BUCKYVERSE

Buckminster Fuller: A Bibliographical Biography/Scenario

by Trevor Blake — Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine, September/October 2017 (Vol. 27, No. 9/10), pp. 11–23

The title of this essay is a play on Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario (1980), by Fuller’s son-in-law, Robert Snyder. Fuller wrote dozens of books, and dozens of books have been written about him. This essay is not a complete bibliography of Fuller’s work, but a pendulum swing between his life and his work, with both the Fuller fan and the Fuller collector/seller in mind. Many accounts have been made of Fuller as architect, as public speaker, as inventor, as fraud, as public figure and more. This is the first of Fuller as the creator and subject of printed works.

When I was a boy in the 1970s my father said he wanted to build a playhouse for me and my brother. He showed us a model of what he wanted to build, a geodesic dome. I said I didn’t want a geodesic dome playhouse, I wanted a log cabin like I saw on Little House on the Prairie, Grizzly Adams and other popular television shows of the time. My father built that log cabin. Later I was introduced to the idea that a person could be inside a shelter made up of triangular panels arranged in a dome shape.

In the 1990s I was a young man, and I moved from Knoxville, Tennessee to Portland, Oregon. I worked in a number of used and rare bookstores. At these bookstores I learned how to make catalogs of books, a skill used in this bibliography, and I had the opportunity to buy books by and about Buckminster Fuller. As the Internet became more popular I sought out information by and about Fuller. Joe S. Moore was always the most active promoter of Fuller online. A lifelong advocate and scholar of Fuller’s work, Moore would answer any question, provide citations and publish new works. In 2013 Joe gave me his 40-year archive of Fuller material. Combined with my own, this is the largest private collection of works by and about Fuller, by weight six tons the last time it was moved. Fuller’s personal archive at Stanford University is the only comparable archive. I have used my collection for original research about Fuller, and to produce the Buckminster Fuller Bibliography.

Geodesic domes are inexpensive, efficient, well-researched, aesthetically pleasing and have a multi-generation support base. And so the question has to be asked: where are the domes? If Fuller’s Dymaxion Car was as much of a marvel as it was said to be, why aren’t we all driving one? The future that Fuller predicted seems invisible, but take another look and you’ll see we’ve arrived and right on schedule.

Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12, 1895. He was born at a time when what was changing the world the most was invisible: radio waves and X-rays. Increasingly, more was being done with less. Fuller came to call this process of doing more with less “ephemeralization.” Ephemeralization was a central theory to Fuller’s work. When Fuller was a boy many tons of copper wire were required to lay a transoceanic telephone cable. When he was a man, the amount of communication formerly requiring tons of copper could occur using only the few ounces of copper wire found in a geostationary satellite. The way every generation of computers is smaller than the previous one yet does more also fits Fuller’s model. Computers have gone from occupying the floor of a building, to the corner of an office, to part of a desktop, to a laptop, to a Smartphone, to a Smartwatch, and the trajectory of smaller-smarter has not stopped yet.

Fuller experimented with maintaining his health in ways that have become commonplace. He noticed that dogs never seemed to be tired, and so he studied how they sleep. He learned that dogs sleep for short periods of time, but often. He tried it himself and learned that he could get by on four hours of sleep a day if those four hours were spread out over the entire day. Fuller called this Dymaxion sleep, but it is now known as polyphasic sleep.

The height of young Fuller’s experiment in the Bohemian lifestyle took place in 1920s Chicago, home of many other eccentrics and luminaries. Fuller wore t-shirts in public when that was unprecedented. He puzzled his friends by inviting them to join what he called the Dog Trot Club. Fuller would wear clothing usually confined to the gymnasium and exercise on his own, not as part of a sports team. He proceeded at a pace that was not walking but also was not quite running, and he would do so throughout the city instead of on tracks. He called this dog trotting, but 70 years later we call it jogging.

As an adult Fuller put on a great deal of weight. He reasoned (in his own way) that the best way to take off the fat was to take in the most efficient form of energy instead. The most efficient form of energy was the energy of the sun, concentrated into the energy of grass, concentrated into the energy of a cow, concentrated into the energy of a steak. For many years Fuller primarily ate steak and drank tea. He never gave a name to his highly successful weight loss program, but today we would call it the Atkins Diet.

Fuller documented his own life from an early age. He called the exhaustive chronological record of his day-to-day life the Chronofile. Currently housed in the Special Collections Department of the Stanford University Libraries, the Chronofile weighs in at 4.5 metric tons and includes material from each day of Fuller’s life: correspondence, newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, models and audio-visual materials. During his lifetime Fuller was derided for the self-importance of keeping such a detailed record of his own life. But today millions of people do just the same via Facebook, Twitter and the like.

While Fuller died in 1983, too early to take advantage of the Internet, he did make use of what technology was available. He bought the global rights to the word “BUCKY” as an address for telegrams. I am confident every person reading this essay has their own personalized global address: we just have them over half a century after Fuller did. Fuller was also prone to wearing three watches at a time, one with the time in his current location, one with the time of where he was going, and one with the time on Bear Island, Maine, where his family owned land and he had spent the majority of his summers as a youth. Modern watches have this feature built in.

4D Timelock

It is not always the case that the most rare, the most important and the most representative title by an author are all the same title. This is the case regarding Fuller. In 1928 Fuller self-published perhaps 18 copies of a 52-page booklet. The book was not given a formal title, but has come to be known by the words that appear on the front cover: 4D Timelock.

In 1927 Fuller was out of work. Married and with a new child to support, he was walking along the shores of Lake Michigan one day, “thinking about life or death.” Suddenly, according to Fuller, he found himself suspended above the ground in an orb of golden light. A voice told him he did not have the right to kill himself, because he belonged to the Universe. The result of this experience was that Fuller decided to embark on a lifelong experiment whose aim was to determine what an individual could do on behalf of humanity. He began to record his ideas, eventually filling 2,000 pages. In 1928 he edited the manuscript into the booklet known as 4D Timelock.

4D Timelock is a fevered presentation of Fuller’s enthusiasm for architecture produced industrially, shipped in pieces and assembled on site. But the book is also a presentation of Fuller’s science and poetry and mathematics and philosophy. All are interwoven, and no concession is made to extract some parts and leave the rest:

With the full faith in Love, in the convergence of whose Universal Light of Truth, the assurance of individualism may cast no shadow either of doubt, or egotism, is this stated to be: the working sketch for the greatest of living dramatic compositions. The cast for it shall be the whole of humanity; the settings—the future ages of temporality.

In it Lord West and Lady East are married, with much necessary solemn music and jazz symphony—the various ceremonies, civil and otherwise, are progressively blended. Look sharply. Being a working sketch, no unnecessary strokes have been made, wherefore there are no “key passages” from which the meaning maybe “skimmed.” In Italian, Russian, Esquimaux or Telegrafenglish—the abstract message is the same.

Copies of 4D Timelock were mailed to members of the American Institute of Architects. They were uniformly unimpressed and, according to Pilot for Spaceship Earth (1978) by Athena Lord, voted to put themselves “on record…as opposed to any peas-in-a-pod designs.” Ironically, in 1968 the American Institute of Architects awarded Fuller their first architectural design award, for his 1967 Montreal Expo geodesic dome, produced industrially, shipped in pieces and assembled on site.

Stanford University, where Fuller’s personal archive is currently curated, has a copy of the original 4D Timelock. I know of no other extant copies or facsimile editions. In 1972 Biotecnic Press of Albuquerque published “a small edition” of a book called 4D Time Lock. I have never had the opportunity to compare the original to this transcribed edition, but I have no reason to doubt it is accurate and complete. The publisher wrote: “Since the time of this book 44 years ago, Buckminster Fuller has mellowed. Today some of the book makes sense and some of it does not.”

Shelter

In 1930 Fuller cashed in his life savings and insurance policy to purchase Shelter, a magazine devoted to architecture. Such was his idealism that architecture was the solution to humanity’s needs and that he had the skinny on the right kind of architecture that he both cancelled all the magazine’s advertising contracts and raised the price of the magazine. His bravado paid off, because within two years Shelter was on the verge of being profitable. This in spite of an esoteric editorial voice and the difficulties of the ongoing economic depression. It was at the cusp of success that Fuller made another bold choice: to close the magazine down.

While quoted from, Shelter has never been reprinted in whole. I have never seen a complete run of Shelter for sale, and I have yet to see even a list of what issues were produced. Shelter is a high-point in a Fuller collection.

Shelter was revived in 1973 by Fuller enthusiast Lloyd Kahn. Kahn went on to publish Domebook and Domebook 2 and then, like the previous owner of Shelter, he had a change of heart. Kahn became convinced that industrially-produced geodesic domes were exactly the opposite of a solution to humanity’s problems by way of architecture. Kahn instead now advocates building using the techniques of indigenous people using local materials. And indeed, some “primitive” structures have endured for hundreds of years when some of the most advanced geodesic domes have failed to endure even a season.

Dymaxion House and Dymaxion Car

In 1929 Fuller presented the Dymaxion House. This was a hexagon-shaped house suspended from a central pole, with a tension structure of wires that held up the walls. The Dymaxion House was designed to be delivered unassembled by air, and to be as easy to disassemble and relocate as it was to assemble. The house was novel in nearly every way, but what distinguished it most was that it was among the first in what was to be a housing industry. Fuller used an analogy to explain the difference between housing and a housing industry. He asked, “What if automobiles were constructed the way houses are constructed today?” First one would select either a local automotive manufacturer or a standard design. The styles offered would generally be 50 or more years out of date, perhaps including a horse and buggy. Before construction of the automobile could begin all the necessary permits from the local government would have to be obtained, and these on a case-by-case basis. If you were lucky and patient then construction of your automobile could begin several months after filing the paperwork. Metal workers, welders, upholsterers, glass workers, painters and more—all from different unions—would show up at your house every day to work on your automobile. Again, with luck and patience you might have a finished vehicle as soon as several years after filing the paperwork. All this seems absurd, but we have grown to accept it as a method of building houses. Fuller wanted shelters to be produced as cars are produced: on the industrial level.

And 80 years later, in 2008, the New York Office of Emergency Management held a contest titled “What if NYC.” The goal was to design a superior form of shelter. The winning design was a hexagon-shaped house that was to be delivered unassembled by air, and to be as easy to disassemble and relocate as it was to assemble. Fuller’s name was not mentioned.

The Dymaxion House demanded a new delivery system, which Fuller originally called the Omnidirectional Plummeting Device. This device was to function as both a land and an air vehicle. When the production model abandoned its wings it became known as the Dymaxion Car.

The Dymaxion Car was conceived during the Great Depression. When production was announced there were more than 1,000 applicants for the 28 available jobs. Fuller hired based on when each man last ate regularly and the size of his family. As the first Dymaxion Car approached completion, work slowed. Fuller learned that his crew was afraid they soon would be out of work, so he immediately set them to work again building the second Dymaxion Car. Today we would call this a “sustainable” form of production, one that employs economic justice.

The first Dymaxion Car was completed July 12, 1933, Fuller’s thirty-eighth birthday. It got 30 miles to the gallon and could reach a speed of 120 miles an hour. When the Dymaxion Car ran in an exhibition at a Bronx race track, this passenger car doubled the standing speed record of local race cars. Part of the secret of its success was that holes were built into the chassis, modeled after boats and airplanes rather than tanks and buggies like most automobiles. And for all that, the Dymaxion Car had three wheels instead of four.

The Dymaxion Car drew a crowd wherever it went, and sometimes unwelcome attention. A Chicago Commissioner of Parks attempted to race the Dymaxion Car on the open road, and when his vehicle could not keep up he ran the Car off the road. The local press blamed the “freak” three-wheeled car instead of the local official. A second and third Dymaxion Car were completed, but the Great Depression and unearned bad publicity closed the factory. Today we ride in high-speed cars with disc brakes and air conditioning, cars that incorporate wind-tunnel testing—just like Fuller’s Dymaxion Car from approaching a century ago.

Fuller also developed the Dymaxion Bathroom, a single-unit shower of a sort now common to many homes. Thirteen models of this project were produced before the manufacturer cancelled it in 1936.

Nine Chains to the Moon

Fuller was urged by his friends to document in a book the ideas he was presenting in public speeches. Lack of formal training as an author, lack of an agent and lack of a contract did not dissuade him from writing a manuscript titled An Adventure Story in Thought, published in 1938 by Doubleday as Nine Chains to the Moon. Nine Chains gets its science-fiction-sounding name from Fuller’s claim that if all of humanity were stacked head to foot it would form a chain that could go to the moon and back nine times.

Originally, Fuller had used his friendship with author Christopher Morley to obtain a contract with the publishing house of J. B. Lippincott. But when Lippincott received Fuller’s manuscript they were concerned that it devoted several chapters to explaining the theories of Albert Einstein to a lay audience. Lippincott claimed that Fuller was not known as an expert on Einstein, and therefore his claims were suspect. Full of himself, the author suggested they ask Einstein. One month later Fuller was told that Einstein had read his book, would be in New York City soon, and wished to speak with him. Fuller was introduced to Einstein by Dr. Morris Fishbein at Fishbein’s apartment, and soon after Einstein asked if he could speak with Fuller in private. The two retired to another room, where Einstein told Fuller he approved of his work and that he would convey that approval to Lippincott. Einstein told him, “Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive anything I have ever done as having the slightest practical application. I evolved all this in the hope that it might be of use to cosmogonists and to astrophysicists in gaining a better understanding of the universe, but you appear to have found practical applications for it.” Or so said Fuller. Confirmation of this story from Lippincott or experts on Einstein has yet to emerge.

Today, the wireless transmission of information to electronic displays is a given fact of life for most Americans. Indeed, it is nearly inescapable. But consider how a prediction of just such a thing must have sounded in Fuller’s 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon: “The main system of general education instruction to go on the air and screen.” Nine Chains includes a fold-out chart of “Resources and Reserves of Copper” and a fold-out chart of “Cumulative Charts of Craft vs. Industrial Production.” In 1974 Fuller informally distributed a manuscript “extracted and never before published manuscript from Nine Chains to the Moon” titled ‘Bible to Babble to Bible.’ This manuscript remains unpublished.

LIFE Magazine

In 1937 Fuller introduced the Dymaxion Map, an attempt to show the entire land mass of Earth at once, with a minimum of distortion. It took 31 more years before the Apollo program gave us our first photograph of the Earth, and even then only half of the planet is visible. In 1952 Fuller suggested the Geoscope, a large globe with computerized lights that could show the “social navigation” of people, goods and services. Google caught up 52 years later with Google Earth.

In the 1940s, under the editorship of Edward Thompson, Life was one of the most successful magazines in the world. It was among the first American magazines to emphasize photography. And in Volume 14 Number 9, the issue of March 1, 1943, it included a number of photographs of Fuller and his Dymaxion Map (“LIFE Presents R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World,” pages 41-55). Life not only published photographs of Fuller and his Map, but included a four-page stiff paper map for readers to cut out and assemble for themselves.

While later in life Fuller presented his Map as an instrument of peace to show a world made up of resources that could be shared by all, the Dymaxion Map of World War Two was an instrument of a different kind. The tiles of the map could be assembled to emphasize the North Pole or the equator. The tiles could also be assembled to emphasize the British Empire, “Heartland” (Europe and Asia), or “Jap Empire.” Regarding the latter: “The ruthless logic of the Jap imperialism is exposed by this layout of the Dymaxion World Map. The seapower-minded Japs want nothing less than the Pacific. Control of the ocean and all its shoreline, they calculate, will give them control of the hinterlands. Their thinking strikes an obvious contrast to the landlubber geopolitics of their German ‘Heartland’ allies.” The Dymaxion Map issue of Life was the first time Fuller enjoyed mainstream success. Today it is not a difficult or expensive issue to obtain, and should be part of any basic collection of Fuller titles.

The Wichita House

In 1944 Fuller was 50 years old. The Dymaxion House was 16 years in his past, and the Dymaxion Car was 10 years in his past. World War Two was under way, but it would not endure forever. Fuller saw in this two weaknesses in America that could be played against each other to make a strength. Soon the airplane factories that had been making war planes would have no war planes to produce, putting the factory employees out of work. Soon the soldiers returning to the States would need new homes for new families and they, too, would need jobs. Fuller conceived of retooling the airplane factories into factories that made homes, providing ongoing jobs for the factory workers and new jobs for returning soldiers.

Fuller presented the idea to Beech Aircraft, and his idea was accepted. Two prototype houses were commissioned by the U.S. Army Air Corps, which expedited access to advanced materials such as duralumin and plexiglas. The first of what came to be called the “Wichita House” (named after the city it was built in) was completed in June 1945.

Like the Dymaxion House before it, the Wichita House was suspended from a central pole. Materials in tension are stronger than materials in compression, and so fewer materials are needed. A simple rope can hold a heavy weight when suspended (in tension), but that same weight might require a heavy foundation (in compression) to hold it to the same height. All the components and all the tools required to build the Wichita House were included in a single delivery container. The flat-packing and inclusion of tools that IKEA now is famous for was utilized by Fuller more than a decade earlier. The cost of one of Fuller’s new homes—including delivery—was 6,500, at a time when the average price of a home was 12,000. No component of the Wichita House was heavier than the average man could hold up by himself. The house was built from the roof downward: the roof was constructed first, elevated, then the walls, then the floor. Because it was built from the roof down, no scaffolding was needed. The house was aerodynamic, and storm-level wind simply flowed around it. It used the entire interior wall space by employing revolving shelves—much like jewelry displays in a department store. And should the owner desire to move, the house could be completely disassembled, relocated and rebuilt.

Fortune

Such was the faith in Bucky Fuller that he made the cover of the April 1946 edition of Fortune magazine, which stated the Wichita House was “likely to produce greater social consequence than the introduction of the automobile.” The essay “Fuller’s House” included a key sentence to understanding Fuller’s entire body of work: “If all people are to get high-quality shelter, says Fuller, that shelter must be industrially produced in enormous quantities.” To that end the Wichita House was produced in a factory by trained professionals. Compare this to the number of individual geodesic domes that have been built by amateurs with good intentions, and the reason domes have a reputation for leaking is explained. Individual automobiles or airplanes may leak, individual mobile homes may leak, but objects tested and made on the industrial scale tend not to leak. Build one ball-point pen and it will not only leak but cost millions of dollars. Make millions of ball-point pens and they will mostly function just fine and they’ll be so cheap you can give away pens with your company’s name printed on the side.

The April 1946 issue of Fortune was the height of Fuller’s career to that date, a height that was surpassed later in his life, though never exclusively by his own hand. Thirty-seven thousand letters poured into the Wichita House factory, many including unsolicited deposits. The managers and workers at the aircraft factory, a growing line of would-be investors and the public were ready for a revolution in housing. However, Fuller said that one more (and then one more, and then one more) prototype needed to be constructed. Push came to shove, and the factory insisted that Fuller allow a first set of Wichita Houses to be made, promising that improvements could be incorporated in future versions. Fuller called their bluff. He owned the intellectual property of the Wichita House. He rolled up the blueprints and walked out the door.

One and only one Wichita House, the prototype, was built. It was privately owned for a generation, then abandoned. The ruins of the prototype were bought by the Henry Ford Museum, where it was restored and is now on exhibit. After walking away from the Wichita House Fuller lived hand-to-mouth and in public shame for some years.

The geodesic dome

Fuller considered ideas to have a shape, a shape as real as any physical object. The shape of an idea is that of a sphere. One idea floats in free space, and can be thought of as having one dimension. Two ideas have a relation, either rolling on each other’s surface or connected by a line, and they can be thought of as having two dimensions. Three ideas act as gears to one another: if they touch, they can only roll against each other in one of two directions, and if they do not touch the lines between them form a triangle. Fuller considered three ideas to have three dimensions. When a fourth idea is introduced, the four ideas lock. Four spheres touching each other cannot roll in any direction, and four ideas connected by lines form a tetrahedron. This is the fourth dimension in Fuller’s philosophy/science/poetry.

Fuller considered spheres and triangles and their interplay to be the best means of explaining thought, explaining time, and explaining the physical world. In his mind, therefore, to construct a sturdy shelter one should turn to spheres and triangles, not to right-angles as found in most architecture. It was from his philosophy/science/poetry that Fuller independently re-discovered the geodesic dome.

The geodesic dome was first used in architecture by Walther Bauersfeld in 1923 in Jena, Germany. Bauersfeld was granted the original patent for the geodesic dome in 1925. Fuller rediscovered the utility of the dome around 1949, and was granted his patent in 1951. Being largely self-educated in architecture, it is likely Fuller was unaware of Bauersfeld’s work just as he was unaware of Alexander Graham Bell’s work with tetrahedron-based architecture from 1907. Fuller’s first large-scale success with geodesic dome construction was the Ford Rotunda Building dome of 1953. The success of the Ford dome guaranteed that his services would be in demand.

Tetrascroll

Fuller said that the origin of Tetrascroll lay in bedtime stories he told his daughter, Allegra. He began with the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” then wove in new elements. Over time the children’s story became a vehicle for his own ideas. Tetrascroll includes more drawings by Fuller than any other published work.

Tetrascroll exists in three forms: a hardcover edition, a softcover edition, and a limited lithographic edition. The limited lithographic edition was published by Universal Limited Art Editions of Long Island. Fuller drew the illustrations and dictated the text. The 26 pages are three-foot equilateral triangles, bound to form a 43-foot strip when fully extended. Forty copies were made. Craft Horizons magazine for October 1977 called it the “Book of the Century.” The deluxe edition of Tetrascroll has fetched between 3,000 and 5,000 at auction.

Books about Fuller: Kenner and Hatch

Fuller was friends with many authors and artists, but few architects. Among the authors he knew was Hugh Kenner, who in 1973 wrote Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller. Bucky is an heroic account of Fuller published during his lifetime, and is the primary source for that view of Fuller and his work. Kenner went on to write Geodesic Math and How to Use It and Polyhedra: A Visual Approach (both 1976), addressing Fuller’s mathematics and structures, but it was Bucky that addressed the man. Another friend who wrote of Fuller was Alden Hatch, in Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe (1974), a book that while full of praise does not refrain from including Fuller’s indiscretions.

I Seem to Be a Verb

Fuller and contemporary thinker Marshall McLuhan crossed paths by way of book designers Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore. Agel and Fiore designed McLuhan’s 1967 book The Medium is the Massage, and they designed Fuller’s 1970 book I Seem to Be a Verb. I Seem to Be a Verb was published as a paperback original by Bantam Books, both in a silver cover categorized as “Sociology” and a white cover categorized as “Non-fiction.” I do not know if there is any record of which cover came first, but the contents are identical. The text by Fuller is a transcription of a speech he gave in 1975. It moves across the pages in the fashion of comic books, and when it reaches the end of the book the print color changes from black to green, and the text turns upside down and races back to the beginning. While The Medium is the Massage enjoys regular reprinting, I Seem to Be a Verb has not.

The Mind’s Eye and The Dymaxion World

Fuller lectured to college students (and anyone else who would listen) for decades, and these students were often inspired to build domes after hearing him speak. But some who listened to Fuller speak were inspired in other directions. Fuller’s patent attorney, Donald W. Robertson, was moved to write The Mind’s Eye of Buckminster Fuller (1974). In The Mind’s Eye Robertson records what it was like to transform Fuller’s often exceptionally ephemeral and general ideas into specific properties subject to patent. Chapter Six is titled “Tensite Integrity by Electronic Computer” and describes a computer-aided production technique not unlike the most experimental 3-D printing techniques used in architecture today. Mind’s Eye is the informed view on Fuller as an inventor and an important compliment to Fuller’s own view of his inventions, published in The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (1960) and Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (1983). The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller is not difficult to find, but the inferior binding of the paperback edition makes the hardcover edition the one for collectors.

Synergetics

Fuller’s life work was Synergetics. The writing of Synergetics was unusual enough that Fuller’s collaborator, E. J. Applewhite, wrote a book about the writing of Synergetics, titled Cosmic Fishing. Applewhite’s book describes how from 1944 onward Fuller carried with him at all times a black leather briefcase on which the initials “B.F.” were stamped in silver. Fuller told Applewhite that the summation of his thinking, then called “Energetic-Synergetic Geometry,” was contained in the briefcase. Neither Applewhite nor anyone else was allowed to view the contents of that briefcase until 1970, one year after the two men agreed to collaborate on Synergetics. To Applewhite’s surprise, the briefcase did not hold essays, diagrams, mathematical proofs or architectural plans, but instead contained 50 pages of blank verse.

Fuller’s intention was to write Synergetics as poetry. Fuller had already published one full book of poetry, No More Secondhand God (1963). Applewhite convinced him that while this made sense to Fuller, it was so far afield from the vision of Fuller’s publisher, MacMillan (known as a textbook publisher), that he might do better to…not.

During the years in between Synergetics emerging from Fuller’s briefcase and its final publication in 1975, Fuller traveled constantly. During the entire production of Synergetics there was only one weekend during which Applewhite and Fuller were in the same room, working on the same book. The rest of the work was done over the telephone, via fax, or independently. Applewhite’s approach was to review Fuller’s entire body of work and make note of each time he spoke or wrote about a particular topic. These topics were then assigned a section number and the numbered sections arranged in a sequence. From Cosmic Fishing: “In Sec. 642.01 the first sentences are from the transcript of the lecture at Eugene, Oregon, of 8 July 1962; the second from a lecture in Carbondale at 21 October 1965; the third from ‘Omnidirectional Halo’ a poem 1959; the fourth was written by Fuller on the manuscripts of Synergetics on 2 June 1971; and the fifth is from a lecture to NASA in June 1966.”

The difficulty of making a narrative of sentences spoken across decades while converting a stack of poetry into a textbook was an insufficient set of challenges for Fuller and Applewhite. Fuller also insisted that the book convey all its mathematics in writing, never through diagrams or illustrations. He demanded that all phraseology was to be his own, and that Applewhite’s role was exclusively to compile and order his phrases. The two struggled and argued for years about the creation of Synergetics, during which time Applewhite learned he could never tell Fuller how to proceed but he could lead, or perhaps deceive, Fuller toward his ends. Applewhite gathered Fuller’s quotes on thousands of index cards, and these index cards were typed into a manuscript. The manuscript was given to Fuller, who would expound on his own ideas in written notes filling the margins. Applewhite would incorporate the written notes and the new manuscript would be given to Fuller, who in turn would return the manuscript fully annotated with new marginalia. Applewhite realized that while he could never get Fuller to agree that a text was sufficiently edited, if he typed the manuscript with especially tight margins Fuller would only have space for a few words of comment. Applewhite also knew that while Fuller would never give up an argument for inclusion of his new notes, when presented with a new manuscript to comment on he would abandon his prior arguments and start on new marginalia and new arguments. By slowly tricking Fuller from chapter to chapter, Applewhite led Fuller to the completion of Synergetics.

Or so he thought. When the galley copies of Synergetics arrived, Fuller filled the margins with annotations as if this nearly-finished book were merely another draft for him to rewrite from cover to cover. Fuller’s reputation and bullheadedness did allow him to rewrite large sections of Synergetics at the eleventh hour. These revisions ate up the majority of what Fuller might have made in an advance, and his advance was further reduced by the late decision to include illustrations.

Applewhite wrote in Cosmic Fishing, “The dilemma of Synergetics is that it attempts to combine science and poetry and mathematics and philosophy into a single work and in the very act of combining three such elements—normally considered so disparate in our culture—it is impossible to appeal to any one of the disciplines without risk of grave offense to the other two.” Synergetics was an expensive and difficult book, but a first edition of 15,000 copies (3 April 1975) was followed by a second edition (in the “Fall,” according to Cosmic Fishing) of 5,000 copies.

Synergetics 2 was published in 1979. Originally called Synergetics Harvest, this companion volume includes color illustrations and “narratives” designed to guide the reader through an otherwise complex book. Synergetics 2 repeats the numbered section structure of Synergetics, with the final text woven between the two volumes. The blank verse poetry that was to have been Synergetics was published as Intuition in 1972. More of Fuller’s poetry from the Synergetics period was published as And It Came to Pass—But Not To Stay in 1976. The thousands of index cards amassed by Applewhite were published as the Synergetics Dictionary in 1986. And all this from 50 pages of blank verse carried in a black leather briefcase.

Fuller’s Earth

Fuller sometimes claimed that his ideas could be understood by anyone, even a child. Richard Brenneman took him up on that challenge and sat him down at a kitchen table with a reel-to-reel recorder and three children. The transcript of this talk was published as Fuller’s Earth (1983). Fuller did not shy away from any of his themes, and he did not talk down to the children. Fuller’s Earth is the most accessible text by R. Buckminster Fuller. If Synergetics is his brain, Fuller’s Earth is his heart.

Artifacts

Fuller is quoted as saying, “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” This quote appears in many books and articles, and even on the website of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. As to where and when and if Fuller said this, I do not have an answer. I present it here as conforming to Fuller’s spirit and intent, no more.

Fuller was known for his artifacts: his house and car and dome. The most inclusive collection of schematics, diagrams, blueprints and the like related to Fuller’s work is found in The Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller (1985). This four-volume set recreates Fuller’s path of artifacts in the way Synergetics recreates the path of his mind. Like the four-volume Synergetics Dictionary, this set is rare and expensive and essential for a comprehensive understanding of Fuller’s work.

Buckminster Fuller’s Universe

I own tens of thousands of printed works by and about R. Buckminster Fuller. Reduced to one and only one recommendation, I recommend Buckminster Fuller’s Universe (1989) by Lloyd Steven Sieden. Sieden’s biography is the most even and thorough navigation between Fuller’s work and his life, between his physical artifacts and his public persona. It makes the best case that Fuller was a Twentieth-century man whose work is worth attention, it explains Fuller’s work in a way that shows one idea leading to the next, and it is illustrated with the most appropriate photographs and drawings. Published 10 years later, the two-volume set Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, The Art of Design Science (Lars Müller Publishers, 1999) provides the single best collection of Fuller photographs and illustrations in an octavo book, and the catalogue Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe (Yale University Press, 2009) provides the best quarto-size illustrations.

From the Library of R. Buckminster Fuller

The personal library of Fuller was catalogued and sold in 2004 by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. The catalogue, From the Library of R. Buckminster Fuller, includes more than 200 titles. The titles are arranged by genre and by author, and most volumes include some sort of personal touch by Fuller. These personal touches include annotations, dedications, corrections, comments and the like. From the Library is the only published price guide to Fuller outside of catalogues published by Fuller himself or by the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Becoming Bucky Fuller

Becoming Bucky Fuller (2009) by Loretta Lorance uses source material, including unpublished letters and diaries by Fuller, to recreate two of Fuller’s inventions: the Dymaxion House and the public persona known as “Bucky.” There is no greater resource for the early work of Fuller, although those desiring to hold on to the heroic narrative of Fuller (for example, the story of his direct communication with God/the Universe in 1927) are discouraged from reading Becoming Bucky Fuller.

If Fuller is known at all today, it is for the popularization of the geodesic dome in architecture. Between 1954 and his death in 1983 more than 300,000 domes were built. Among them were several significant prototype domes designed by the United States Marine Corps; the Montreal World’s Fair Biosphere dome (inaugurated on July 12, 1967, Fuller’s seventy-second birthday); and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line domes.

The DEW line was a series of radar stations in the northernmost parts of the United States, Canada, Greenland and Iceland. These radar stations were established to detect incoming aircraft in the event of a Soviet attack on the United States. The hostile weather found along the DEW line necessitated a structure that could withstand heavy snow loads and constant high winds while simultaneously allowing radar signals to penetrate the walls of the shelter with a minimum of impedance. These structures needed to be able to be assembled from industrially-produced parts shipped in by aircraft. Because of the likelihood of storm conditions, delays in construction had to be kept to a minimum. Geodesic domes were the obvious and perhaps only solution. The radar domes (called radomes) of the DEW line were a success. Some radomes are still in use after more than 50 years continuous exposure to some of the most punishing weather on the planet. Similar radomes have been built around the world.

Like all success stories, the story of the DEW line domes was not without difficulties. The DEW line was made partially obsolete by the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile. The DEW line was not equipped with the means to safely dispose of their waste (in some cases, hazardous waste). Fuller wrote about waste disposal systems as early as the 1930s in connection with his Dymaxion House and Dymaxion Mobile Dormitory, but these measures were not put into place. The estimated cost of cleaning up the DEW line is $600 million. Neither of these difficulties can be credited to the use of the geodesic dome on the DEW line. They are mentioned for the sake of completion.

Many of Fuller’s students put his ideas into practical use in ways Fuller never imagined. One of them is Sam Lanahan, whose Flextegrity work—the development of building materials and structures that will perform well under extreme stress conditions—is attracting the interest of inventors and investors around the world. Another was a graduate student named Bruce LeBel. LeBel studied under Fuller in college, then became the production engineer for a camping equipment firm named North Face. North Face tents are lightweight tension-based domes produced on the industrial level—everything Fuller said a modern shelter should be, decades after he said it.

In 1982 Fuller visited EPCOT at Walt Disney World. He saw the EPCOT sphere, a large and attractive geodesic structure, but was put off to see no mention of his name. Just at that moment a jet plane flew overhead. Fuller thought to himself, “Well, they don’t call that a Wright Brothers 747.” He knew his ideas were in play, and if his name had not stayed in circulation with his ideas, well, he could still be satisfied.

Fuller was concerned with shelter, recycling, clean air, hyper-efficiency, multi-environment structures, transportation, international cooperation. He was concerned with these things as early as the first decades of the Twentieth century, but had to wait until the Apollo program to see them all come together. As Fuller said, “The answer to the housing problem lies on the way to the moon.” Today we may not give credit to Fuller for the way we communicate and present ourselves, but he was living an early-Twenty-first century life long before most of us alive today were born.

A Selected Checklist of Books By and About Buckminster Fuller

OCR caveat

The original final-page checklist is a two-column layout that the scan’s text layer interleaved; titles below are reliable, but a few publisher/year pairings were reconstructed and should be verified against the scan.

By Buckminster Fuller

About Buckminster Fuller

Source: Trevor Blake, “Buckminster Fuller: A Bibliographical Biography/Scenario,” magazine essay, Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine, September/October 2017, pages 11–23, Volume 27, Number 9/10. Text extracted by pdftotext from a searchable scan; OCR errors corrected and the image-heavy spreads (Tetrascroll, I Seem to Be a Verb, Synergetics) de-interleaved into reading order.
File: buckminster-fuller-a-bibliographical-biography.pdf