From Mary Bellis,
Your Guide to Inventors.
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In 1895, Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, MA, to a socially conscience family involved in activism and public service. "Bucky" as he was nicknamed, loved the family excursions to Bear Island, ME, where he became familiar with the principles of boat maintenance and construction and gained a respect for nature.

Early Inventing

From 1917 to 1919, Buckminster Fuller served in the U.S. Navy. During his service, he invented a winch for rescue boats that could quickly pull downed airplanes out of the ocean, saving the lives of pilots. Because of the invention, Fuller was nominated to receive officer training at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he studied engineering.

In 1926, when Fuller's father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, developed a new way of manufacturing reinforced concrete buildings, he and Fuller patented the invention together, earning Fuller the first of his 25 patents.

Dymaxion

As an inventor, Buckminster Fuller wanted to revolutionize construction and improve housing. He designed the Dymaxion House, an inexpensive, mass-produced home that could be airlifted to its location; the Dymaxion Car, a streamlined, three-wheeled automobile that could make extraordinarily sharp turns; a compact, prefabricated, easily installed Dymaxion Bathroom; and Dymaxion Deployment Units (DDUs), mass-produced houses based on circular grain bins.

The word "dymaxion" was coined by store advertisers and trademarked in Buckminster Fuller's name. Based on the words "dynamic," "maximum" and "ion," it became a part of the name of many of Fuller's subsequent inventions.

In 1927, Fuller made a now-prophetic sketch of the total earth which depicted his concept for transporting cargo by air "over the pole" to Europe. He entitled the sketch "a one-town world." In 1946, Fuller received a patent for another breakthrough invention: the Dymaxion Map, which depicted the entire planet on a single flat map without visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the continents.

After 1947, the geodesic dome dominated Fuller's life and career. Lightweight, cost-effective and easy to assemble, geodesic domes enclose more space without intrusive supporting columns than any other structure, efficiently distribute stress, and can withstand extremely harsh conditions. Based on Fuller's "synergetic geometry," his lifelong exploration of nature's principles of design, the geodesic dome was the result of his revolutionary discoveries about balancing compression and tension forces in building. Fuller applied for a patent for the geodesic dome in 1951 and received it in 1954.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Fuller was especially involved in creating World Game, a large-scale simulation and series of workshops he designed that used a large-scale Dymaxion Map to help humanity better understand, benefit from, and more efficiently utilize the world's resources.

Awards and Honors

After being spurned early in his career by the architecture and construction establishments, Buckminster Fuller was later recognized with many major architectural, scientific, industrial, and design awards, both in the United States and abroad, and he received 47 honorary doctorate degrees. In 1983, shortly before his death, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, with a citation acknowledging that his "contributions as a geometrician, educator and architect-designer are benchmarks of accomplishment in their fields."

R. Buckminster Fuller died in Los Angeles on July 1, 1983.