Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr., born in Massachusetts in 1895, invented an umbrella-driven rowboat at 12, rejected classroom geometry, and was expelled from Harvard twice, once for spending his tuition on a party with a vaudeville troupe. After work as a mill mechanic, a meatpacker, and a Navy radio operator, he lost his daughter Alexandra to polio and spinal meningitis in 1922 and blamed the family’s damp housing. His Stockade Building System, built on lightweight blocks of cement and wood shavings, failed by 1927. That year, broke and drinking, he stood by Lake Michigan in Chicago considering suicide, then described a sphere of white light and a voice telling him he belonged to the universe.

From then on he called himself Guinea Pig B and treated his life as an experiment for humanity. The Dymaxion name, coined by a department store admin, went on a three-wheeled teardrop car steered from the rear, a house hung from a central mast, and a sleep schedule of 30 minute naps every six hours. At Black Mountain College, student Arthur Penn coaxed him into acting, and he refined the geodesic dome, building on Walter Bauersfeld’s earlier planetarium and proving strength through tensegrity. He later created the World Game and the Dymaxion map, and died in July 1983, an hour after his dying wife Anne squeezed his hand.

• The fatal Dymaxion car crash and the dispute over whether a second car caused it
• Ephemeralization, doing more with less, and the fine mist shower that cut water use
• Students hanging from a dome frame, radar domes flown in by helicopter, and the 1967 Montreal Biosphere
• The icosahedron-based Dymaxion map, Spaceship Earth, and words like livingry and in stairs
• The Dymaxion Chronofile, an archive about 82 meters long, and the words trim tab on his gravestone