| Inventor,
designer, poet, futurist; born in Milton, Massachusetts.
(great-nephew of Margaret Fuller). Leaving Harvard
early, he largely educated himself while working at
industrial jobs and serving in the U.S. Navy during
World War I. One of the century's most original minds,
he free-lanced his talents, solving problems of human
shelter, nutrition, transportation, environmental
pollution, and decreasing world resources, developing
over 2,000 patents in the process. He developed the
Dymaxion ("dynamic and maximum efficiency') House
in 1927, and the Dymaxion streamlined, omnidirectional
car in 1932.
Fuller
wrote some 25 books, notably Nine Chains to the
Moon (1938), Utopia or Oblivion (1969), Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), and Critical
Path (1981). An enthusiastic educationist, he held
a chair at Southern Illinois University (1959--75),
and in 1962 became professor of poetry at Harvard.
In his later decades he was a popular public lecturer,
promoting a global strategy of seeking to do more
with less through technology. His inventions include
the 1927 Dymaxion House, the 1933 Dymaxion Car and,
foremost, the 1947 geodesic dome. He has the distinction
of having both his names used for a scientific entity,
the "fullerene" (also known as a "bucky-ball"),
a form of carbon whose molecule resembles his geodesic
dome.
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