‘On behalf of all humanity’

The Montreal Biosphère, formerly the American Pavilion of Expo 67, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, on Île Sainte-Hélène, Montreal.

“Dare to be naive.’’

— Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), inventor of , most famously, the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car, futurist and theorist, in Moral of the Work

A 1933 Dymaxion prototype

He was born of an old Massachusetts family and was the grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, an American journalist, critic and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalist movement, which was based in the Boston area. He was mostly known by his middle name, Buckminster, an ancestral family name. But many called him “Bucky.’’

He wrote in the year of his death:

“I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.

xxx

Margaret Fuller, for her part, once wrote in her diary: “Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife.’’

The only known daguerreotype of Margaret Fuller (by John Plumbe, 1846)