Buckminster Fuller — United States Patents
A curated table of the patents on which R. Buckminster Fuller is himself the inventor — 22 U.S. patents spanning 1927–1983 — distilled and verified from a 645-result Google Patents search. They are the legal-documentary spine of his career as a designer: each major idea, from the Stockade blocks of his twenties to the geodesic dome and tensegrity, has a patent behind it.
The arc of the patents
Read in order of grant, the patents narrate Fuller's design life:
- The Stockade years (1927–1931). His first patents — Building Structure (1927) and Process of Manufacturing Fibrous Blocks (1931) — are for the Stockade lightweight building system, the venture that ended in his 1927 crisis and reorientation.
- The Dymaxion artifacts (1937–1946). The Motor Vehicle (1937) is the Dymaxion Car; Prefabricated Bathroom (1940, assigned to Phelps Dodge) is the Dymaxion Bathroom; the Design for a Prefabricated House (1942) is the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine; two Building Construction patents (1944) cover the Dymaxion Deployment Unit; and Cartography (1946) is the Dymaxion Map — the only patent ever issued for a cartographic projection.
- The geodesic explosion (1954–1967). The landmark Building Construction patent (1954) is the geodesic dome. A cluster of variants follows: the paperboard dome (1959), the Self-Strutted Geodesic Plydome (1959), the Geodesic Tent (1959), Synergetic Building Construction / octet truss (1961), Laminar Geodesic Dome (1965), Geodesic Structures (1965), and the Octahedral Building Truss (1967).
- Tensegrity (1962). Tensile-Integrity Structures (1962) patents the tensegrity principle — discontinuous compression in a continuous tension net — extended later by Non-Symmetrical Tension-Integrity Structures (1975).
- Oddments and lasts. Undersea Island (1963) and Suspension Building (1964, the "aspension" hung dome) sit alongside a Floatable Breakwater (1975) and his final patent, a humble Hanging Storage Shelf Unit (1983), granted just months before his death.
What the table is (and isn't)
The page is curated: from a Google Patents search that returned 645 results — Fuller's own patents plus roughly 600 later geodesic/tensegrity/dome patents by others that cite or relate to him — the entries naming Richard Buckminster Fuller as inventor were extracted, de-duplicated against foreign equivalents (Canadian, British, Australian, etc.), and each one's number, title, and grant year verified against Google Patents. The full export PDF is kept beside the page as provenance, and itself documents how widely Fuller's structural ideas have propagated through the patent literature. Fuller is generally credited with ~28 U.S. patents, so a handful may not have surfaced in this one search.
Significance
The patents are the precise, dated counterpart to the prose of Inventions and the exhibition portfolios: where the books narrate, the patents pin down exactly what was claimed and when. Together they show that Fuller's reputation as a "failure-prone" dreamer (the framing his press fought for decades) is contradicted by a continuous, fifty-six-year record of granted, defensible invention.
See Also
- Inventions (Inventions) — Fuller's own book collecting and narrating these patented works
- Inventions: Twelve Around One (Inventions: Twelve Around One) — the Carl Solway portfolio of twelve of these patented inventions as fine-art prints
- The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller) — documents the Dymaxion and geodesic projects these patents cover
- Inventory of Reprints and Overruns — Fuller Research Foundation (Inventory of Reprints and Overruns — Fuller Research Foundation) — contemporaneous press on the dome and Dymaxion work the patents protect
- Donald W. Robertson (Donald W. Robertson) — read Fuller through these patents in The Mind's Eye
Sources
- buckminster-fuller-patents (raw pointer)
- buckminster_fuller_patents/index.md — the curated patent table (with Google Patents links) and the full search-export PDF