Fuller, R. Buckminster, LTJG

Biography

Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller, (July 12, 1895 - July 1, 1983), was an American-born architect who worked and taught all around the planet. He popularized the term 'synergy', wrote over 21 books, and was granted 28 U.S. patents. He wrote and lectured on the nature of the Universe, the role of human beings, history, and corporations. His life is considered to be the most documented in history.

Up to the age of four Fuller didn't realize that the patterns he had grown accustomed to were the result of near-sightedness until his family realized the situation and fitted him with corrective lenses. His most vivid childhood memory was welcoming in the new century with his first pair glasses. His pursuit of the patterns he found in nature continued throughout his life. His search for nature's coordinate system, and mankind's role in the universe began while he watched bubbles and realized that nature doesn't use Pi to create spheres.

Often thought of as an eccentric utopian, Fuller was a critic of the way society had been organized since the time of the Phoencians. His view of history revealed the increasing significance of mind-power over muscle-power. He claimed to be a verb, predicted a one world family, and claimed that every human being could comprehend the principles of the Universe, (through general systems analysis), and continue the creative work begun by God.

The invitations, awards, and appointments which followed him through all the days of his adult life were not the result of self-promotion, but came because others recognized the value of his design science [1] work.

Born to R. B. Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews in Milton, Massachusetts, Bucky grew up on the family farm off the coast of Maine on Bear Island. He had no expection that in his lifetime mankind would go from horse and buggy to walking on the Moon.

Relatives who influenced his thinking during the first decade of the 1900s included his great aunt Margaret Fuller Assoli (who, with Ralph Waldo Emerson co-edited the Transcendentalist magazine, the Dial, were the first to publish Henry David Thoreau, and was author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century); his uncle, Waldo Fuller (a Harvard football player, 1883, a chief engineer on the NYC subway system, and Klondike gold rush participant); and grandmother, Matilda Wolcott Andrews, (whose family bought Bear, Compass, and Little Sprucehead Islands off the coast of Maine). After elementary school, he attended Milton Academy upper school.

Fuller, inspired by Robert Burns, began keeping a journal when he was 12 years old, (1907), in the hopes of seeing himself as others saw him, and getting a glimpse of his "comprehensively integrated self." He later renamed his journal the "Chronofile." His father, Richard, one of several generations of Harvard-educated Fullers, had a stroke that year and died three years later.

During the second decade of the twentieth century Fuller continued his education, graduating from Milton Academy in 1913 and followed in the footsteps of his father's family by enrolling at Harvard (as a member of the Class of 1917). But Bucky was expelled a year later. He moved to Quebec, Canada and worked at a cotton mill until given a second chance at Harvard. A year later he was expelled again. This time he went to New York City and got a 12-hour-a-day job with the Armour meat packing company.

Fuller's short military career began in 1916, (two years after the beginning of World War I), when he entered the U.S. military training camp in Plattsburg, NY, as a corporal. A year later he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, and married Anne Hewlett on his birthday. Their first daughter, Alexandra was born in 1918. That same year, he was assigned to a short special course at the Annapolis Naval Academy in Maryland, and a year later was temporarily assigned to the USS George Washington, then to another special course at Annapolis. Promoted to Lt. USN, he was assigned to troop transport duty as a personal aide to Admiral Albert Gleaves. He also saw service on the USS Great Northern and USS Seattle.

The Navy provided much food for Fuller's thoughts about history and the Universe. But on November 1, 1919 he resigned when Adm. Gleaves was re-assigned, and his daughter, Alexandra, got sick.

The beginning of the 1920s saw Fuller again working for Armour and Company, this time as an assistant export manager in their New York City headquarters. But in 1921 he resigned to become a national account sales manager with the Kelly-Springfield truck company, also in NYC.

The following year he resigned from Kelly-Springfield to start a career as an "independent enterpriser" and joined with his father-in-law in developing the Stockade Building System, and built light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof houses. That year saw Alexandra die of complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Four years later, in 1926, after not making any money building houses, Fuller resigned as president of Stockade.

Believing that his was a "throwaway life" at 32, (1927), Fuller contemplated suicide. Standing on a river pier, he nearly threw himself into the water. But, instead, decided to do his own thinking for the first time in his life, and embarked on an "experiment" to see what one person in his situation could do to benefit mankind.