Best known as the inventor of the Geodesic Dome, engineer, architect, inventor, and philosopher Buckminster Fuller epitomized old-fashioned American know-how, and was an apostle of the democratizing possibilities of technology. Convinced his inventions and designs might prove the salvation of the human race, for more than 50 years the diminutive autodidact talked a blue streak, tirelessly lecturing to audiences around the world, all the while churning out a seemingly endless procession of designs and elaborations on earlier designs. Circumnavigating the globe twice in the year of his death, he went to his grave convinced of the efficacy of these beliefs—that one day, his inventions would revolutionize human life.

Born to an illustrious New England family, Richard Buckminster Fuller (nicknamed Bucky as a child, an appellation he would never outgrow) was an awkward child with poor eyesight and mismatched legs requiring the insertion of a...