for Ekistics. Granted patent for non-symmetrical tension-integrity structures. Inducted as a fellow in the American Institute of Architects.
1976—Participates in drafting “Declaration of Principles and Rights for American Children.”
Publishes And It Came To Pass—Not To Stay. Completes work on world’s first tetrahedronal book, Tetrascroll, which is published in limited edition.
1977—Designs and develops two new prototype geodesic domes, “Pinecone Dome” and “Fly’s Eye Dome.”
Travels on lecture of Far East sponsored by US government.
1978—Appears in ad for Honda Civic.
Becomes Senior Partner in NY architectural firm Fuller & Sadao.
1979—Publishes Synergetics 2, expanding on Synergetics and Buckminster Fuller on Education. Becomes Chairman of the Board of R. Buckminster Fuller, Sadao & Zung Architects of Ohio. Becomes Senior Partner of Buckminster Fuller Associates, London, England.
1980—Granted patent for tensegrity truss. Delivers over ninety “thinking out loud” lectures around the world.
Moves to Pacific Palisades, CA, near his daughter Allegra and her family.
1981—Publishes Critical Path. Inducted into the “Housing Hall of Fame.”
1982—Publishes three books: Grunch of Giants, Inventions, and Humans in Universe. Designs and supervises Dymaxion “Big Map” the size of a basketball court and displays it to members of the US Congress. Delivers over seventy “thinking out loud” lectures around the world. Inducted into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame. Granted patent for hanging storage shelf unit.
1983—Honored in daylong “Integrity Day” presentations in several US cities. Dies July 1 in Los Angeles, CA.
ROADMAP TO UNIVERSE
LOGISTICS & STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
THIS SOMEWHAT SUCCINCT AND EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND (FOR Buckminster Fuller) quote expresses the context of this book. A Fuller View is designed to support us all (including me, the author) in eliminating fear and handling the challenges that face us both individually and as a global society. The quotes selected in this book are both profound and easy to digest quickly. Although they are some of Bucky’s best, they in no way come close to the complex intensity that pervades the majority of his writing and speaking. The following is a more typical Bucky sentence / paragraph selected from Chapter 2 of Fuller’s diminutive book Grunch of Giants:
“In contradistinction to brains, which are constructed of physical matter, the weightless, matterless, metaphysical mind has the unique capability, from time to time, to discover eternal interrelationships existing invisibly between special-case experiences, which interrelationships cannot be discovered by any or all of the brain’s physical sense systems--for instance, the mathematical law governing gravity’s invisibly cohering not only the Sun and its multi-millions-of-miles-apart planets as discovered by the weightless invisible conceptual thought-relaying from the mind of Kepler to Galileo to Newton and as also cohering the never-anywhere-intertouching parts of local Universe systems of galaxies, and electrons remote from their nuclei.”
If you spend as much time as I have with Bucky and material such as this sentence, it will eventually morph into something very clear and extremely relevant. In today’s world, however, most of us don’t have the time, much less the interest, to interpret massive