Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth 1. Comprehensive propensities I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best.
Click on the links to DOWNLOAD pdf versions of the following: The book Grunch Of Giants by Buckminster Fuller. The book Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller. The books Synergetics I and Synergetics II by Buckminster Fuller. The book Guinea Pig B by Buckminster Fuller.

During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life's work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller's major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization.The stories behind his Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, World Game and integration of science and humanism are lucidly communicated with continuous reference to his synergetic geometry. Permeating the entire series is his unique comprehensive design approach to solving the problems of the world. Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering.

Spouse(s)
Fuller in 1972
Born	July 12, 1895 Milton, Massachusetts, United States
Died	July 1, 1983 (aged 87)
Occupation	Designer author inventor
Children	Allegra Fuller Snyder
Parent(s)	Caroline Wolcott Andrews (mother)
Buildings	Geodesic dome (1940s)
Projects	Dymaxion house (1928)
Philosophy career
Education	Harvard University (expelled)

Richard Buckminster Fuller (/ˈfʊlər/; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)^[1] 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' house/car, 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.^[2]^[3]

Fuller's outrageous statements without careful consideration, and even hesitated to call 'Sum of angels around each vertex' in the rough manuscript a misprint. The truth has usually turned out far stranger than Buckminster Fuller! Fuller is a Janus: grass-rooted in the past, he creates beacons for the very young. Here Buckminster Fuller takes on the gigantic corporate megaliths that exert increasing control over every aspect of daily life. In the form of a modern allegory, he traces the evolution of these multinational giants from the post-World War II military-industrial complex to the current army of.

Guinea Pig B:
I AM NOW CLOSE TO 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.

—Bucky Fuller, 1983^[4]

1Life and work
3Major design projects

Life and work[edit]

Fuller in c. 1910

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.^[5]

Fuller spent much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[6]

Education[edit]

Fuller attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and after that began studying at Harvard College, where he was affiliated with Adams House. He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his 'irresponsibility and lack of interest'. By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.^[6]

Wartime experience[edit]

Between his sessions at Harvard, Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry. He also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash rescue boat commander. After discharge, he worked again in the meat packing industry, acquiring management experience. In 1917, he married Anne Hewlett. During the early 1920s, he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing—although the company would ultimately fail^[6] in 1927.^[7]

Depression and epiphany[edit]

Buckminster Fuller recalled 1927 as a pivotal year of his life. His daughter Alexandra had died in 1922 of complications from polio and spinal meningitis^[8] just before her fourth birthday.^[9] Stanford historian, Barry Katz, found signs that around this time in his life Fuller was suffering from depression and anxiety.^[10] Fuller dwelled on his daughter's death, suspecting that it was connected with the Fullers' damp and drafty living conditions.^[9] This provided motivation for Fuller's involvement in Stockade Building Systems, a bus

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