Sunday, June 04, 2006

Buckminster Fuller

March 6, 2006





"Dare to be naive." ~Buckminster Fuller

Who was Buckminster Fuller? Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) had one of the most fertile and optimistic minds of the 20th century, believing that every observation carried a promise, every problem had a solution, and every person held limitless possibilities. He was a designer, an inventor, an architect, an engineer, a mathematician, a poet and a determined independent thinker who impacted the entire world. He even impressed Albert Einstein, who said to him, “Young man, you amaze me!”

But he didn't begin to grasp his purpose in life until age 32, while contemplating suicide in the freezing waters of Lake Michigan. His first child had died and he was unemployed, destitute and disrespected. He chose at that moment to consider his life “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.”

During his extraordinary 56-year experiment he was awarded 25 U.S. patents, authored 28 books, and received 47 honorary doctorates in the arts, science, engineering and the humanities. He invented the geodesic dome, the lightest and strongest structure ever devised. He was an early advocate of renewable energy sources, claiming “there is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.”

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