page_title: Buckminster Fuller
section_title: Life and work
hierarchical_section_title: Buckminster Fuller / Life and work
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped photo of young Buckminster Fuller
context_page_description: Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist.
  Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", ephemeralization, synergetic, and "tensegrity". He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.
  Fuller was the second World President of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.
context_section_description: Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. The unusual middle name, Buckminster, was an ancestral family name. As a child, Richard Buckminster Fuller tried numerous variations of his name. He used to sign his name differently each year in the guest register of his family summer vacation home at Bear Island, Maine. He finally settled on R. Buckminster Fuller.
  Fuller spent much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten.  He disagreed with the way geometry was taught in school, being unable to experience for himself that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented an "empty" mathematical point, or that a line  could stretch off to infinity. To him these were illogical, and led to his work on synergetics. He often made items from materials he found in the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. By age 12, he had invented a 'push pull' system for propelling a rowboat by use of an inverted umbrella connected to the transom with a simple oar lock which allowed the user to face forward to point the boat toward its destination. Later in life, Fuller took exception to the term "invention".
  Years later, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but also a habit of being familiar with and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.
caption: Fuller in c. 1910
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