7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7noteworthy geodesic domes is the United States pavilion
for Expo 67 in Montreal. Also a poet and a philosopher, he
was noted for unorthodox ideas on global issues.
Life
Fuller was descended from a long line of New England
Nonconformists, the most famous of whom was his great-
aunt, Margaret Fuller, the critic, teacher, woman of letters
and cofounder of The Dial, organ of the Transcendentalist
movement. Fuller was twice expelled from Harvard Uni-
versity and never completed his formal education. He saw
service in the U.S. Navy during World War I as commander
of a crash-boat flotilla. In 1917 he married Anne Hewlett,
daughter of James Monroe Hewlett, a well-known archi-
tect and muralist. Hewlett had invented a modular
construction system using a compressed fibre block, and
after the war Fuller and Hewlett formed a construction
company that used this material (later known as Soundex,
a Celotex product) in modules for house construction. In
this operation Fuller himself supervised the erection of
several hundred houses.
The construction company encountered financial
difficulties in 1927, and Fuller, a minority stockholder,
was forced out. He found himself stranded in Chicago,
without income, alienated, dismayed, confused. At this
point in his life, Fuller resolved to devote his remaining
years to a nonprofit search for design patterns that could
maximize the social uses of the world’s energy resources and
evolving industrial complex. The inventions, discoveries,
and economic strategies that followed were interim factors
related to that end.
In 1927, in the course of the development of his com-
prehensive strategy, he invented and demonstrated a
factory-assembled, air-deliverable house, later called the