Engineer from "Spaceship Earth"

3. The Buckyball Asteroid

Engineer from "Spaceship Earth"

R. Buckminster Fuller, known familiarly as Bucky, lived from 1895 to 1983. He grew up and lived to witness the invention of the automobile, airplane, radio, television, electronic computer, and atomic bomb.

The Wright Flyer, on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., became the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft in 1903.

At a time when many people regarded technology as a means for profit and for waging war, Bucky believed that we could use it to help abolish poverty, hunger, and conflict. He called our planet "Spaceship Earth" to help convince people that we all need to work together as the crew of a ship does.

Bucky had an original way of thinking that made it hard for him to fit into the status quo. He was twice expelled from Harvard College.

The first time, when he was expelled for excessive partying, his family sent him off to a Canadian cotton mill as an apprentice machinist, hoping he would become more mature and responsible. At the mill, he became so good at making, installing, and troubleshooting complex machinery that Harvard invited him back.

The second time, he was expelled for "showing insufficient interest in his studies." Bucky went to work in a meat-packing house and never completed college.

During World War I, he served as a radio operator on a ship with wireless communications. Using his mechanical skills and ingenuity, he helped design a system for rescuing pilots who had been shot down over water.

The navy rewarded him with an opportunity to study briefly at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he enjoyed courses that went beyond academic theory and dealt with the realities of global communications, air travel, and logistics. The skills he developed in his various mechanical ventures would become very important to his future work as an engineer, inventor, and architect.

One of Bucky's later projects was to examine a system of geometry based on the tetrahedron. That led to the novel building design that made him famous: the geodesic dome.

Geometrically, a geodesic dome is akin to a sphere with a piece sliced off its bottom. Like an icosahedron, a classic geodesic sphere has twenty triangular sides. What makes a geodesic dome different from an icosahedron is the fact that its triangles are slightly curved and each triangle is subdivided into smaller triangles. The corners of all these smaller triangles are each the same distance from the sphere's center.

In a geodesic sphere, each face of a polyhedron is subdivided into triangles.

Unlike conventional buildings, Fuller's geodesic domes become stronger, lighter, and cheaper per unit of volume as their size increases. They enclose the largest possible volume of space using the smallest possible surface area.

Since Bucky patented his design in 1947, hundreds of thousands of geodesic domes have been built around the world, everywhere from high mountaintops to the South Pole.

The U.S. Pavilion (above) at Expo 67 in Montreal was a two-hundred-foot-high version of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome. The close-up (below) shows the hexagonal units that make up the surface. The dome is now a family-oriented museum called the Biosphere.

These domes are among the strongest structures for their weight ever devised and least vulnerable to damage from hurricanes and earthquakes.

See also "Hexagons, Pentagons, and Geodesic Domes," "Dome Triangles," "Geodesic Mesh," and "Geodesic Pentagon." 

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