At that moment, Richard Buckminster Fuller found himself suspended several feet above the ground, surrounded by sparkling lights. Time seemed to pause and he heard a voice say:
You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.
It was at this point that Fuller realized he had faith—faith in what he called “the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call God.” This inspired the conception of his “lifelong experiment,” which was “to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise.” Specifically, his mission was to plan the survival of humanity. He started compiling his “Chronofile,” a vast scrapbook that included a daily diary, recording all his ideas, copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, even his dry-cleaning bills. In it, he called himself Guinea Pig B (B for Bucky). By the end of his “lifelong experiment,” this “lab notebook” took up 270 feet of shelving. Fuller claimed, with some justification, that he had the most-documented life of any human being in history.
After his mystical experience, he locked himself away for a whole year to read and think. He emerged convinced that the secret to saving the world was better design. His axiom was “maximum advantage from minimal energy,” a principle he observed throughout the natural world in the structure of plants and animals. He started with housing: He already had some experience in construction and knew that cheap, efficient “machines for living” (as he called them) were needed all over the world. Ignoring thousands of years of building tradition, he went back to first principles. What if he based house design on the human frame, or a tree, hanging everything off a trunk or backbone—a system that used gravity instead of fighting it? And what if he made it from the lightest materials, like those already being used in aircraft manufacture? The result, a prototype for which was built in 1929, was the first entirely self-sufficient, portable house. Looking like an aluminum yurt, it was suspended on a central pole, ran on a diesel generator, and recycled its own water so it didn’t need plumbing. And it was light enough to be airlifted anywhere it was needed. It was called the Dymaxion house, from a contraction of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension.” It slept four and was priced at $1,500 (about $40,000 today), which meant it could be marketed as “a house that costs no more than a car.” Although it never went into mass production, it put Fuller’s name—and Dymaxion’s—on the map.
Over the next two decades, Fuller created Dymaxion cars and Dymaxion bathrooms and, especially, the Dymaxion globe. This was an atlas of the world projected onto an icosahedron (a solid geometrical figure with twenty sides, each of which is an equilateral triangle) rather than a sphere. It had no up or down, south or north, and it could be unfolded into a flat map of the world. Unfolded one way it showed how the world’s land masses join together; the other way did the same thing for the oceans. Laid out flat either way, it was a much more accurate representation of the world than traditional atlases, but being composed of twenty triangles, it was startlingly unfamiliar to look at.
Few of these conceptual innovations made Fuller any money, but he persevered, taking part-time jobs to keep his wife (and his second daughter, Allegra) clothed and fed. In order to be taken seriously, he gave up smoking and drinking and started eating carefully. “I found that if I was talking about my inventions and drinking, people just wrote them off as so much nonsense,” he explained. His diet consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak, and Jell-O. He experimented with a technique for sleeping as little as possible, to squeeze more out of his day. “Dymaxion sleep,” as he inevitably called it, involved training himself to take a thirty-second nap at the first sign of tiredness. He tried it for two years, averaging only two hours’ sleep a day, but had to stop because his colleagues at work couldn’t keep up.
Then, in 1948, came the great leap forward that changed it all. Fuller had been teaching at Black Mountain College, a liberal arts foundation in North Carolina that acted as a summer camp for the elite of American avant-garde culture. Other faculty members included the composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, and abstract 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 knowledge or our taste in music, the details of their lives never go out of date. It would be churlish not to mention www.wikipedia.com. For all its unevenness and flaws, it is an invaluable tool that will only grow in usefulness the more of us who use it.
Wherever possible we have tried to indicate editions of books that are still in print.
1 There’s Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life
Leonardo da Vinci
Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (Allen Lane, 2004)
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks (Profile, 2005)
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud,The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (Penguin, 2006)
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life in Our Time (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998)
Isaac Newton
James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Fourth Estate, 2003)
Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Faber, 2009)
Oliver Heaviside
Basil Mahon, Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity (Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009)
Paul J. Nahin, Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age, new ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Lord Byron
Ashley Hay, The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron (Aurum, 2001)
Fiona McCarthy, Byron: Life & Legend (Faber, 2003)
Ada Lovelace
Betty O’Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (Pickering & Chatto, 1992)
Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter (Macmillan, 1999)
Hans Christian Andersen
Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen (Duckworth, 2005)
Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (Allen Lane, 2000)
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, tr. Haakon Chevalier (Dover Publications, 2009)
Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (Faber, 1997)
2 Happy-go-lucky
Epicurus
Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, tr. Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson (Hackett Publishing Co., 1994)
Benjamin Franklin
H. W. Brands, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Doubleday, 2000)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography & Other Writings, ed. Ormond Seavey (Oxford, 1993)
Edward Jenner
John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner (London, 1827)
Richard B. Fisher, Edward Jenner 1749–1823 (André Deutsch, 1991)
Mary Seacole
Jane Robinson, Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea (Constable & Robinson, 2005)
Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, new ed. (Penguin, 2005)
Moll Cutpurse
R. Sanders, Newgate Calendar or Malefactor’s Bloody Register (London, 1760)
Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing, Counterfeit Ladies (New York University Press, 1994)
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (W. W. Norton & Co., 1985)
James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman & Modern Physics (Little, Brown, 1992)
Richard Leighton, Tuva or Bust!: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey (W. W. Norton
& Co., 1991)
3 Driven
Robert E. Peary
Fergus Fleming, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole (Granta, 2001)
Jean Malaurie, Ultima Thule: Explorers and Natives in the Polar North (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003)
Josephine Peary, My Arctic Journal: A Year among Ice-fields and Eskimos, new ed. (Cooper Square Press, 2002)
Mary Kingsley
Dea Birkett, Mary Kingsley: Imperial Adventuress (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992)
Katherine Frank, Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)
Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, new ed. (National Geographic, 2002)
Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative: Of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, new ed. (abridged), tr. Jason Wilson (Penguin, 2006)
N. A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago University Press, 2008)
Francis Galton
Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton (Bloomsbury, 2004)
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, new ed. (Prometheus, 2005)
William Morris
Fiona McCarthy, William Morris (Faber, 1994)
William Morris, News from Nowhere & Other Writings, new ed. (Penguin, 2004)
4 Let’s Do It
Giacomo Casanova
Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life, new ed. tr. Stephanie Sartarelli and Sophia Hawkes (Penguin, 2002)
The Book of the Dead Page 38