2 An Introduction to Bucky
2R. Buckminster Fuller over many years graced the cover of nearly every major publication in America and abroad. But since his death in 1983, he has been neglected, if not shamefully ignored. The need for the public, especially the young, to discover his thinking anew impelled me to take on this anthology. By training I am an architect; this publication is my first attempt at being an author/editor. Any criticism directed at me is probably deserved, and a small price to pay for introducing the young, regardless of age, to a man named Bucky.
3 Why publish now? Bucky would call the birth of a new millennium an auspicious occasion, a time line in history, a notch in the evolution of man’s being on our ‘‘Spaceship Earth.’’
4 What better way to celebrate the new millennium than to let new readers discover a comprehensive anticipatory corporeal thinker, a nonconformist poet? I am convinced that if people understand him, they will be unwilling to let him go, and by adopting comprehensive planning, humanity will be significantly better off in this new millennium. As a student of Bucky’s in the early 1950s and later as his architectural partner, I recall the host of highly creative people touched by him and note how their insights have dramatically affected this beautiful and elegant 8,000-mile-diameter—actually 7,926.42- mile-diameter—planet we call Earth.
5 In a 1964 cover story, Time magazine named R. Buckminster Fuller ‘‘the first poet of technology.’’ Harvard University must have agreed, for in 1961 it had appointed Bucky, as he liked to be called, to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry. In 1996, Time published Great People of the 20th Century, and included Bucky Fuller. As an inventor, architect, author, and forty other titles, he may be best remembered for his geodesic domes, but he is much more than just the notable U.S. Patent No. 2,682,235.
6 Time magazine called him an American original, a cranky genius, and an ingenious crank. Bucky Fuller’s career started inauspiciously. Bucky had, in his words, ‘‘been fired twice from Harvard University.’’ The first firing came after he expended his tuition funds by treating musical comedy star Marilyn Miller and the George White's Scandals cast to dinner at Churchill’s. His family forced him to re-enroll at Harvard. The second firing: he was simply bored, and he felt that he was wasting his family’s funds, which were quite limited since the death of his father.
7 In 1917, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, daughter of a prominent architect, and a year later their daughter Alexandra was born. Sadly the baby contracted infantile paralysis and spinal meningitis and died when she was four. Fuller felt tremendous responsibility and guilt.
8 In 1927, at age thirty-two, Bucky Fuller was to make a momentous decision. Considering himself a failure, he went to the shores of Lake Michigan, ‘‘to be a throwaway.’’ In his own description, ‘‘I was an utter failure in business, I had lost all my money, my friends’ investments, I was discredited and penniless.’’ His second daughter, Allegra, had just been born, and he thought his small family would be better off without him.
9 Before jumping, he stopped himself, thinking: Instead of being a throwaway, could I be useful?' Said Bucky, ‘‘Could I use myself as my scientific ‘guinea pig’: to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity?
10 ‘‘To make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.’’ It is here that Bucky Fuller starts his Guinea Pig ‘‘B’’ life experiment.
11 During the 1960s, Bucky Fuller was popular with the young, and he became a folk hero to the hippies, as some of them were known. Geodesic domes were multiplying like rabbits, and by the 1980s thousands had been built. Bucky believed in the young, and he urged young people to ‘‘reform the environment instead of trying to reform man.’’ Bucky argued that ‘‘mankind has the capability through proper planning and use of natural resources to forever house himself and live in workless leisure.’’ He put it very plainly: ‘‘Through technology, man can do anything he needs to do.’’
12 Sparks of rekindled interest in Bucky have recently emerged, reported a July 1999 New York Times article by James Sterngold. Currently, there is a major traveling museum show, Your Private Sky—R. Buckminster Fuller, produced by the Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, with Curator Claude Lichtenstein and Dr. Joachim Krausse. The show started in Zurich and is touring Europe in 2000, with an Asia venue in 2001. The board of trustees of the Stanford University Libraries in California has acquired the massive archives of R. Buckminster Fuller from his family and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Fuller’s ideas are resurfacing, notes Michael A. Keller, Stanford University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources. In the fall of 2000 a play on Fuller, written by D. W. Jacobs, was performed by Ron Campbell to rave reviews on the West Coast.
13 The publication date for this book is set to coincide with the actual millennium year. I think Bucky would have been amused by the celebration of the millennium on December 31, 1999, when on New Year’s Eve the ball dropped high above New York City’s Times Square. The ball was actually a Phillips-made glass geodesic polyhedron. Fuller was a stickler for precise language and scientific fact. A century gets its name from its year. The first cen-' tury was designated by the year 100; the second century is named for the year 200. The twentieth century’s last year is 2000, and the century does not expire until December 31, 2000. January 1, 2001, begins the new millennium. At least that’s what I learned at Stuyvesant High School, and in college I learned even more: that a millennium has 1,000 years and not 999.
14 Misinformation is something Bucky abhorred. It brings to mind Bucky’s reaction when astronaut John Glenn was orbiting the earth for the first time and President John F. Kennedy contacted him to congratulate him on his successful mission. Remarked Fuller, ‘‘The president said, how is it up there?’’ At that precise moment, the astronaut was circling at the foot of the president, on the other side of the earth. The notion that the sun sets made him irate. ‘‘The sun never sets or goes down,’’ Bucky would exclaim, ‘‘the sun eclipses, and the correct term would be that we sunsight in the morning and sunclipse in the evening.’’ Seemingly harmless imprecision in language and idiom taints our understanding of scientific truths, and Fuller calls this to our attention.
15 In the nineteenth century, Thomas Malthus theorized that humankind was multiplying at a geometric rate but producing goods and food at only an arithmetic rate. Clearly, we were headed for failure. Following the Darwinian theory, Karl Marx then added that only the fittest class of men would survive, and that the fittest was the working class, because workers knew how to handle tools and all other people were parasites. Man would endure only because of the worker population.
16 It is reported that our human population reached the six billion mark in October 1999. In 1800 the population was just one billion. (Bom in 1895, Bucky Fuller was himself part of this population explosion.) Projections are that in just fifty years, by the year 2050, our six billion population will nearly double to about 11.5 billion. If the population control agency predictions are accurate, in 2050, of the 11.5 billion people, 23 percent will live in Africa. Since Africa currently has only 8.8 percent of the world’s population, many of whom are starving, these are troublesome numbers. In order to feed the world’s enormous population, we need some innovative solutions. But neither Malthus nor Marx could look into a crystal ball and see that through science, mankind could accommodate a higher standard of living for all people. Man might be saved through a design revolution, one that Bucky would call anticipatory design science, an invisible revolution called technology.
17 Fuller predicted in Critical Path that by the end of the twentieth century the billionaires of the world would hold not physical property but information property. His prognostication about real wealth has become a reality, weaving new ways to measure ‘‘money,’’ recorded now invisibly. He wrote in 1969, in Utopia or Oblivion, ‘‘Ephemeralization is accelerating by ever-increasing quantities of invisible energy events of the universe, it constantly does more with visibly less.’’ Astonishingly, the current group of supermillionaires are very young—but this would not surprise Bucky. The richest men in the nineteenth century held vast wealth by owning tangible property like manufacturing plants, steel mills, tracts of land, railroads, shipping lines, oil wells, etc. Not so in the twentieth century.
18 Indeed, two of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Paul Allen of the Microsoft Company, have a combined wealth of over $125 billion via a computer chip that is weighted in nano ounces. They hold their power of wealth through innovative technology, the United States courts notwithstanding, and acquired this wealth in about a decade. Other recent millionaires have achieved their super-rich status within this same decade by the technology information network called the Web. And yet Bucky cautions us against ‘‘greed.’’ Bucky once remarked on Instant Universe that while light’s speed of 700 million miles an hour is very fast in relation to automobiles’, it is very slow in relation to the ‘‘no time at all’’ of society’s (obsolete) instant universe thinking. ‘‘Comprehensively the world is going from a Newtonian static norm to an Einsteinian all-motion norm. That is the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history. We are becoming ‘quick’ and the graveyards of the dead become progressively less logical.’’
19 But even technology has traps. As the world prepared for the Y2K transition, the computer industry was panicked because some computer systems and some software would interpret the number 00, short for 2000, as 1900. A May 28, 1998, New York Times editorial commented: ‘‘It seems odd, somehow, that in an industry that is downright apostolic about the future—whose pundits make more prognostications than a Ouija board—no one saw the millennium coming until it was just this close.’’ America’s Y2K czar, the White House Y2K coordinator John Koskinen, estimated that the repair of this technical world glitch would cost our nation over $100 billion—more than the gross national product of over thirty of our least developed nations. And other nations collectively would pay an additional $500 billion for fixes. Technology can go awry, and the technicians, mostly our youth, must recognize their obligations and moral responsibilities to the world they helped create. My generation remembers Dr. Albert Einstein, who helped develop the atomic bomb via the Manhattan Project, and later expressed dismay and shame at the creation of such a hideous artifact and its use against his fellow men. Einstein, who studied at the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich, remarked after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ‘‘If only I had known,
20 I would have become a watchmaker.’’ ‘‘God makes no mistakes,’’ said Bucky. But man can make mistakes.
21 Bucky Fuller could see no sense in the leading industrial nations’ spending huge portions of their budgets on military items like nuclear bombs. These weapons of mass destruction replaced the common sense of finding ways to house the homeless and feed the hungry. He called for ‘‘livingry instead of weaponry.’’ Einstein said, ‘‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophes.’’ We now have satellites that can shuttle destruction vehicles into space. These space weapons can launch ‘‘kinetic energy rods’’ and create havoc by hitting with pinpoint accuracy targets on Earth at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound. The United States has high- resolution satellites like Space Imaging’s Ikonos, which from 24,500 miles in space can produce images of phenomenal detail like a six-inch animal. How productive is it to spy on a small mouse nibbling in a cornfield from outer space, while millions go hungry?
22 Society shifted its transportation thinking in the late fifties and early sixties as the delivery of Europe to the U.S. air passenger services outperformed in time, money, and energy the Queen Mary in crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Soon, air transportation, ‘‘doing more for less,’’ rendered seaports obsolete. The docks along New York’s Hudson River lay vacant, and so did the docks across the Atlantic at Southampton. Technology—in the form of the airplane—had changed their geographic importance. Nations were now building international airports with vast runways where jet planes could land.
23 Today, technology is having a dramatic effect in Brazil. Fuller would have been amused that an obscure location named Alcantara might be as well- known in the new millennium as Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base. At Alcantara, Brazil, which is 2 degrees south of the Equator, the launching of satellites is 30 percent more efficient than from Cape Canaveral. Why? Because the rotation of the Earth is at its maximum speed at the Equator, and its speed recedes in zones going north and south. The spin pushes the rockets into orbit faster. Alcantara can then launch rockets with heavier payloads than anywhere else on Earth. That means billions of dollars for Brazil’s economy, says Ronaldo Sardenberg, the Science and Technology minister. What a rational economic activity, and one preferable to chopping down the rain forest and displacing scientific study in that invaluable virgin region. Fuller would call Alcantara an example of ‘‘anticipatory thinking’’ by Brazil, as that nation builds up the spaceport while waiting for Lockheed Martin, Rockwell International, and Boeing to queue up for a launch schedule.
24 Despite all our technical knowledge, we still strain our environment with dangerous nuclear energy plants. Accidents like that at Three Mile Island in the United States, the recent leaks at Japan’s Tsuruga nuclear power plant, and the 1986 accident in Chernobyl are still not resolved. After years of flimflam in Ukraine, the $443 million allocated in its 1999 budget for the Chernobyl disaster is only one-third of the amount necessary for cleanup and victim relief, according to reports by Ukraine’s Emergency Situation minister. And today, fourteen years later, there are 3 million children who still require medical treatment for radiation exposure as a result of that accident. Despite worldwide warnings, on November 26, 1999, Chernobyl Reactor No. 3 was restarted.
25 Bucky said that the ‘‘sun is a nuclear energy plant, and Mother Nature put her safely 93 million miles away’’ and anything closer is pure folly. This generation, the next generation, and probably the generation after that, will need to study this catastrophic artifact that endangers our environment.
26 Fuller was not only concerned with intellectual abstractions; he would sometimes be so practical that he was delightfully amusing. During one of our trips to England, Bucky announced to me at breakfast that I was to arrange transportation from London to Greenwich. He wanted to show me the timepiece at the museum by which time is measured throughout the world, i.e., the Greenwich Mean Time piece. As we neared the artifact, a smiling Bucky saw that the timepiece was happily ticking away; no grinch had stolen it. Then he went into a half-hour talk on how, just twenty years ago, the sun never eclipsed over the British Empire. On another occasion, my son, Tommy Bates, watched ‘‘grand-godfather’’ Bucky negotiate, with a waitress at a four- star hotel a swap of five gauze-covered lemons, neatly tied with pink ribbon, for three additional stewed prunes for his breakfast order. He was very real and always very human, and he wrote with conviction about the options humanity faces.
27 In assembling this anthology for publication, I invited each essayist to contribute a piece on R. Buckminster Fuller. But as E. J. Applewhite notes, Bucky did not want to be misunderstood, so major portions of this book are Fuller’s own words, taken from his many books. It’s important to know the dates of publication for Fuller’s books, and with one exception, each excerpt in this anthology follows those dates. This chronological order illustrates Fuller’s thinking over the years. Like other innovative thinkers, Fuller would often come back to an idea. Thomas Carlyle called these thinkers ‘‘original men,’’ noting that their ‘‘first peculiarity is that they communicate with the universe at first hand.’’ Fuller often came back to his earlier thoughts on a subject, which surely accounts for his many versions of rethinking the Lord’s Prayer.
28 Fuller’s first book for general circulation, Nine Chains to the Moon, published in 1938, serves as this book’s first chapter. It was reviewed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wright’s comments are printed in the appendix.
29 Some of the contributors knew Bucky personally, others knew him from his work. Each o£ the contributors’ essays is paired with a selection from one of Bucky’s books, but the essay is not paired with Fuller’s work as a commentary. No conscious attempt is made to tie Fuller’s work with the contributor’s piece. Much of Bucky’s work is universal and omnidirectional, so that first impressions can sometimes be deceiving. If there appears to be a connection to the reader, it is purely coincidental. There is, however, a sympathetic approach to the pairing. Many of Fuller’s early writings are out of print, and I hope this millennium anthology publication will spark interest in reprinting some of his early books.
30 Reading Bucky is an exploration process. As the new reader ventures into Fuller’s work, he may need a gestation period before he comes to an understanding of Fuller’s words, as he talks about our universe and the nonsimultaneous scenario of omnirelated events, often in a lighthearted, Mozartian manner. Following Bucky’s thought can sometimes be difficult, which is understandable, since he sometimes uses his own language. Just let the words flow, and you soon will be in the blend. Let Fuller’s words flicker in your mind. He maintained that all children are born geniuses. Out of every 1,000, some 999 are swiftly and inadvertendy degeniused by grown-ups. Motivated by love but also by fear for their children’s future, parents in their ignorance act as though they know all the answers, and so they curtail the spontaneous exploratory acts of genius of their children. I remember Bucky’s own words, ‘‘I see in a flash that the eyes of youth see that the world could be made to work for all humanity. And I see that they will settle for nothing less. And I see that they are impatient. And I see above all that they can and will soon make it so.’’
31 In 1998, National Geographic conducted an interactive Web questionnaire called Survey 2000, which gathered data from 80,000 people. Among young people thirteen to fifteen years old, 85 percent worry about the environment. And (50 percent of children disagree with the statement: ‘‘All in all the world population will be better off in the next hundred years.’’ In fact, most would accept cuts in their standard of living to conserve global resources. Bucky would find these findings about the young an opportunity for humanity.
32 Civilization is engaged in the rapid acceleration of Fuller’s design science revolution. Humanity now has the historically unprecedented option to produce a high standard of living for all people on an ecologically sustainable basis. Bucky said, ‘‘Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before—that we now have the option of all humanity to ‘make it’ successfully on this planet in this lifetime. To induce all humanity to realize full lasting economic and physical success, plus enjoyment of all the Earth, without one individual interfering with or being advantaged at the expense of another.’’
3334This collection of Bucky’s writings and contributors’ essays recalls the words of Sir Winston Churchill: ‘‘The further one looks back in history and delves, the further one will see ahead into the future.’’ This book is an appetizer designed to encourage readers to explore the Dymaxion world of R. Buckminster Fuller, a publication guide for the new millennium for those who care about our future on Spaceship Earth.