Alec Nevala-Lee - Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

To my parents

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ,

KUBLA KHAN : OR , A VISION IN A DREAM

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

On October 24, 1980, a man named Taylor Barcroft drove to San Francisco. He was there to see Buckminster Fuller, the architectural designer and futurist, who was delivering a speech at a wellness conference. After the event, Barcroft headed south with Fuller and a cameraman to Cupertino, where they parked at a building on Bandley Drive. Barcroft had arrived without an appointment, and his entire plan depended on how confidently he handled himself now. Leaving Fuller in the car, he went inside and approached the receptionist. Ive got Bucky Fuller here for Steve Jobs.

The visit was a gamble, but he had reason to believe that it would pay off. Barcroft, a University of Denver graduate in his early thirties, hoped to produce a series of cable television programs featuring commentary from Fuller. A segment with one of the founders of Apple Computer would be a compelling proof of concept, but instead of calling ahead, Barcroft thought that he would have better luck by showing up unexpectedly with his famous guest. I knew Steve was a fan of Bucky, Barcroft remembered. Anybody like Steve would be a fan of Bucky. And I wanted Bucky to meet Steve, who was going to fulfill Buckys dream.

It was a risky move, but it succeeded. After the receptionist passed along his message, the first person who emerged to greet Barcroft was Mike Markkula, the chairman of the company, who spoke with him for a minute as they waited for Jobs to appear. Word also reached Daniel Kottke, a mellow but bright twenty-six-year-old who had met Jobs nearly a decade earlier when they were freshmen at Reed College in Oregon. He had become close to Jobs, with whom he later shared a house, and was hired as the twelfth official employee of Apple.

Kottke was at his lab bench, which stood in a work area of cubicles and Herman Miller chairs, when someone announced that they had a visitor: Buckminster Fullers here. He rose immediately and hurried for the lobby, where he saw a cluster of people standing outside. His eyes were drawn at once to two men. One was Jobs, who wore his usual outfit of a casual shirt and jeans, and the other was R. Buckminster Fuller, whose face in those days was familiar across the world.

Fuller, eighty-five, was dressed in the dark suit that he favored for all of his public appearances, and, in person, he was startlingly small. His drivers license may have said that he was five foot six, but he had been about two inches shorter even in his youth, and his stature had been diminished by age. He had a huge, bald head with white hair trimmed almost to the scalp, a large hearing aid, and black, plastic glasses that magnified his hazel eyes into soft, enormously deep pools.

Joining the circle, Kottke spoke briefly with Fuller, whose work he had admired since high school. Kottke expected to talk to him furtherhe was often the one who showed guests around the officebut as the group headed off without him, he realized that Jobs wanted Fuller to himself.

As for Barcroft, he couldnt believe his luck. He ended up at a conference table with Fuller and Jobs, who exchanged a few words while a cameraman recorded the meeting. When it was time for a tour, however, Barcroft was left behind as well. Jobs clearly didnt want to include anyone else, and no one would ever know what he and Fuller said to each other in private at Apple, which was only months away from its initial public offering.

Afterward, Barcroft took Fuller back to his hotel. Barcroft was elated, but his plan for a cable show never materialized, and he later lost the footage of Fuller and Jobs. For his part, Fuller was unconvinced that the personal computer would enable his lifelong vision of access to information. He didnt believe it, Barcroft recalled. He thought that only mainframes could do that work. Fuller had devoted his career to predicting the impact of technology, but he saw nothing special in Apple: I remember him saying that he thought the computer was a toy.

* * *

Judging from his eagerness to meet Fuller, their encounter left a greater impression on Steve Jobs, which came as little surprise to Daniel Kottke. In my early friendship with Steve, he was interested in so many things that I was also interested in, Kottke said. That definitely included Fuller. Since the sixties, college campuses had found an unlikely hero in Fuller, whose reputation was based on the geodesic dome, a hemispherical structure used in everything from industrial buildings to hippie communes, as well as the sculpture studio at Reed.

Fuller was renowned for his avowed optimism that technology could make the world work for everyone by lifting entire nations out of poverty. His message centered on the figure of a generalist known as the comprehensive designer, an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist capable of grasping whole systems. In an era that was skeptical of politics, his argument for a radical science of design, which emphasized universal housing and the efficient use of resources, offered a seemingly plausible program for achieving change outside conventional institutions.

To an ambitious individualist like Jobs, it was a model of what was possible, and no one embodied it like Fuller, who had been inescapable in the Bay Area of the seventies. Fuller had been given a crucial push by the Whole Earth Catalog, an oversized guide to books and tools for the counterculture that Jobs, who avidly read it in college with Kottke, described as one of the bibles of my generation. Copies were kept in the Apple lobby, and its first edition, published in 1968, opened with a spread devoted to the man whom editor Stewart Brand credited as its inspiration: The insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog.

At the heart of the Catalog, which Jobs once called Google in paperback form, was Fullers determination to change the environment rather than human beings. That definitely comes directly from Fuller, Brand noted decades later. Fuller said that a lot: that changing human nature is hard, and when you try, you mostly fail, and its discouraging. Changing tools and technology is relatively easy. This perspective was warmly received in Silicon Valley, which Brand thought was why the microcomputer revolution happened at that specific time and place: The stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think, because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.

For a community that was still defining itself, Fuller was an inexhaustible source of metaphors and images, which spread through existing networks into every corner of the culture. The Whole Earth Catalog, for example, was born at the Portola Institute, an educational nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, that eventually included a commercial arm for books on computing. At the suggestion of Marc LeBruna coding prodigy who would later be one of the first four members of the Apple Macintosh teamthe subsidiary was called Dymax, an homage to Dymaxion, the personal brand that Fuller used for his designs. Dymax, in turn, spun off the Peoples Computer Company, which held classes and potlucks that became a hangout for hackers.