1 Raging Optimist
1Apart from the temporary notoriety of a few high government officials and some athletes like Muhammad Ali and Mark Spitz, Buckminster Fuller is probably the best-known American in the world outside of the United States. This is certainly true of the population under thirty. Nor is he without honor among the youth of his own country. Though some mathematicians, savants, and other ivory towerites still sneer gently at the intellectual pretentions of a man whose only scholarly degrees are honorary ones, young people worship him with a fervor they accord to no one else above their arbitrary cutoff age of three decades. At seventy-eight he is the Pied Piper of the twentieth century whom the children follow in their multiracial millions; the prophet of that Supreme Intelligence who designed the exquisitely balanced, ever-regenerative entropic-antientropic, nonsimultaneous, technological-metaphysical synergetic system, which Bucky calls Universe.
2 The reasons for his hold upon the young are quite simple. They believe in him because, he believes in them, believes that their uncluttered, tradition-spuming minds will lead humankind out of the wilderness of fallacious reasoning and outworn concepts into a glorious era of new enlightenment when, by the intelligent use of never-diminished energy and by ephemeralization—doing ever more with less—all men will enjoy a standard of living as high or higher than the most fortunate 5 percent of now-living people. In short, among the clamorous voices of doom and gloom he alone gives them hope and a reason for being and striving.
3 For Bucky is a raging optimist, often overhopeful, but frequently magnificently right. This facet of his character is acutely expressed in an adjuration his brother-in-law, Roger Hewlett, addressed to Bucky’s ever-loyal wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller, at a time when the Fullers were, as usual in those early days, almost flat broke:
45Lady Anne, Lady Anne, Keep the coffee hot, Bucky’s found a sixpence And he’s off to buy a yacht.
6 Many years later when Bucky and Anne came to visit the author in Florida, I asked him what he would like to do the following day.
7 “I think I’ll run up to St. Petersburg and buy a yacht,” said he.
8 “Dear Bucky, thank God you haven’t changed,” I said.
9 Though Bucky confides the future of the passengers and crew of Spaceship Earth to ever-increasing technology and intelligent industrialization, he is above all a mystic. He believes that the great discoveries of general principles by which the mind of mankind has suddenly leaped forward are not entirely due to the laborious piling up of data upon data until a general principle becomes clear, but are sudden flashes of intuition that come as some exceptionally gifted mind meshes briefly with a Greater Intelligence to obtain a revelation of Truth, later to be proved by conventional pragmatic experimentation. Such was the discovery of the law of gravity by Sir Isaac Newton, such also Einstein’s basic law of physics—. Though such a mind must have the rigorous training and profundity which enables it to grasp the suddenly revealed truth, such truth could not be discovered by ratiocination, since it is a matter of synergy, which means the behavior of a whole system which is not predictable by the behaviors of any of the system’s components taken separately. As Bucky puts it: “Mind relates to the generalized principles, and mind alone can discover them. The mind makes contact with the eternal in these moments of discovery.” 1
10 Bucky has had several such insights himself. One was the discovery that the tetrahedron was the basic building block of Universe, and another the fact that Nature—which he capitalizes—deals always in beautifully coordinated whole numbers. In his new synergetic geometry, which has revolutionized mathematical thinking, there is no such thing as pi—that awkward, irresolute expression for the circle that is never truly squared, but wanders off the page in a gaggle of digits carried to infinity. He proves it in a series of calculations far too complex for the purposes of this book.
11 Bucky’s most recent glimpse of Truth occurred in 1971 as he was sitting on the end of his dock at Bear Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, waiting for Norman Cousins to arrive in a chartered schooner. Delayed by adverse winds and tides, Bucky’s guest was an hour or more overdue, which gave him a precious period for meditation. Cousins tells how he rowed ashore full of apologies to be greeted by Bucky with a great bear hug. Then, “with his eyes blazing behind his large, thick glasses like watermelon seeds in an agitated bowl of olive oil, just flashing back and forth, Bucky exclaimed, ‘Something wonderful has happened!’ ”
12 “What is it, Bucky?” Cousins asked.
13 “I’ve just discovered the coordinates of Universe.”
14 “I’m sure he had,” says Cousins. “That night at dinner and long afterward, Bucky explained it; and once again all the people there were privileged to have a share in the discovery, and they’ll never forget it.
15 “They’ll never forget hearing about it though neither they nor I would be able to tell you what the coordinates of Universe are. What I am trying to say is that you don’t have to know what Bucky is talking about in order to get the impact of it; which is especially true when he’s saying it; less so when he’s writing it. Then one gets bogged down in a flow of prose. Oh, he has to say it, because it parses beautifully as he says it. It’s an act of creation, you see, because he never says it the same way twice. He’s just a lovely human being.
16 “Bucky’s amazing range, his inventiveness, his ingenuity are inexhaustible and infinite; within five minutes after telling you about the coordinates of Universe, he will tell you that he invented a new dance step and demonstrate it.” 2
17 Though Fuller became well known through his inventions—“the House on a Pole,” the Dymaxion car, the Dymaxion map, and, above all, the Geodesic Dome, which encloses more space with far less material and expense than any other form of structure known to man—he does not think of himself as an inventor but rather a discoverer of general principles. For all of his remarkable contributions to technology are simply fallout from those principles. He is a philosopher, some of whose revelations happen to have a practical application. Previously, the enormous publicity which he has received has been beamed on things—the Dome and so forth. Now, at last, to his great delight, people are talking and writing about his ideas, because, as he believes, their time, and his, has come.
18 In the beginning, after some sad experiences with “practical” people hedged in by traditional concepts, Bucky did some calculating. He figured that the time lag between the inception of a new idea and its practical application varied in different industries. In electronics it was two years, in the aircraft industry about four years, in railroading fifteen years, and in the most backward of all, the construction industry, approximately forty-two years. So he said to himself: “If I aim to be fifty years ahead of my time I shall be safe. No one will interfere with me because I’ll be so far ahead that I will pose no threat to all the people who have a vested interest in opposing progress. They’ll just call me a nut.”
19 Which, of course, they did.
20 His ever-increasing fame brings constantly intensifying pressures upon Bucky. Millions of people from Osaka to Leningrad, from Reykjavik to Cape Comorin want to see him and to listen to his complex but inspiring message of hope. In addition, he must find time to write the books in which he expresses his ideas in more detail, and for meditation to enlarge his understanding of Universe and open his mind to further flashes of intuition.
21 Bucky takes his responsibilities to humanity very seriously indeed. He is driven by a fierce compulsion to accomplish an enormous amount of work in whatever time he may have left, and to express the truth, as he sees it, to the greatest possible number of people, especially young people. His schedule is Homeric, strenuous enough to destroy an ordinary man forty years younger. An example was his itinerary for the summer of 1972:
22 June 7, Wednesday. Speak at 3M Company, St. Paul, Minnesota. Lunch with technical directors.
23 June 8, Thursday. Speak at 6th Conference of the International Work Simplification Institution, Boston, Massachusetts.
24 June 9, Friday. Speak at Taft School, Watertown, Connecticut.
25 June 10, 11, and 12. Burr wedding. Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island.
26 June 12, Monday. Confer with biographer Alden Hatch.
27 June 13, Tuesday. Fifty-fifth Reunion Class of 1917, Cambridge, Mass.
28 June 17, Saturday. Fly to London, confer with dons on plan for theater at Cambridge.
29 June 20, Tel Aviv, Israel.
30 June 24–27, Carbondale, Illinois.
31 June 28. Meet with president and directors of Design Science Institute, New York.
32 June 29. Fly to Spoleto, Italy.
33 June 30-July 6. Spoleto Festival.
34 July 7 and 8. Speak at the Aegina Art Center, Aegina Island, Greece.
35 July 9. Gathering on Philopappas Hill, Athens, Greece.
36 July 10–17. Doxiadis cruise.
37 July 18. Fly from Athens to New Delhi, India.
38 July 19–31. India (working on plans for new airports at New Delhi, Bombay, Madras).
39 August. Reserved. [For Bear Island, Maine].
40 Bucky did not, in fact, arrive in Maine until August 21, having been delayed by unexpected difficulties in India and by stopping on his way back around the world to make a speech in Seattle.
41 Bear Island! That is Bucky’s Shangri-La, his Blessed Isle, his Eden. For eleven months of the year he is truly a world citizen, uncaring, hardly even noticing, whether he is in Carbondale or Moscow, New Delhi or Tokyo. On the twelfth month he touches earth, like Antaeus to renew his strength. Touches the earth where he spent his happiest boyhood days; where his family gathers around him; where he escapes the stress of modem life and the complexities of the technological civilization he so ardently endorses.
42 For Bucky has seen to it that Bear Island remains just as it was when he was a boy seventy years ago. This prophet of industrialization, whose aim is to harness the energy of the sun and the stars in the service of mankind, will not allow so much as an electric generator on his beloved island. There are no telephones or radios. You haul water from a well in a bucket—not even a hand pump—and go to the toilet in the rain.
43 In 1953, Bucky wrote about the island in his most poetic vein—he is a poet, too, who once held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard.
4445“Took 543 photographs of Bear Island, which alone, in my forty-nine years’ memory of it, remains unchanged in an otherwise all-changed physical world. All that was inherited from the past, all that was first found wonderfully good in life, here remains vividly alive, and how dearly I love it, and what strength it gives!”
46—“R B F.”
47 With his faith in an Omniscient Intelligence that designed and is embodied in the exquisitely ordered complexities of Universe, which he sometimes calls Nature, sometimes the Supreme Intelligence, and occasionally God, Bucky is a latter-day transcendentalist. William H. Channing, whose brother, William Ellery Channing, cofounder of the Unitarian Church, married Bucky’s great-aunt Ellen Fuller, described the transcendentalist movement, which dawned brilliantly over New England in the summer of 1839, as an “assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the immanence of Divinity in instinct.” It was, he said, “grafted on the somewhat stunted stock of Unitarianism…Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted. …” The transcendentalist believed in “perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright of universal good…Channing says of the ideal transcendentalist, “His work was to be faithful, as all saints, sages, and lovers of man had been, to Truth as the very Word of God.”1 By that definition Buckminster Fuller is a transcendentalist.
48 Should he not be with his heritage! For the Fullers were of that New England strain who led and nurtured the first intellectual blooming of America, and Bucky’s great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, was the original liberated American woman, with an intellect so profound that it dazed the members of her own sex and even daunted the men who were then the leaders of American literature and learning. She it was who first published Ralph Waldo Emerson, the high priest of transcendentalism, in Dial, a magazine she founded with him for the purpose of encouraging a native American literature untrammeled by subservience to foreign culture. “Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature,” she wrote.
49 While she was editor of Dial she also published Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and she was the first editor to publish Henry Thoreau. Though she is described as extremely ugly, these men, with the exception of Hawthorne, who disliked her intensely, and their contemporaries of that small brilliant coterie, were dazzled and enthralled by her learning and wit, though sometimes disturbed by her blunt unfeminine manner of expressing the truth as she saw it, and at others embarrassed by her all-too-feminine desire to be loved.
50 One can picture her in Emerson’s book-cluttered library in Concord, arguing about esoteric enigmas of German philosophy (which, by the way, she introduced to Harvard by her translations of Goethe and Schiller), her eyes flashing with excitement, her head on her abnormally long neck darting this way and that like an angry swan, while the Sage listened with a mixture of admiration and discomfort. When Margaret met her tragic death in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850, it is said that Thoreau combed the sands for days in the hope that some fragments of her monumental biography of Goethe would be washed ashore among the flotsam.
51 Margaret Fuller was as far ahead of her time as Bucky has been of his, and he is the first to acknowledge his debt to her, even reprinting part of one of her essays in his autobiographical Ideas and Integrities, as foreshadowing his own thoughts.
52 The sublime self-assurance, which for years enabled Bucky to maintain his ideas against an almost universal chorus of derogation, is not unlike the intellectual arrogance of his great-aunt who once said to Emerson, “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to mine.” 2
53 Though Bucky intellectually regards race as a dirty word and considers that all types of human beings are of equal value and native ability, he is, paradoxically, extremely proud of his ancestry—a man of many paradoxes he, and the greater for that fact.
54 The first of the family to come to Massachusetts was Lieutenant Thomas Fuller of the British Army, who in 1638 took a year’s leave to have a look at the tiny colony on Massachusetts Bay, the talk of whose exploits and religious dedication had excited his curiosity. In
55 Cambridge, the preaching of eloquent Reverend Thomas Shepard so moved him that he abandoned all thoughts of returning to England and decided to live among the Puritans in “the forest aisles where God might be freely worshiped.”3 He bought a large tract of land in Middleton, Massachusetts, married three times, buried two wives, and raised a family of three daughters and five sons.
56 The Fullers, like their progenitor, were exceedingly devout. One Biblical injunction which they strenuously followed was “Go forth and multiply.” Thomas’s favorite son, Jacob, to whom he left the Middleton farm, had six children, and his son, also named Jacob, had ten children, of whom Timothy Fuller set the style and tradition of Bucky’s direct line.
57 Timothy was the first Fuller to be graduated from Harvard—the Class of 1760. He “applied himself to theology,” and was ordained the first minister of the town of Princeton, Massachusetts, in 1767. He was a successful, though controversial, preacher, being very independent in his thinking. He married Sarah Williams, the daughter of the Reverend Abraham Williams of Sandwich, Massachusetts, and his wife Anna Buckminster, daughter of Colonel Joseph Buckminster of the British Army, who left it to join the Revolutionary Army under Washington. When Timothy Fuller died, “He left a widow and ten children to mourn him.”
58 None of these children went to school regularly. Strong-minded Timothy trusted not in other people’s pedagogy but educated his sons and daughters himself until the former were ready to go to Harvard. Timothy, Jr., made even more of a mark than his father. He was graduated second in his Class of 1801 at Harvard, and of course would have been first had he not been set back by participating in a student rebellion against certain oppressive and unjust rules of the college. All his life he was hot for freedom and the rights of man—a Jeffersonian Democrat among Federalists.
59 After graduation he studied law and went into politics, becoming successively a Massachusetts senator, a United States congressman, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and a member of the Executive Council.
60 However, the most important thing he ever did was to sire Margaret Fuller and force-feed her education so that she read Latin at six and learned Greek, French, German, and Italian. By the time she was in her teens she had read many of the classics in all those languages. It was pretty tough on Margaret, but it made her the outstanding woman of her era.
61 Another important accomplishment of the Honorable Timothy in the progenitive field was to father Bucky’s grandfather, Arthur Buckminster Fuller, and educate him. When Timothy died of Asiatic cholera in 1835, at the age of forty-three, Margaret took over the education of Arthur and his next younger brother, Richard Frederick Fuller, and poor though she always was, having to earn her own living, sent them both through Harvard. Arthur was graduated in 1843 and Frederick in 1844.
62 At Harvard, Arthur “united with the church connected with the university” (Unitarian). Soon after graduation he became a member of the Illinois Conference of Christian and Unitarian Ministers and was licensed by them to preach. He preached his first sermon in Chicago in 1843, in the Reverend Joseph Harrington’s Unitarian Church. When he returned to New England, he studied at Harvard Divinity School, and then became pastor of the Unitarian Society in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he was ordained in 1848. In 1853, he was called to the New North Church on Hanover Street in Boston. He was also elected Chaplain of the Massachusetts Senate in 1858.
63 Arthur and Frederick, who became a lawyer, were the closest to each other of the whole family. They both married, Arthur having two children, and Frederick four by their first wives. When both brothers lost their wives, Frederick married Adeline R. Reeves, a widow, in 1856. Two years later Arthur married her sister, Emma Lucilla Reeves, who was also a widow. Then the two brothers bought a house at 13 Hilliard Street in Cambridge and formed an extraordinarily loving joint household with their wives, their children, and their stepchildren, to whom were soon added the children of their second marriages, two sons in Arthur’s case while Frederick contributed three sons and two daughters. Forty years later members of both families were still living at 13 Hilliard Street.
64 Arthur’s son, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Bucky’s father, was bom on February 13, 1861. He never knew his father. Though Arthur had resigned his pastorate of the New North Church in 1859 because of poor health, the onset of the Civil War stirred him to action. So ardent was his patriotism, so strong his hatred of slavery, that he felt impelled by his conscience to take part in the war. In August 1861, he was commissioned chaplain of the 16th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. While serving with them he also acted as a war correspondent for the Boston Herald, the Journal, the Christian Enquirer, and the New York Tribune, for whom he wrote a vivid eyewitness account of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack.
65 One would think that this man of forty had done enough by leaving his pleasant home, his wife and children for the rugged conditions of army life and the heartbreaking business of ministering to the dying and wounded, but a New England conscience is a powerful propellant. In December 1862, the Federal Army was encamped at Fredericksburg on the road to Richmond. Bewhiskered General Ambrose E. Burnside conceived the preposterous plan of crossing the Rappahannock River to attack General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, impregnably entrenched on the heights beyond. Early in the morning of December 11, a pontoon bridge was flung across the Rappahannock and the 16th Massachusetts was ordered to cross it. In view of the murderous fire of Confederate rifles and artillery from the commanding heights, they very sensibly hesitated. Whereupon Arthur Fuller, with deep faith that he was doing the Lord’s work, led them onto the bridge. Halfway across he was killed by a Confederate bullet, thus becoming one of the first casualties of that bloody Union defeat.
66 Though Arthur’s infant son, Richard Buckminster Fuller, grew up to be a charming gentleman, he never displayed the intellectual strength of his father nor did his life involve such dramatic incidents. The most important thing he did was to father Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr.