Basic facts: Richard Buckminster Fuller's life began in Massachusetts in 1895. Fuller entered Harvard as his male ancestors had for four generations since 1760 but as a freshman was expelled not once but twice, the second time being "promptly re-expelled as generally irresponsible."

After stints in textile mills, Armour and Company, the Navy and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, he married Anne Hewlett in 1917 and fathered a daughter Alexandra. Alexandra was born ill. Fuller and his father-in-law, a noted architect, founded a construction venture called the Stockade Building System. Fuller oversaw the construction of four or five small factories and 240 small residences in the eastern United States.before Fuller was forced out of the company in 1927, just as Alexandra took a turn for the better then suddenly died, at the age of four, in Fuller's arms.

Depressed and confused and stranded in an expensive apartment in Chicago, Fuller had an emotional crisis. This moment in his life is described variously through the books, but among the most dramatic is on the slipjacket of "Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller," "In 1927 Bucky Fuller was a total failure, a college dropout, penniless, unable to support his wife and newborn (second) daughter, a man on the verge of suicide. Standing on the edge of Lake Michigan, he underwent a profound religious experience that was to shape the course of his activity for the next fifty years. Committing 'ego-cide,' he turned away from efforts aimed only at his own personal advantage and dedicated his life to doing what needed to be done for the advantage of all humanity."

Fuller himself was to call this moment a 'blind date with principle'. The result was another fifty years of not-for-profit work for the good of humankind -- at least, that was the content of the inspirational talk he gave afterwards.

Following this crisis, and after a year in which Fuller shut himself up figuratively to furiously research, read, and write (and shut himself up literally, speaking to nobody but Anne), Fuller emerged and first gained national attention with his glassy, hexagonal model of his Dymaxion House, which he showed and gave lunchtime lectures on at Marshall Field's in Chicago. Designed as a mass-producible prototype of a dwelling, it hung around a central mast that contained the service core. The Dymaxion House was never built and technically not patented. Fuller's evident intent was to find capital for the mass production of this house, which did not happen.

In 1933 came the patent application for the Dymaxion Car, an egg-shaped, three-wheeled metal chariot. Hugh Kenner quotes him, "I knew everybody would call it a car. It was the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin-orientable-jet-stilts flying device." Three were actually individually crafted. Anticipating the Chrysler Airflow by several years, it was the first streamlined automobile and could reportedly do 120 miles per hour on a standard 90 horsepower engine. It could describe a one-foot 180-degree turn at 15 MPH, since it steered on the single, rear wheel. At 21 feet long, it could carry 12 passengers in an interior yacht-like space as roomy as a minivan, and it got 28 miles per gallon at a time in history when MPG was not in the common vocabulary. Of the three built, one survives and is on demonstration at Harrah's Auto Museum in Reno Nevada.

Fuller was undeniably well-connected, and through the war he continued to write, notably for Fortune magazine, and he courted and was courted by various industrialists who saw a future in The Future. After the war, Fuller became involved in a second hamburger-shaped mass-production house project at Beech Aircraft in Wichita Kansas. Although that project held great promise and had reached the marketing stage with enthusiastic results from customers who sent Beech unsolicited orders for the house, the project fell through for reasons which remain unclear.

The overall pattern of Fuller's activity to this point is relatively clear. Fuller had been busy all these years applying logical design principles to the two most expensive American necessities, the house and the car, in hopes of revolutionizing those industries in favor of cheap, efficient, logical mass production. He was hoping to single-handedly bring about his Design Science Revolution. His car and house designs still appear fresh and advanced today because they are advanced -- in comparison to the wasteful, primitive, lethal, absurd artifacts sold today at the end of the 20th Century, which have been designed to maximize producer profit. (This issue is critical in understanding Fuller's work. Compare the Dymaxion Car with a Buick Regal, compare the geodesic dome to a ranch house in Blair Nebraska, understand the difference, and you've understood a large chunk of his work. As to Bucky's reputation as an architect, it's worth noting that there's a recurring urge in architectural history to return to first principles and honest design. Modernism, which began as a scientistic effort to rationalize housing along design principles, quickly degenerated into just another visual style which ignored practicalities. But that's another story.)

The mass production of houses, the often-attempted 'Fordization' of the housing industry by Thomas Edison, Bucky Fuller and such Fuller-influenced characters as Howard Fischer of General Houses, is a fascinating and painfully brief chapter in American industrial history. Rocked by its failure, the painful collapse of the Beech Aircraft project marked an end of the 'captain of industry' phase of Fuller's life and a change in his appearance. Considerably humbled, and likely out of money, Fuller went from Wichita to accept a position at the small Black Mountain College in North Carolina. At Black Mountain his thinking entered a more theoretical realm, a realm that would produce the breakthrough geodesic dome and the concept of 'tensegrity'. The geodesic dome marked the turning point in Fuller's reputation (and a degree of financial comfort), culminating in the grand triumph of the huge and beautiful geodesic dome that served as the United States Pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967.

For roughly the next forty years after Black Mountain, Bucky Fuller wrote, spoke and proposed. He became something of a scientific luminary, the 'planet's friendly genius' in newsmagazines, and his research was supported by his college lecture fees and the royalty income from his patents. He settled in Carbondale, Illinois in 1959, near the campus of Southern Illinois University where he was a research professor from 1959 to 1968, in the world's first geodesic residence, built at the corner of Forest and Cherry. He became full professor in 1968, distinguished university professor in 1972, and university professor emeritus in 1975. In 1975 he published the first volume of the two-volume Synergetics written with Ed Applewhite, each volume about 800 pages, which describes a non-Euclidian alternative geometry, "nature's own mathematical coordinate system."

Between 1954 and 1980 Fuller was granted 43 honorary doctorates and the British Royal Gold Medal for Architecture among many other honors. He died in Los Angeles in 1983, aged 88, within 36 hours of his wife.