Word: fullers
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...last fling before adulthood closed in? The jobs Fuller held in early manhood might lead one to think so: machine fitter in a cotton mill. Navy ensign during World War I, managing exports for a meat packer and sales for a truck company. The presidency of the Stockade Building System (1922-27) sounds more like it. Fuller and his father-in-law copatented a tough, light substitute for bricks that eliminated the need for hod carriers and mortars. Holes in the blocks were lined up and cement poured in. Both the brick industry and the unions ganged up against...
...business failure came during the most discouraging period in Fuller's life. It included poverty and the death of Alexandra, his three-year-old daughter, who died of spinal meningitis and polio. The child's death, said the grieving father, was "design-preventable." Always accenting the positive, he even turned from thoughts of suicide at 32 on the assumption that he was the custodian of one of the universe's vital resources...
...Fuller chose two years of silence, study and contemplation instead. "From his silence," says Kenner, "he emerged talking of everything at once, and was barely intelligible." His first book, Time-lock, a chain reaction of nascent Fullerese, was "like a cloud of gas just condensing into a galaxy...
When it cooled down, Fuller's galactic vision turned out to be a peculiarly Yankee notion of universal principles translatable into an earthly Utopia. Fuller's trademark word was Dymaxion, which meant getting the most out of available technology. Dymaxion houses would solve the world's shelter problems. Dymaxion cars, steered by a single rear wheel, could park in a space only one foot larger than the car itself. Today, Fuller holds more than 20 patents, mostly for structural designs still...
...these days of disenchantment with technology, it is not too difficult to find blind spots in Fuller's vision. Many of his ideas are as old as Archimedes. He is too rational for human nature. He avoids details, particularly politics, in favor of charting immense generalities. But Kenner, who is a protecting angel as well as a biographer, offers a final word. Fuller's mission, he writes, is to spread a sense of wholeness and connectedness. Like Emerson and Whitman, he wants people to feel the universe in blades of grass and bubbles. He also retains the faith...