The Book of the Dead

Impressionist painter Willem de Kooning.

Always trying to “do more with less,” Fuller had gone on thinking about the lightest and strongest possible building. The simplest way of enclosing space is a regular pyramid, or tetrahedron, each side of which is an equilateral triangle. (It is also much stronger than anything with rectangular sides.) The most efficient way to enclose space is a sphere, because it uses the least possible surface area of any three-dimensional shape. In the back of his mind were the yurt-shaped roof of his Dymaxion house and the twenty equilateral triangles on the surface of the Dymaxion globe. Then came his eureka moment. What if he built a sphere out of triangular planes? Wouldn’t that have the spatial capacity of a sphere and the strength of a pyramid? And so it was that one summer evening at Black Mountain, Fuller and his students took a pile of wooden slats and built the world’s first geodesic dome.

It was an approximation of a sphere made out of triangular planes and then cut in half—and it was the perfect structure: the largest possible volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area, offering huge savings on materials and cost. The ratios were simple and beautiful: Double the dome’s diameter, and its footprint on the ground quadrupled while its volume grew eight times larger. It was also extremely stable, and because air could circulate freely inside, it was up to 30 percent more efficient to heat than a conventional rectangular building. Fuller called it geodesic because a geodesic line is the shortest distance between any two points on a sphere (from the Greek, geodaisia, meaning “dividing the earth”). Most remarkable of all was this: proportionally speaking, the larger the dome, the cheaper, lighter, and stronger it became.

The first commercial application of Fuller’s design came in 1953. The Ford Motor Company commissioned a geodesic dome to cover the central courtyard of its Rotunda building in Dearborn, Michigan. The U.S. military followed with a second order, and soon the world went dome crazy. His immediate success turned Buckminster Fuller into a household name and even made him some money. He took out the patent in 1954, but always refused to set up as the exclusive manufacturer. When asked why, he said:

Whatever I do, once done, I leave it alone. Society comes along in due course and needs what I have done. By then, I’d better be on to something else. It is absolutely fundamental for me to work and design myself out of business.

There are now more than half a million geodesic structures across the world, including the Eden Project in Cornwall and the Houston Astrodome in Texas.

Fuller’s inspiration for the dome was the way in which the protons, neutrons, and electrons of the atom fit together to create matter. In fact, he came to believe that the natural geometry of the whole universe is based on arrays of interlocking tetrahedra. He already had seen how the light-but-strong structure was used all over nature: in the cornea of the eye, in the shape of some viruses, and even in the configuration of the testicles. In 1985 his discovery was to receive the ultimate endorsement when a team of scientists in Houston, Texas, discovered a new class of carbon molecule (C₆₀) shaped exactly like a geodesic sphere. Its discovery won them the Nobel Prize and they named the molecule buckminsterfullerene (or the “buckyball”). It is the third known form of pure carbon in nature, after diamond and graphite.

More recently, buckminsterfullerene has been found in meteorites that date from the time of the earth’s formation, suggesting that the elements needed for life originated in space—something that Fuller himself had long believed.

The later years of Fuller’s life were spent traveling back and forth across the world lecturing and inspiring people, particularly the young. He could talk for ten hours at stretch, without notes, and would wear three watches, reminding him of the time where he was, where he was going, and at home. He was on tour in 1983 when he learned that the cancer his wife was suffering from had worsened. Anne had been in a deep coma for some time when he made it back to her bedside. As he held her hand, Fuller felt her move. “She is squeezing my hand!” he exclaimed. Still holding her hand, he stood up, and immediately suffered a massive heart attack. He died soon afterward, “with an exquisitely happy smile on his face,” according to his daughter. Anne, his wife of sixty-seven years, died a few hours later.

Way to go. Fuller’s inventions may not yet have transformed our daily lives like Nikola Tesla’s or even Bill Gates’s. We don’t live in Fuller-designed houses or drive Dymaxion cars—and geodesic domes have a tendency to leak. None of this would have troubled Fuller: He wasn’t interested in inventions as such. Instead of the dome, he said, “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.” His designs were merely a by-product of his larger quest: “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe.” Fuller’s real influence has been in the worldview he has helped to create. Words we now use as standard, such as “synergy” and “holistic,” are a direct result of Fuller’s work. Every global campaign against poverty, or in favor of sustainability, owes something to Fuller’s vision outlined in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and to his “doing more with less” mantra. As his friend John Cage wrote, “His life was so important that it shines almost with the same intensity now that it did when he had it.”

The lives of all the visionaries in this final chapter were changed by something they could not control, whether they called it inspiration, the Universe, an altered state, or the voice of God. Few of us have visions of anything like the same intensity (and let’s face it, given a life like Ann Lee’s, few of us would want them) but anyone who has ever been so absorbed in something that they forget where they are will recognize the phenomenon described by the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell: “What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.”

This is one of the great mysteries of life and (like most of them) it is also a paradox. If I’m most myself when I’m least aware of myself, then, who, or what, am I? As Buckminster Fuller put it: “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”

Standing inside the vaulting lightness of a geodesic dome or admiring the beauty of a Shaker bowl, a Blake engraving, or St. Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham Cathedral brings us face-to-face with another mystery. Where do ideas come from? The lives of all the people in this book have survived because they left behind them something they made: a body of work, an idea, a bundle of stories. We have seen some of the common factors that unite those whose achievements were built to last. A few of them are obvious advantages—a positive outlook, a gift for languages, good luck. But the majority—terrible childhoods, parents dying young, being hopeless at school, illness, psychological trauma—look more like distinct drawbacks. The Dead were no better than us—they made mistakes, behaved badly, lost the plot, lost hope, treated one another cruelly—and, as we have seen, they certainly cannot be said to have had better lives. Ultimately, though, whatever they started with, and however badly it sometimes ended, all of our distinguished Dead did something that made a difference—and they did it by making something of themselves. And so can you. As a watchword for living, the old Lebanese proverb cannot be bettered:

The one who is not dead still has a chance.

Further Reading and Acknowledgments

Many of the books listed herein acted as sources for the lives in this book. More important, they seem to us the perfect places from which to start your own explorations in the Underworld.

All books of this kind are built on the scholarship and insight of others. Some repositories were raided more regularly than any others. At the head of the table stands the completely revised 2004 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com), which somehow manages to be both accurate and interesting about fifty-seven thousand lives. It is a national treasure without parallel. Close behind it comes the American National Biography (www.anb.org) and the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, the last great encyclopedia to be written by real people, rather than teams of academics, with entries by Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Bertrand Russell, Algernon Swinburne, and even the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. One of the many excellent things about dead people is that unlike scientific