The Dreams of R. Buckminster Fuller

Imagine a world where cities fly, we all drive three-wheeled cars and mainly eat Jell-O. This is where the dreams of architect and engineer Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller would have taken us. At his height, Bucky was influential between the 1930s and 1950s. But his legacy today is largely that of a designer and a counterculture symbol, not as an inventor. In this episode of Stuff To Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian examine the life of Fuller, as well as the success of his dymaxion inventions and geodesic domes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Hey I'm Christian Seger,
and in this episode we're gonna talk about the work
of our Buckminster Fuller. Yeah, this guy was a real visionary,

(00:24):
primarily influential between the nineteen thirties and fifties. You may
have heard of him as a maybe an engineer or
a designer, or sometimes as an architect. He really wasn't
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

(00:46):
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

(01:08):
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,

(01:29):
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.

(01:56):
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

(02:18):
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

(02:40):
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

(03:03):
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

(03:25):
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

(03:45):
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,

(04:09):
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,

(04:31):
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

(04:52):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:38):
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

(05:59):
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

(06:21):
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

(06:43):
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,

(07:03):
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

(07:27):
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

(07:49):
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,

(08:11):
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,

(08:32):
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

(08:53):
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.

(09:13):
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.

(09:34):
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,

(09:56):
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

(10:18):
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

(10:42):
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

(11:03):
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.

(11:25):
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

(11:45):
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

(12:08):
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

(12:30):
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

(12:51):
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

(13:13):
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,

(13:34):
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

(13:57):
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

(14:17):
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

(14:38):
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

(15:00):
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

(15:21):
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

(15:41):
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

(16:02):
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,

(16:24):
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.

(16:49):
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

(17:09):
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

(17:31):
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,

(17:53):
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.

(18:15):
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

(18:37):
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,

(18:58):
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

(19:19):
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

(19:40):
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

(20:03):
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

(20:24):
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

(20:46):
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,

(21:08):
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

(21:30):
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

(21:53):
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

(22:15):
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

(22:36):
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

(22:58):
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

(23:18):
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

(23:40):
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

(24:03):
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

(24:25):
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,

(24:45):
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,

(25:06):
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

(25:27):
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.

(25:49):
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

(26:10):
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

(26:31):
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

(26:53):
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

(27:14):
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

(27:36):
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

(27:56):
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

(28:19):
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.

(28:41):
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,

(29:05):
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

(29:25):
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

(29:47):
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,

(30:10):
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

(30:32):
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.

(30:54):
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.

(31:17):
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

(31:40):
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

(32:01):
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

(32:22):
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

(32:42):
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

(33:04):
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.

(33:27):
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

(33:50):
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

(34:10):
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,

(34:34):
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

(34:54):
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

(35:17):
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,

(35:39):
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

(36:00):
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.

(36:24):
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

(36:45):
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

(37:07):
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

(37:27):
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,

(37:48):
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.

(38:08):
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

(38:29):
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

(38:50):
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,

(39:13):
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

(39:33):
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

(39:54):
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,

(40:14):
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

(40:38):
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

(41:01):
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,

(41:24):
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

(41:45):
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,

(42:06):
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

(42:28):
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.

(42:50):
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.

(43:10):
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

(43:33):
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

(43:55):
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.

(44:18):
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

(44:41):
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

(45:02):
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

(45:26):
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.

(45:49):
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

(46:10):
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

(46:31):
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,

(46:52):
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.

(47:14):
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

(47:35):
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

(47:58):
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.

(48:18):
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,

(48:43):
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

(49:04):
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

(49:25):
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

(49:50):
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

(50:11):
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

(50:32):
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

(50:57):
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

(51:20):
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

(51:41):
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

(52:04):
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

(52:25):
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,

(52:50):
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,

(53:12):
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

(53:32):
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

(53:54):
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.

(54:16):
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

(54:36):
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
him to us on social media. You can find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, where we are Blow to
Mind on all of those platforms, and of course the
mothership floating high above the surface our cloud nine is

(54:56):
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, so check that
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you name it, and you can always contact us at
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