The name Richard Buckminster Fuller is not widely known, but his inspirational life story and his extraordinary ideas are worth learning. His life, he said, was an experiment.

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts. Born into a wealthy and patrician family, he never experienced lack of money or lack of popularity. In his teenage years he horrified his parents by getting expelled from Harvard twice: once for treating an entire New York dance troupe to champagne on his own tab and then, after having been readmitted, for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest”. To his family’s shock, he never completed his college education.

Between his sessions at Harvard, Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a Cotton mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry.  At the age of 22 in 1917, he married his sweetheart Anne Helwett and joined the US Navy for wartime service, where for two years he eagerly served as a shipboard radio operator, and later as a crash-boat commander.

His life seemed almost perfect at the time, but in only a few years his familiar and secure world had turned upside down.

By the age of 32 Fuller was bankrupt and jobless, living in low-income housing in Chicago. His daughter Alexandra died from polio meningitis. He had no viable means to support his wife and his other new born child. His failures and misfortunes pushed him over the edge and he started drinking heavily.

Not seeing a way out, Fuller seriously thought about committing suicide. But before drowning himself in Lake Michigan, he decided to give himself one last chance.

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