The Dreams of R. Buckminster Fuller

any of those things. Technically, he didn't have the training necessarily. But what he was was a major symbol for counterculture and influencing people to be creative. I think that's fair to say. Yeah, yeah, as we researched him, and this was a guy that I didn't know a lot about. I mean, I grew up seeing the diodestic Dome. You know some of the edific doum houses near where I lived. Oh yeah, I didn't know that. Well there was one.

I say that as if there was a whole there, but there was one up on the hill and there where where my my parents lived. I always tried to imagine what's going on, and yeah, yeah, well I think I must have heard of him the first time when I went to Epcot Center, because I believe that the what do they call it Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center is is a geodesic sphere. I believe it's based on

the principles. I don't think that Fuller was involved in constructing it, but but yeah, but certainly the gudesic dome, the guidestic sphere serves as a symbol for him. It's this uh uh, the inspiration of what can be done with engineering and ingenuity. Yeah, and and I think that's very very stuff to blow your mind in terms of how much this show has covered retro futurist kind of aesthetics or engineering principles, ideas imagination in the past. Yeah, yeah, totally.

I mean, and so much of what's appealing about Fuller is that he the audacity of some of his ideas, Like some of the other visionaries that we've we've touched on the show before and we'll touch on in the future. You know, he really he really thought outside the box. To use a very cliche term, he didn't he didn't have all the filters that that that a lot of us have been trying to envision what we can do

with technology and what the future could consist of. Yeah, and my take on this, So I went into this episode being a fan of our Buck Muster Fuller being very excited about, in particular the Cloud nine ideas which

we'll talk about, which are basically flying cities. Um and I had even written about him for How Stuff Works before and then really doing a deep dive into the research about him, and in particular there's an article uh in The New Yorker that came out in two thousand eight that's called the di Maxian Man, and it's by

a woman named Elizabeth Colbert. Uh not Colbert. I believe it's Colbert because it's got okay, but um uh, it really highlighted his life beyond just the you know, the the big ideas that this guy came up with, and I think that of him now more along the lines of this generation of men who were big thinkers, but we're also sort of con artists in a way. Joe is not going to be delighted to know Joe. Yeah, for those of you who know are our third host, Joe is a a big buck Mr. Fuller fan has

also written about him. But but I'm gonna try to convince him. Hopefully he'll listen to this and I'll change his mind. So why don't we start just talking about that. I'm gonna call him Bucky Buckminster. I think is gonna be a little bit too much, and Mr Fuller seems formal for where we're at, So let's call him Bucky. That's what his friends and family called him. Uh. He was born on July twelve in Milton, Massachusetts, which I'm

familiar with from the Boston area. Uh. And he died on July one, in nine three in l a um. He this is like right out of the gate like this, This story of him as a little kid, I think perfectly streets what kind of a human being he grew up into. So he was nearsighted as a child, so was I. I stared wearing glasses when I was five, but it wasn't until he was actually fitted with glasses, like his parents convinced him, Hey, you need glasses. He

didn't believe that the world wasn't blurry. He thought the whole world was blurry because that's how he saw it. So I know I presented that as a double negative. So he thought the world was blurry, and when they said to him, no, you have something wrong with your eyes, he didn't believe them until somebody actually put glasses on his head and he realized, Oh, this is how I'm supposed to see the world. And I think that's a

perfect metaphor for this guy's life as it goes on. Basically, I mean, I see some of that in my my own toddler. To say that he's gonna, you know, grow up to be such an iconic figure, but I wouldn't be surper. But there's a stubbornness at times to to a kid. You know, they think they know how the world works, and they don't. They don't accept the counter argument that you present them with. But but maybe that's

part of a Fuller's vibe. And why I resonate so much is because he kept that that kind of childish vision and assuredness. Yeah, yeah, I think you might be right. Well here's another thing. Tell me if your son does this yet? Okay, okay buck. Mr Fuller constantly collected throughout his entire life scrap books of his letters, articles, everything as a record of his life. This included receipts for everything like dry cleaning, bills and we have all of

this today. He actually referred to it later on as the Dymaxion Chronophile. He loved coming up with weird names for things. Now that sounds a lot more impressive until you realize it has like laundry receipts in it. Yeah, yeah, so is um is your son keeping a Dymaxian chronofile. He has a box of rocks. He comes home every day with like six different rocks in his pockets. So sort of an early early stage. Well, I could see them keeping that in an archive someday, and that's what

they did with with Fuller. Actually, uh, it weighs forty five tons this guy's archives. So I used to work in an academic library and work a lot with archivists and special collections, and forty five tons is a lot. That's a lot of material. It's the largest personal archive

that's currently at Stanford University. So I mean, I think it's basically everything this guy ever wrote down to paper he thought was going to be important in some way and kept a copy of it um And and it's, uh, it's just kind of fascinating, Like I think about other figures throughout history who even at a young age, were convinced that whatever they had was going to be so important that one day mankind was going to need to go look back upon these papers, you know, even when

you're a child. Theodore Roosevelt was a guy like this, kept kept a log of pretty much everything he did. Um. And that also, I think there's a certain amount of narcissism that comes into play there, I would think, so, I mean, and yeah, we definitely see that with with Fuller, and that he's from a from an early point keeping keeping a file, a holy document of what he is setting out with a chief. Yeah. Yeah, so you know, that's that's the basics of what we have of him

as a child. But like many people and his family, mostly men, Uh, he went to Harvard University. Unfortunately, halfway through his freshman year, he took his tuition money and he took it out of the bank and he said, I'm going to use this to entertain chorus girls in Manhattan. Uh. Story goes that Harvard wasn't pleased about this. He was expelled. A year later, they reinstated him, and then he got thrown out again. We don't know why. Maybe it was chorus girls again who knows. But the gist of it

is that Bucking never graduated from any college. He doesn't have a degree in engineering. He um, he really you know, from what it sounds like, he was a book learning man, you know, um, which is which is fine, but I think, like when you see some of the large scale projects he was hired for later on based on his hotspa, it makes you, it makes you wonder. Um. So anyway, so after this whole Harvard thing collapsed for him, he went on, he took a meatpacking job, then he joined

the Navy. When he was in the Navy, this is when he really started his whole like invention kick, right. So he uh, he invented this device to rescue pilots that had like you know, crashed at sea. And um, what what ended up happening was this device often just flipped them upside down and dunked them head first into the water and held them under water. Right. Well you know it it expedites the process, but it's just not in the way, not the way I think the Navy

was looking at. Um. And then you know, after World War rather during World War One, he got married and he started a business with his wife's father, His wife's father was an architect, and so I think that this is where he you know, picked up a lot of his nol but that the two of them started this business together where they manufactured books out of wood shavings. And I was trying to imagine what this even meant. It's it's one thing to read that as a sentence

in an article. I don't know what does that mean. They took the wood shavings and they they like pulped them down. I guess it certainly makes me think of sort of you know, homemade paper craft nowadays. But well, it's hard to imagine. But the company went almost bankrupt and uh then somebody bought it from the two of them. In so at this point, this is this is an interesting point in Buckey's life. Uh, and by different accounts

from what I read, Uh, it's acknowledged differently. Even stories say that, like their interviews with his daughter saying this what I'm about to tell you is is probably fictional. Basically, he comes to a crossroads in his life. Oh yeah, oh yeah, literally, like he his daughter was born. Um, he claimed that at the time he became really depressed because he didn't have a job. He couldn't provide for

his family. So he he was on a walk, and he was walking alongside Lake Michigan, and he had suicidal thoughts. And so some versions of this story say that he claims suddenly he was suspended several feet above the air, above the ground rather in the air, and saw light and he heard a voice say, you do not have the right to eliminate yourself. And then it said you

do not belong to you, You belong to the universe. Uh. And so I presumably he was set back down and he had this epiphany that this was a sign that he should start a lifelong experiment uh, where basically he should figure out how one person himself could benefit all of humanity, could change all of humanity for the better. And this is where he really started hitting the books, right, hanging out in library, he's compiling notes and really trying

to figure out how he can transform the world. Right. Yeah, and here again, so he's keeping like documentation of all of this stuff. Right. So, rather than you get a job and support his family, he goes to the library. He refers to himself in the third person as guinea pig b presumably be is Bucky uh and he starts writing this booklet that he called The for d Timelock. Uh and uh. From what I understood, it's apparently quite

hard to read. It's it's a the reviews rather of it where that it was you know, the pros was dense, it was it barely made any sense. But essentially it's a diet tribe about how we were failing at that time in how we constructed modern homes and how we were basically like real estate and construction. Um. And he felt like this was this was how he was going to impact human He was going to change production basically

of home life. And this comes along at a at a at a key point too, because we're seeing in this industrialized world, we're seeing these uh, these sort of cookie cutter designs roll out in the world around us, but we're also seeing futuristic visions of what's possible showing up in our our science fiction and advertising and uh and and and Bucky's ideas kind of serve as a

as a bridge to that. Yeah, I think that's important to remember is that, like there were a lot of people at that time who were having amazing imaginative ideas really that you know, I think that um formed what we think of today as sort of our science fiction fantasy uh conventions, I guess, right, like the aesthetics behind that. And Fuller, Bucky rather sort of thought of himself not

you know, he wasn't in the fictional space. He saw this as no, that this is how we're going to change the real world, no matter how unrealistic it was or even as we'll find out later that he came up with ideas for things that hadn't been invented yet. So his excuse for why he couldn't construct things was, well, the materials aren't here. Yeah, sorry, this doesn't actually exist,

so I can't make it yet. Yeah. I mean he was, like a lot of people at the time, riding that wave of technological optimism where it seemed that all these things would definitely come to fruition and uh and so he's just sort of dreaming, dreaming ahead of that wave crashing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So i'd like before we get into the first of his his large, uh you know, scale inventions, here's a couple other notes about him, just so we've we've got

a framework of Buck Mr Fuller as a man. Uh So, later on in his life, after he gained some notoriety. He was an academic uh and reportedly he could lecture for ten hours at a time. UH, and that if you had class with him, they lasted from nine am until five pm. And this was not like the kind of like a seminar where you broke out in a group sessions and you were interacting with your classmates. Fuller spoke the entire time. He basically just shared at people

for eight to ten hours at a time. But he was very charismatics. I presumably this is it's not as dreary attend it's as much as ten hour lecture. I get the impression that people weren't falling asleep, that it was a spectacle to behold. Um. Of course, he believed all the world's problems could be solved by technology. That's basically the philosophy behind a lot of what he saw. Yeah, he also proposed a clear dome be constructed over Manhattan, a tetra head drawn suburb in San Francisco Bay, and

he patented a scheme for an underwater city. So he's really thinking about I guess, like what we would call today urban studies, right like he was, he was thinking about cities as microcosms of people and how we could put them elsewhere, whether that be the sky, underwater. I don't know why Manhattan would need a dome, but I think this is something that's caught on in fiction because I feel like I've seen it in a lot of

other Yeah, it definitely shows up in Futurama. There's a really at some point the city of New York is uh is covered in a dome. I don't recall exactly why, but but it does happen. Yeah, maybe like acid rain or something like that, although I don't know that that was what his thinking was. Um, here's another interesting thing about him. So, while he did believe that technology was the you know, saving grace for all of humanity, he

didn't believe in evolution. What he actually thought were that human beings had come from another part of the universe, like another planet, uh, totally as we are right now, and populated the planet Earth like somebody dropped us off here. Uh. He also thought that dolphins were descendants from these like proto humans that came to Earth and that they had like become seafaring proto humans and eventually turned into dolphins. I bet he. I wonder if you ever met up

with John C. Lily. They definitely lived at the same time. Yeah, and you were telling me about Lily earlier, So I think that, Um, he sounds like somebody who should definitely talk about on the show, which I think we should do a full episode on literally at some point, because he's a fascinating dude and we've only we've only really touched on some of his uh crazier ideas here on the show in the past, and there's a lot more to him than that. Well, well, we'll save that for

another episode. But here's the last thing I'll give you on Bucky. This is one of my favorites before we get into the diet Dymaxian inventions that he had. Okay, Um, for many years, Bucky had a very specific diet and there are only a few things he would eat and they consisted of prunes, tea, steak, and jello. Those were like his four food groups. Prunes, tea, steak, and jello. Wow. Well, I I think you'd have to put a lot of different things into that jello to really make that diet work.

But I'm trying to imagine. I know that there's a recipe and I may be taking us off track here, But isn't there something like where you there's like a mold of jello where you embed other food products inside the jello, like and suspended animation. Yeah, like a little bits of fruit. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, But in his case, it would just be like prunes and and steak, like yeah yeah, he just had this one thing that he

would eat every day. Yeah yeah, yeah. I mean, because he was very utilitarian, you want to make it as simple as possible. Okay, So with this gives you an idea of what kind of a person Fuller was he. Like I said earlier, he liked to make up words of his own. So this leads us to his favorite word that he made up. But he didn't make it up, actually, but it was made up maxian. Uh. There was a consultant who was working to sell model homes and they

came up with it. And it's a mash of three words that they thought sounded exciting at the time, dynamic maximum and ion is good is good marketing maxion? Yeah yeah, I'd buy that. But it's perfect for Fuller, right, because so so many of these ideas are are about the marketing of the dream, not so much about the realization of it. Yeah, I think if he were alive today, he would very much be like the kind of mad men that would that would work in advertising or marketing

or just do a lot of Ted talks. May definitely he would be a Ted talker for sure, You're right. Uh so. So he took this word dymaxie and he just applied it to a lot of his you know, invention ideas. Um. The first one was the Dymaxion vehicle. So this was a car that had three wheels, there were two in the front, one in the back, and instead of a rear view mirror, it had a periscope. I tried imagining how that would work. So you're you would like, what, lean over and put your eye in

the periscope to see behind you? I guess so. But of course it's that's not really two different from what we have now with the rear view video, right. Oh, yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I've never driven a car with one of those before, but yeah, it works, you know, ultimately not too different from a periscope. So I'm gonna give him, I'm gonna give a break pass on that. Well, apparently this car was really good for for like, you know,

odd parking maneuvers. So if you're the kind of person who has trouble parallel parking, I think the Dymaxian vehicle was for you, and it was apparently very good at degree turns. Uh. But it caused a lot of controversy when it was first introduced. The very first time you put it out on the road in nine three, there was so much hype and people were so surprised by seeing it on the road that it caused gridlock. That people just weren't driving because they were up staring at

this thing. Yeah, I can definitely understand. I mean I I I feel like when I see a vehicle that's particularly futuristic driving around town here in Atlanta, and it throws me off for a minute and I almost wrecked the car. Yeah. In fact, there's somebody near the office here. I see him coming in and out of the Whole Foods parking lot in some sort I don't even know what you call them these days, but it has to two wheels in the front and one in the back.

Really it's kind of vehicle. Oh, now I'm curious. You know who we should ask about this? As the car stuff guys, would I wonder, Yeah, yeah, I I even considered asking them if they had already covered the Dymaxine vehicle. I'm not sure if they have or not, but I'm sure Scott's heard of it before. Um So, Fuller basically envisioned that this vehicle would go beyond the three wheel model that he had built. He wanted it to fly. He wanted basically, he wanted everything he made to fly.

That was kind of his thing. Um. But he he thought it would be kind of like a duck the way that it would take off, uh, And that it would also be built in such a way so that like when it was on land, it could travel on the roughest roads, but then when there was terrain that you couldn't necessarily get over with you know, the three wheels on on the Dymaxine vehicle, it would just take off and fly over the stuff. Um he. So here's what happened with the Dymaxine vehicle. They built one prototype

and as this one that caused the grid block. I believe three months after it was released, it crashed. The driver was killed, the one of the passengers was seriously injured. But later on and they determined. I believe it was at like a World's Fair that this happened or something

similar to that, like one of these big exhibitions of technology. Uh, they determined another car was found responsible for the accident, and they only produced two more of these, and then the whole thing was just put on hold because you know, it's just it was again like many of his ideas, it was a it was a cool idea, but it wasn't exactly practical or functional. Yeah, as a as an inspiration and as an argument, it totally works because it's it's Bucky saying, Hey, why does a car have to

be this? Let's think outside of the timeline so far. Let's think about what is what's possible, and not just what we have to work with. But when you start actually, you know, putting a tire to the road, Uh, it doesn't always work out. And I imagine that like the investors involved, you know, he must have had to have he must have been a very charming man in order to convince people to put their money into these projects. Um. And so that leads us to the next Dymaxion invention,

which was the Dymaxion house. So that, like like the car and some of the other stuff we're gonna see you later on. He very much had this idea I think of like everything being kind of like uh, what we would refer to now as plug in play right right. Yeah, you buy it and it's just right out of the box, good to go. And so that's what he wanted this house to be. It was something that you could erect

in one day, totally complete. Like I think furniture and definitely appliances were all built into the structure and they just sort of like unfold and be there. He called it drudge y proof. I don't know what that necessarily meant other than that, like maybe he thought it would be aesthetically pleasing when the roll of building up. Yeah, so I guess that's true. Yeah, I thought more of that it was like the drudgery of everyday life, you know that that there was something about the home that

would kind of put a little spring in your step. Well, I mean as as a homeown, right does like that the home comes to you kind of broken, even if even if you had to build the damn thing, it's it's it's in a constant state of breaking. So this is uh, and you're having to repair it and then so maybe the drudgery free home. It's just simply this this, like if you're microwave of breaks, you just buy a new home. Yeah yeah, I think the complete modular home

is a complete insert. It's just if you're this one's broken, well great, just tear tear the fresh strip off the new one, plug it into your lot, and you're good to go. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's how he was thinking. I mean, it only really made it to sketch stages and at the beginning, what he envisioned was that there are these ultra lightweight towers and that they would be

assembled at a particular location. I guess there would be like a factory or something or they're making these, and then they would have Zeppelin's transport them around the world.

I love that that detail of it. Yes, it's it's just go ahead and throw airships in there, like like every every idea that he has is is tailor made for one of those old popular science covers, right yeah, and this is straight out of like a pulp pulp novel from the thirties two, Like like the way that they would excavate this didn't actually happen, but theoretically they would excavate sites to place these homes and by just

you know, dropping bombs from the zeppelin. Just drop a small bomb, just a small one, blow up the area, flatten it out, and then you could put your dimaxi in home down. Yeah again, just completely thinking outside of existing context. You know, why not why can't we dig a hole in a neighborhood by the use of smart bomb, Yeah, yeah, exactly, and then just drop it, drop the house in there.

From his I wouldn't be surprised if it came back around again, you know, with the at least here in Atlanta, with the way real estates are, real estate prices are going, you know, it's just yeah, we'll just drop a bomb, knocked down the whole neighborhood and then put a bunch of these. That's basically what does happen. You know when you when you think about these like a live work play units that go up in like a year, you know, they're just really quickly built. Maybe he did inspire some

some engineers and architects. So the second version of this, this is the one that that ended up like being built, was it was shaped like a hexagon and it was made out of stamped metal and it was suspended on a mast. The mast this way I'm envisioning it was like this was sort of like a telephone pole maybe. Um. And this mask contained all the wiring and plumbing and stuff like that. Today that's where we'd have our you know,

internet chords and stuff like that. Uh. And then when a family moved, they would just disassemble the house uh and pack it up and move it with them. It would it basically like another piece of furniture or something like that. Um. And he really only built the scale model that was exhibited in There was no full sized version ever built because Fuller said the components weren't made yet. There was you know, the stuff didn't exist yet. I think it went beyond just like the stamped metal and

and the structure of the thing. I think he was thinking along the lines of sort of science fiction e type technology that would come as part of this home, uh, stuff that we probably considered you know normal nowadays, like

you know, entertainment center or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, you could of course say the same thing for the the Zeppelin's and the bomb dropping, right if you could say that, well, technology just wasn't there yet, and still wasn't there yet enough to where we would trust, say a drone to deliver an explosive device to a neighborhood or you know, or or be able to adequately deliver things via some sort of you know, a drone

Zeppelin scenario. So okay, so he didn't have the materials. Then we're talking this is like late thirties. I think, um, we probably do now. Uh So is this feasible? Is this something that we could do today? Well? I think one of the big things is that it is Fuller is very much rebelling against existing notions of what we should have, and he's saying, what what can we have? What we can what can we create that will fulfill

those needs? When clearly we're the rest of us that the non BUCkies out there are are mostly tied to tradition too strongly to say, you know what, I'm not going to live in a house. I'm not even gonna live in a modern house. I'm gonna live in some sort of space age tent that I fold up and

take with me when I move. You know, you know, you occasionally see these like kind of articles in science magazines where it's like, hey, look at this this home that this one person is built, and it's very much kind of like this, but there's only one of them, you know what I mean. It's like a um some sort of like cross between a Winnebago and like a hobbit hole. It's like this, you know, amazing idea for

a custom built home. Um. Yeah, I just I wonder if it's feasible to mass produce them the way that he was imagining. You know, you gotta have demand be there or or it's got to be a situation where there's a real need for it. Because one of the applications that that has come up at times with some of these designs is why you could use it for emergency housing. You could you essentially a better take ons FEMA trailer on time of scenario. Yeah, that's true. And

and um here's what I think of it. As you remember in the fifth element, the apartment that Bruce Willis lives in and that I don't remember, I remember it was vaguely blade runner any bed. Yeah, So it's basically like all the apartments are just like a bed and then like that folds out of a wall and everything else folds out of a wall. You're basically in like a room that's the size of like a walking closet.

It's got one window and a door, and they're kind of like stacked on top of each other like um, like crates. Most Um. That's that's That's what I keep thinking of when I'm thinking of like the buck MMR. Fuller Dymaxian house. You know, like your shower head pops out of the wall in the corner, and then like the house is somehow designed so that all the water drains down immediately, you know, your your kitchen surfaces pop out of the sides of the wall. Whatever, whatever you

need is available. But basically the space is very compact and small, and the the the actual structure itself is utilitarian, so the space transforms to meet your needs. And ye so if it needs to be a bathroom with toilet pops up, comes down, Yeah you just need to do yoga. Everything goes into the wall, right, yeah, yeah exactly. Um. And I don't know if that's visible either, but but like some of some of the architecture, I think that we're seeing people experiment with today, we might we might

be heading towards something like that. Um. So okay, So he tried to mass produce these, even though they never really got off the ground. He worked together with this aircraft company in Wichita. So this was sorry, so not the late thirties, mid mid forties. Um, he did try to build two examples. They collapsed. Uh. The only surviving version of this actually is in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. So if you're out in Dearborn, you can go see one of these things see how it worked.

We'd love to hear from you, guys, if you've seen us before in action. I'm sure some listeners have seen one of these, or maybe they'll have seen some of the geodesic domes. We're gonna talk about it shortly. Um, he applied dymaxion too, almost everything. I'm surprised there wasn't a Dymaxian dome. But there was a bathroom. Yeah, we're already talking about fifth element bathrooms, and he got in

there as well. So the bathroom was just this single unit that had a built in shower, toilet, and sink, etcetera. It was just all you know, it's basically like a porta potty with like a sink and a shower built into it. Yeah, and you know, I'm I'm kind of sold on this because there's so much goes into the

modern bathroom. Like there's like if you build a bathroom onto your house, um, like it just it gets really complicated really fast, and you have to worry about like how far is it or you're gonna have to have additional pumps and there's so many pipes going into it. But if you could just drop something in, if there was just this module like Lego, Yeah, it's just this Lego block your your your House project by a Zeppelin,

then why not? Yeah? And the bath room is another is one of those key areas where we really don't do a lot of rethinking of the bathroom. So it's time for a full Bucky redo. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Oh that could we could do a whole episode on that. Yeah. I mean, the the audacity of the modern toilet is I mean, it's just ridiculous. So we should be rethinking the toilet more than we do, which makes me wonder

to what extent he actually changed how we pooped. Yeah, I'm sure that there was a Dymaxian toilet out there somewhere that reimagined that whole scenario. I know you and Juliet covered something like that previously, right, Yeah, we talked a bit about about the science of pooping and uh yeah, since that episode, I've become a big advocate of the squat potty. So yeah, yeah, well, who knows. I'm sure

if he were here today, Bucky would listen. Yeah, I can imagine he would be a squatter if he were here. You're around now. But at the time, it just the concept might not have been out there enough for Yeah, it could have been a little too riskue. I mean, flying cities was pretty much as hard as far as he could push it and just run through. A couple

of other Dimaxian ideas he had. It was the Dimxician development unit, which was essentially a mobile shelter also described as a grain bin with windows, and I believe this was something that like the military would use right deploy this in scenario essentially like a FEMA trailers situation um.

And then he also had a Dimaxian map, which is projection of the world map onto the surface, and then so he drin a There was the twenty sided polygon, which can be unfolded and flattened to two dimensions, which also didn't catch up. So I'm trying to imagine this basically looks like a large twenty sided die for D and D eat. It unfolds into a map. Why why because because it's cool? Okay, But but that, just like the flat map didn't work for him. He needed flat

He wanted to carry it around. The dime Axion man can't really roll with a traditional map. He needs a map that uh that that looks like it was given to us by you're already like thinking in the Madison Avenue like version of Dymaxian Man sales. I like that. I think it would be a great name for a store shop, a Dymaxion Man. I would not be surprised because when I was doing research for this, the A state of our Buckminster Fuller is kept up pretty well.

The website is pretty interesting and has a lot of information of it on him of its own. Um. But I wouldn't be surprised if there is somebody who's holding the copyright to Dymaxion right now and just waiting for the opportunity. Oh yeah, because I mean again, a lot of these ideas were, according to the man himself, ahead of their time. And ahead of a head of ahead of even our time. So maybe it's just about waiting for them to come to fruition. Yeah, yeah, it could be. Well,

here's one that sort of worked. This. He didn't use dymaxion for this. This is the geodesic home. So this is what most of us, uh probably recognize Bucky's contributions from. Uh So the Dymaxian stuff wasn't wasn't successful. Um So he said that didn't work. You know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna invent my own system of geometry. Uh and I'm gonna call it synergetic geometry. Uh. And he decided that ninety degree angles he's going to throw those out.

It's all gonna be based on sixty degree angles. And apparently he hated the number pie, so he didn't He didn't like the idea of using that ungainly number to represent, you know, the tree with circles. So he even though it works, he said, nope, let's throw that away. We're gonna use the tetrahedron as this basic building block for

the universe and everything's gonna stem out of that. Yeah, this is interesting because it brings them behind a number of these different threads and mysticism that that apply a lot of mystic significance to the tetra he drawn, you know, like the he drawn his God. The tetrahedron is having uh, some sort of mathematical mystic significance. I wonder why that is. I'm sure, I'm sure. Again we're this episode. I feel like it's leading us into like a spider web of

other future episodes. But there's got to be some connection there that makes it um cross cultural, right, like that it's something that that other um groups of humans have all come up on their own, separately. So he's into the tetrahedron. He decides that he's going to invent this thing that he calls the geodesic dome, and basically what it is is a series of struts, like metallic I believe, struts that support a skin kind of covering, not not

actual skin. He's not Buffalo Bill here. It's it's you know, some kind of a material he's using. But basically this looks like a sphere cut in half, but it's composed of triangular support. So that's where this tetrahedron stuff comes in. UM. So at the time, you know, he actually managed to parlay the whole Dymaxian failure into a teaching position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. And he was working

with a team of students. Uh. And they built one of these as like you know, I think part of one of his classes or something like that, and uh, immediately it sagged and fell in on itself. So we were looking at the Dymaxian home all over again. Um. And he claimed the he intentionally wanted this to happen because, you know, a bunch of the faculty at the school like, oh, there's this this wacko fuller. He just had the whole class build a crazy dome for semester and then collapsed.

What's going on? Yeah, and he apparently they were referring to it on campus as a flapahedron. Uh and uh so he says, no, I intentionally did that because I wanted to know at what point the dome would collapse. You know, he had to figure out the weak structural points of this thing. He reminds me a lot of the Cat in the Hat at this point, because the Cat in the Hat, who I've been reading a lot recently. Um,

you know, he's always causing a mess. But is that it that keeps reframing it as being a part of the plan. Yeah, I knew this would happen. I knew that the multiple cats would turn the yard into pink google. I knew that the Thing one and Thing too would run wild. But but there's a plan here, and everything's gonna work out in the end because I know what I'm and I know what I'm doing here. Yeah, Fuller doesn't strike me as a man that was capable of

mitting when he was wrong very easily. Um. And and that leads us into there was there was some controversy around all of this, So he actually didn't invent these domes. Um. A guy named Walter bowers Field had already designed something like this for a planetarium in Germany, but Fuller got the paperwork done first, so he basically filed you know, the copyright registration whatever it was at the time that

he was using for this. Uh. And so even though you know, the Goodesic domes basically used this method method that Bowersfeld had come with, Bucky held the u S patent and popularized the whole idea, and so we think of him as being the inventor for this thing. Um. Having worked on our show Stuff of Genius here at How Stuff Works, which is largely about inventors and things they've invented. That is a common story with almost all inventions that yes, somebody else invented it, but this person

got to the copyright office first. So there was another person as well that that Bucky Uh essentially took an idea from. Uh. This was one of his students who is at Black Mountain College. Um. So, so part of the idea of these geodesic domes was that they were held together by something that he called tense segrity. I don't I don't know because what I from what I read he the way he used the term was that it was a combination of tension and integrity. Yeah, I'm not.

I think he just like takes words and slams them together. Well, you know, there's there's a there's a fine art to creating a good poor too. But yeah, exactly. Um. But one of the students from that program, Kenneth Snelson, claimed that he was actually the one who came up with the whole idea for these sculptures, these geodesic dome sculptures. Uh, and that he worked on it while he was a student there, but he was under Fuller at the time, and that Fuller than was like, okay, well here's this.

This is ten segrity, that's what we're gonna call it. And yeah, you know, he just took off with the idea. So there is again some controversy about whether or not any of this. Now keep in mind, this is like one of the only things that he did that actually sort of worked, um, and and so there's controversy about whether or not he even came up with it in the first place himself, but he did work. And you

do see these domes yeah, around the country. Yeah, in fact, you can, you know, you can very easily do a search and look up geodesic domes and see they're they're used all over the world. Actually, you know, um, the one that is the most famous, I believe it's the US Pavilion for the Expo sixties seven in Montreal. Um they built that, they built this geodesic dome structure, and there's a lot of people that you know, it's it's fairly noteworthy. But I believe that there's some in Japan.

You said, you're even seeing some in your neighborhood. Growing up. Yeah. Yeah, just down the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, there's a Judesic domehouse up on the hill. Well apparently, uh, you know, there was a little bit of problems with these, uh and one of which was that they all leaked. So I'm curious if people that lived nearby you had problems with leaking, especially like in heavy rain seasons. You couldn't

seal them successfully the way that they were designed. Um. Some people even said about um ones that they built under Fuller's guidance, that they would you know add um, what would you call it, like hulking or some kind of you know, material in order to cover up the spaces in between the triangles and and that would just

make it even worse. All right. So part of the problem here is that you're creating you're creating a drastically new house, but and with that comes drastically new problems perhaps you know, I mean it is it's separate from the sort of evolution of the existing house design. So yeah, yeah, and think about it. You've got you know, what kind of a home would that be? Like you're basically just under one huge dome. Like there's not a lot of

ways that you can subdivide that up. I mean you could, but um, from what a lot of people have said who have worked on these things, that the acoustics are as you would imagine, you know, pretty terrible. They just broadcast everything that one person says over to the other house. So there's not necessarily a whole lot of privacy there. One of those structures that it looks great I'm sure as a as a set for science fiction movie, but then you start asking questions, well like, well, how do

we divide these rooms out? And then you have you're gonna have these weird rooms where everything just sort of caves off and into the corner. Um. Yeah, so again, wonderful concept. But then when you start applying it to the to real life and reality and our extations and demands of real life and reality, uh, some of the some of the potholes began to show. But you know, he was able to get people to invest money in this,

including his wife. His wife sold thirty thousand dollars in stocks that she had to help fund his research so he could keep working on these things. And eventually he built a fifty foot diameter dome that worked, you know, other than the leaking. Today it is known as quote, the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure, and the only practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions beyond which

the structural strength must be insufficient. So that sounds architecturally fascinating. Yeah, I mean it definitely, And it definitely lines up with his his outlook on life that technology can achieve all things. And here he has achieved essentially a perfect form. Right, it can it works at at any given size. Yeah, And and and I think the thing out these that is we should point out that somewhat marvelous is how

light they are for their size. Right. So he built one for the Ford More Motor Company in ninety three. It was to this is I assume why a lot of his stuff is in the Dearborn, Michigan Museum. There. Um, he used aluminum and fitted it with fiberglass, and it was ninety three ft dome and it only weighed eight point five tons. So you know, I'm not a structural engineer,

but that sounds uh fairly light. Yeah. Um. And and then that so okay, So his wife puts in thirty grand Ford Motor Company hires him, and then the Pentagon hires him and they say, build us this protective housing unit for our radar, So another dome structure that you know, basically, I think they wanted to keep their radar, so it wasn't the equipment wasn't so obvious from basically instead of a traditional dome, des dome and then it will maybe

be a little more structural integrity to it. Yeah, possibly, uh, And legend has it he even Nikita Khrushchev wanted Bucky to come to Moscow and build one of these for him. Um. And Bucky himself lived in one near Carbondale, Illinois, Illinois while he was working at Southern Illinois University. So uh, that's the one in particular that I know leaks really badly.

The the that was the one that that Uh. I read interviews with people who worked on the construction of it, and they were just saying, yeah, like you know, he lived there, lived in quotations, but I think that it wasn't necessarily habitable. So that brings us to the natural extensive extension of the geodesic sphere, which is m I've got this idea for this sphere thing. It's kind of working out. Okay, I got car companies and the Pentagon giving me money to make more of these What if

I could make these things fly? Yeah? I mean he's and he's already expressed an interest in ceiling up cities and domes and whatnot. And and so this is like the perfect extension, perfect tention of his design philosophy. Enclose us and close all of us and close a community in this structure that he has dreamed up, and then that structure will simply float up off the ground. Yeah.

So the idea here was that the temperature adjustments inside the sphere would uh like sort of act like a hot air balloon, like it would be warmer on the inside and subsequently it would float upwards. Um. But but that it would be large enough that it could float and have the same quote unquote tense segrety of his domes and also hows you know, an entire metropolis. Um. This is I'm gonna read this part here because it's this is his explanation of how it works technically, although

keep in mind nobody has ever actually built by cloud nine. Um. So he sees it as a half mile diameter geodesic sphere that would only weigh one thousandth of the weight of the air inside of it, so that contributes to why it's able to float. If the internal air were heated by either solar energy or just you know, average human activity inside producing heat, it would take only one degree shift in fahrenheit over the external temperature of the

dome or sphere rather to make it float. So the idea here is that the internal air would get denser when it cooled, and Bucky figured, you know, he'd put polyethylene curtains around the outside to slow the rate that the air from outside was entering the sphere. So this is his you know, he did actually think out some

of the math and science around this um. Essentially, it's a it's a space age hot air ballint except much larger and uh and would you know would would allow us in theory to elevate small communities and not whole metropolis is I don't don't think you ever actually argued that,

but but small towns, many cities, etcetera. Well, you know, he took this idea basically because there was a game name Matt Suturo Shariki in Japan who challenged him and said, hey, you know you've got all these big ideas, here's what I would like to see, um uh, you know, come up with something that can float over Tokyo bay um. And so that's where Bucky basically, you know, really put his effort into this. I believe Shariki paid him to sort of think this up. But so they had two names.

We were calling them cloud Nines. That was sort of their nickname, but the the official name was the Spherical Tin Secrity Atmosphere Research Station or STARS for short. Uh. And his idea was basically, like you know, like with all of his other sort of portable homes or or gadgets and inventions, you take these things around, set them up.

You know. One idea was that you could anchor him to a mountain, so you've just got this flying home next to a mountain, or you just let him go, like let him go like a balloon that flies out of a child's hand, and just the inhabitants would see the world like wherever the dome took them. It's a wonderful optimistic vision. Yeah, technology has I mean, it's the ultimate non drudgery home. Right, You're literally floating free of the world. You're no longer limited by the confines of

of your environment. You don't have to worry about floods or storms. Well, you probably have to worry about storms, but but you know, you can do a little advanced notice. You can just float to a storm free area, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that that's the idea all over the nearest Zeppelin Zeppelin coming by to dropped some bombs, to build some homes. They just zip by, tug you along. I don't know, I don't know how he envisioned controlling

the direction these things went. And I didn't read anything about like propulsion or anything like that. But maybe it was just all that fascination of Zeppelin's at the time. Um, he would have been like a steampunk cost player. Now it is, Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm kind of surprised that I don't see this idea replicated in uh in science fiction. I mean, I assume it is. Is it has been used somewhere because because Buckminster was just too influential, not but you think it would be showing up in

video games left and right. I worked on something once that wasn't published where there was a Cloud nine in the story. And this was before I had started working here. And done some really deep research on Fuller and I believe, I want to say it was something by Warren Ellis that I had read where he had envisioned using cloud

nines for something. Yeah, it sort of inspired me. And you certainly see this concept employed elsewhere with other other other individuals were thinking about the possible you know, applications for this kind of technology. Uh, in particular nineteen seventy one edition of Technica Mola Desi, which was a essentially Soviet era popular science magazine, and uh, you see this

concept for colonies in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Because of course, the planet Venus at surface level is just a poisonous pressure cooker, you know, that's it's not hospitable in the least for human life. But conceivably, if you were to have some sort of a floating structure, you could you could you could just place it in the upper atmosphere and there we would be able to live and you know, artificially not out in the open, but but with a with a little more earthlike conditions. And

so cloud City and Empire strikes back. Yeah, I mean I was never sure exactly how Cloud City was supposed to float in that science magic propelling it. But this particular concept in the in the Soviet publication would have used a very similar design using uh, you know you depending on the buoyant sea of the atmosphere enclosed in a giant sphere. Okay, okay, yeah, the drawing for that

is fascinating. And you posted that onto the Stuff to Boil your in mind site already, right, yes, and I'll be sure to include a link to that post on the landing page for this episode. Okay, great, Yeah, everybody go take a look at that, because I think it gives you a pretty good idea of how humans would turn a flipping sphere like this into a little microcosm, you know. Yeah, and he's kind of around me like

a submarine. Yeah, And he's very much in keeping with the fuller design philosophy of like, here's something we could do, potentially can do, but there are a lot of steps that would need to get check off the list before we actually got to floating cities. Well, and that that was basically his you know, and thesis on the whole thing was he even said like, all right, this is not an idea that I know how to actually bring about.

He called it a exercise to stimulate imaginative thinking. Uh. And so you know, he thought it would eventually be possible to do this, but he didn't see how they could be constructed until his far future. I don't know how far in the future he meant. Maybe it's today, maybe it's two hundred years from now, I don't know. Um. So, you know that's basically that's a that's a good round, uh summary of a fuller There's you know, more to him than the wacky invention that we didn't really get

into today. He is noted as being what we refer to today as somebody who would be like a green philosopher like, uh, take note, like the solar energy aspect of the of the cloud nines, that's how they would be heated, not with gas or or other fossil fuels. Uh. And he's also you know, seen as being a social theorist too, so some people see him as really thinking ahead of time about human again like what I was saying earlier, like I think he would be like a

great urban studies professor today. Yeah. Yeah. He seemed to think a lot about you know, where technology meets humanity and not just you know, not just about what's come before and but but also but what we can do with it and and and and what needs need to be met by a technology? Yeah. Yeah, Well, so okay, I went into this, uh, you know, wanting to to to love him. I think I learned a little bit more about his background and it it made me less

convinced of him as an inventor necessarily. But uh, you know, even though only a few of his ideas have come to fruition, you know, he has influenced counterculture to quite a degree, social thinking as well. And uh, you know, a lot of Silicon Valleys pioneers list him as being one of the biggest inspirations. Yeah, and ultimately that's that's his contribution, is that he was a dreamer and he and he was an optimist when it came to technology and uh and design and uh and so yeah, that's

his greatest gifts. He passes this design philosophy onto individuals who can either take those dreams a little further or figure out how to realistically apply them in a beneficial way. Yeah, the practical applications. Maybe that's something that comes after his life. Yeah, you gotta have somebody throw out the dream and then somebody else needs to make it, figure out how to make Maybe he's not as much of a con artist as I made him out to be at the beginning

of the episode. Man, yeah, I I don't think of him as as a con artist as much as a dreamer who like like his post Cloud nine is is floating a little bit off of here. Well, they like his vision that he experienced to floating and that his life is not. Oh yeah, look at that, those all connect floating. He's literally in this sense of an architect and engineer who doesn't have both feet on the ground. But that's all love him because he's he's thinking free

of those restraints. Absolutely. So there you have it. That is our buckminster Fuller indeed, to dive into who he was when we're still talking about him today and what some of his more out there ideas and encouraging ideas that consisted of. So if you are out there and you have seen some of these inventions in real life, I'd love to hear about it or even maybe you know, see photos or something like that. If you could send

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