Buckminster Fuller is known as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, yet at one time he thought only about ending his life.

Living in Chicago in 1927, 32-year-old Fuller faced a crisis. Not long after his first child, Alexandra, died at age 4 of polio and spinal meningitis, a construction business he started with his father-in-law collapsed.

It left him discredited and his family almost destitute. He was jobless and seemingly hopeless.

Feeling responsible for these personal setbacks, he was driven to alcohol and then to the verge of suicide. One winter day, he stood on the shore of Lake Michigan, ready to take a fatal leap into the icy water.

But at the crucial moment, he took a leap of faith.

Rather than commit suicide, he committed what he called egocide — "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity."

For the next 56 years, he did just that, and with great success.

Take The Lead

Hailing from a family of New England nonconformists, Fuller — whose full name was Richard Buckminster Fuller — showed a propensity for creative thought and following his own path.

Born in Milton, Mass., in July 1895, he was a self-reliant child, a trait perhaps prompted by the death of his father when Fuller was 12.

Spending his youth on a farm on Bear Island off Maine, he showed an early aptitude for design. He often made things from materials he brought home from the woods. Sometimes he made his own tools. Stepping up his creativity, he designed a device for the human propulsion of small boats.

Years later he said that experience helped him become familiar with the materials that his ambitious projects would require. It also helped him learn the workings of the sheet metal trade and obtain a machinist's certification.

A good student, Fuller showed aplomb in class and a tendency to be a free spirit. After attending Milton Academy in the city of his birth, he began studying at Harvard but was expelled from the university twice. His first ouster was prompted by a raucous party he threw, the second for "irresponsibility and lack of interest," according to the school. By his own admission, he was a misfit in the fraternity environment.

Between his sessions at Harvard, he worked in Canada as a mechanic and in the meatpacking industry. He married his wife, Anne, in 1917 and served in the U.S. Navy in World War I — as a ship radio operator, an editor of a publication and a crash-boat commander.

A few years after his honorable discharge and his brush with depression, he started from scratch, resolving to go his own way. He called himself Guinea Pig B (B for Bucky, his nickname).

In the late 1940s, Fuller accepted a position at small Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

He was not a formally trained architect or engineer, but at Black Mountain — with the help of students and professors — he began work on the geodesic dome, a project that would stun the architectural and engineering worlds.

Using lightweight materials in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid) he and his colleagues created a small dome that would get stronger as it got larger. Suddenly he had designed the first building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits.

The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the Army. Within a few years,thousands of these domes sprang up. An estimated 500,000 geodesic domes exist today worldwide.

Notable domes include the 265-foot-wide Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Florida, a 360-foot-tall dome over a shopping center in Ankara, Turkey, and a 280-foot-high structure enclosing a civic center in Stockholm, Sweden.

The world's largest aluminum dome formerly housed Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose airplane at Long Beach Harbor in California.

A spherical dome that was 20 stories high and 250 feet in diameter served as the U.S. Pavilion at Montreal's Expo '67, the 1967 world's fair.

The success of the geodesic dome gave Fuller international acclaim as a futurist. He traveled far and wide promoting his ideals of applying scientific principles to solving humanity's problems. He reportedly circled the globe 57 times.

All the while, Fuller found time to remain committed to education. He taught at Southern Illinois University from 1959 to 1970 and received a doctor of science degree from Maine's Bates College in 1969.

"You can never learn less; you can only learn more," Fuller said.

During his career, Fuller was awarded 28 U.S. patents, especially in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation.

His ideas often were first deemed peculiar, but initial suspicion from others did not dissuade him from following his experiments to a conclusion. Many times, he reached a conclusion he didn't expect.

"Most of my advances were by mistake," he said. "You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't. How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else."

Fuller was the author of 28 books and received 47 honorary doctorates. He was given dozens of major architectural and design awards, including the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Amy Edmondson, who worked with Fuller in the last years of his life, said she was struck by his esoteric outlook.

"When Bucky Fuller looked around, he saw not trees and roads and butterflies, but a miraculous web of interacting patterns," Edmondson wrote in her book, "A Fuller Explanation." "Above all, he was driven by curiosity — and found nature a far more compelling teacher."

His End

In 1983 — 11 days from his 88th birthday — Fuller died of a heart attack while visiting his ailing wife in a hospital. She died 36 hours later.

Fuller left a legacy of someone not afraid to take a different view in creating something new or finding a new way of doing something. To him, there was beauty in finding a successful result.

"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty," Fuller said. "But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
BY JOHN WOOLARD