Fuller, R. Buckminster
A major contributor to scientific engineering and environmental studies, Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (1895–1983) was born on July 12 in Milton, Massachusetts, and died July 1 in Los Angeles, California. His epitaph, "TRIMTAB," sums up the worldview of the man who coined the term "spaceship earth." Trim tab is an aviator's term that refers to adjusting the wing's surface in order to change direction slightly. "TRIMTAB" refers to Fuller's belief that no one could actually steer the entire spaceship earth, but one could adjust the course slightly and stabilize it in times of turbulence.
Fuller entered Harvard in 1914, only to be expelled twice for "irresponsibility and lack of interest." From this inauspicious educational beginning, Fuller went on to receive forty-four honorary degrees, lecture at more than five hundred universities around the world, author twenty-four books as well as hundreds of articles, travel around the world more than forty times, and hold twenty-six patents.
Fuller was an environmentalist long before the word was popular. In 1927, Fuller designed Dymaxion House, a metal structure hung from a central mast with outer walls of glass. The unique house was heated and cooled by natural means, created its own power, included prefabrication, had rotating closets, was self-vacuuming, and was storm- and earthquake-proof. He built an example of the Dymaxion House in 1946 in Wichita, Kansas.
R. Buckminster Fuller, 1895–1983. The American architect and engineer was in a broad sense a product designer who understood architecture as well as the engineering sciences in relation to mass production and in association with the idea of total environment. (AP/Wide World Photos.)In naming this contribution, Fuller demonstrated he was also a master of creating neologisms.
Dymaxion is a combination of "dynamic," "maximum," and "ion." These three properties characterize his design strategy applied to many different problems.
For the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago, Fuller designed and built the Dymaxion Car. It had three wheels, was twenty feet long, carried eleven passengers, got thirty miles to a gallon of gasoline, and obtained a speed of 120 miles per hour. The car could make a u-turn within its own length.
In 1936, Fuller turned his attention to poor sanitation and the high cost of bathrooms. The five-square-foot Dymaxion Bathroom was his solution. The prefabricated bathroom consisted of four sections of either sheet metal or molded plastic. All of the necessary pipes, wires, and appliances were built in so that the entire unit merely required being hooked up. Both the sink and bath/shower allowed easy access by children and seniors.
In 1940, recognizing the need for military housing, Fuller designed and built the Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU). The DDU was a circular structure twenty feet in diameter made of corrugated galvanized steel, lined with wallboard on the inside and insulated with fiberglass. The house was naturally air-conditioned. Superheated air rising from the outer steel walls created a vacuum under the house that sucked cool air down the ventilator.
Fuller's Dymaxion Airocean World Map shows the continents on a flat surface without any visible distortion. On this map, the earth appears to be approximately one island surrounded by water. In the March 1, 1943, issue, Life magazine published Fuller's world map. That issue sold 3 million copies, the largest circulation of the magazine to that date.
In 1945, the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine house was designed and built. This was a vast improvement on the DDU house. The intention was to create a prefabricated house at low cost whose disassembled parts could be shipped anywhere in the world to meet the housing needs that were emerging at the end of World War II. The house was featured in Fortune magazine and generated thousands of unsolicited orders. These orders were never filled because of ethical differences between Fuller and financiers.
In 1948 Fuller created the most well known of his designs, the geodesic dome. A geodesic dome was selected for the United States Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Exposition, where it still stands.
Buckminster Fuller was an early thinker about the entire earth. His Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1978) helped to focus world attention on one earth and the growing need to work together for survival. In poetic works such as No More Secondhand God (1963), Fuller also imbued technology with religious significance and called on human beings to accept responsibility for their god-like powers. He argued that human beings had to either create utopia or destroy themselves. Synergetics and Synergistics 2 (1975 and 1979) is Fuller's mathematical masterpiece concerning the geometry of nature and the universe.
A truly remarkable man, Fuller's contributions all focused on what he referred to as a "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science." In this view, the science is directed to anticipating human problems and solving them by providing more and more support for everyone, with less and less resources. Yet Fuller often expressed himself in a vocabulary that critics sometimes found eccentric if not opaque.
Earth;; Earth Systems Engineering and Management;; Efficiency;; Engineering Ethics;; Environmentalism.
Bibliography
Fuller, Buckminster. (1938). Nine Chains to the Moon. New York: J. B. Lippencott. Fuller's solution to the space trajectory to the moon.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1962). Education Automation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press. Thoughts about educationally effective and environmentally safe applications of automation.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1963). No More Secondhand God. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Fuller's view of how technology and the spiritual are related.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1970 [1928]). 4-D Timelock. Corrales, NM: The Lama Foundation. Fuller's view of the space-time continuum.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1973). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. New York: Penguin. A view of earth as a contained spaceship with finite and non-renewable natural resources.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1975). Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. New York: Macmillan. The geometry of nature is presented in this volume and the second volume.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1979). Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. New York: Macmillan.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1981). Critical Path. New York: St. Martin's Press. An economic analysis solving problems within the model of using less to obtain more.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1983). Grunch of Giants. New York: St. Martin's Press. An extension of critical path with applications of Fuller's geometry of nature.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1983). Inventions—The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: St. Martin's Press. A compendium of Fuller's inventions.
Fuller, Buckminster. (1992). Cosmography. New York: Macmillan. Published posthumously. An extension of Fuller's views of the universe and the earth as one of its elements.
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