When Richard Buckminster Fuller was in New Zealand a year ago, he spent several rewarding hours at the University of Auckland with a friend of his, a cultural anthropologist who also happens to be Keeper of the Chants of the people he belongs to, the Maoris. These chants go back more than fifty generations and constitute, in effect, an oral history of the Maoris, and Fuller, a man who is intensely interested in almost everything, undertook to persuade his friend that it was high time they were recorded on tape and made available to scholars, himself included. The anthropologist said that he had often thought of recording them, but that, according to an ancient tradition, the Keeper of the Chants was allowed to repeat them only to fellow-Maoris. Fuller thereupon launched into an extensive monologue. It was buttressed at every point by seemingly irrefutable data on tides, prevailing winds, boat design, mathematics, linguistics, archeology, architecture, and religion, and the gist of it was that the Maoris had been among the first peoples to discover the principles of celestial navigation, that they had found a way of sailing around the world from their base in the South Seas, and that they had done so a long, long time before any such voyages were commonly believed to have been made—at least ten thousand years ago, in fact. In conclusion, Fuller explained, with a straight face, that he himself had been a Maori, a few generations before the earliest chant, and that he had sailed off into the seas one day, lacking the navigational lore that gradually worked its way into the chants, and had been unable to find his way back, so that he had a personal interest in seeing that the chants got recorded. We have Fuller’s assurance that the anthropologist is now engaged in recording all the chants, together with their English translations.
The somewhat overwhelming effect of a Fuller monologue is well known today in many parts of the world, and while his claim to Maori ancestry must remain open to question, even that seems an oddly plausible conjecture. An association with the origins of circumnavigating the globe would be an ideal background for his current activities as an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, and comprehensive designer whose ideas, once considered wildly visionary, are now influential in so many countries that he averages a complete circuit of the globe each year in fulfillment of various lecture and teaching commitments. Fuller, who was seventy last July and whose vigor seems to increase with his years, gives every indication of enjoying to the hilt his more or less constant “toing and froing,” as he calls it. He often points out that man was born with legs, not roots, and that his primary natural advantage as a species is mobility. Fuller has adapted himself so well to the extreme mobility of his present life that he considers it preposterous to be asked where he lives. A New Englander by birth and heritage, descended from eight generations of Boston clergymen and lawyers, he has had his official base of operations since 1959 in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is a professor at Southern Illinois University in what he has designated as the field of “design science,” and where he and his wife occupy a plywood geodesic-dome house built according to the patented specifications of the best known and most successful of his many inventions. By agreement with the university, though, he spends only two months of the year, at most, in Carbondale, and much of that is in brief stopovers between jet flights to other cities, often on other continents. Perpetual mobility, he feels, is a perfectly satisfactory condition for a “world man,” which is what he firmly believes all of us are rapidly becoming.
The worldwide enthusiasm for Fuller’s ideas is by no means confined to university students, though they are currently his most fervent supporters. Professional mathematicians will undoubtedly question some of the premises of his “Energetic-Synergetic Geometry” when he finally gets around to publishing the definitive book on it that he has had in preparation for thirty-five years, but it is no longer possible to question the practical application of these same principles in such eminently satisfactory structures as the geodesic dome, which has been recognized as the strongest, lightest, and most efficient means of enclosing space yet devised by man. Over the last decade, moreover, scientists in other fields have been finding that Fuller’s research into nature’s geometry has anticipated some important discoveries of their own. Molecular biologists have now established that his mathematical formula for the design of the geodesic dome applies perfectly to the structure of the protein shell that surrounds every known virus. Several leading nuclear physicists are convinced that the same Fuller formula explains the fundamental structure of the atomic nucleus, and is thus the basis of all matter. As more and more people discover the comprehensive relevance of Fuller’s ideas, he finds himself increasingly involved in all sorts of new areas. The government, for example, recently appointed him a “Distinguished Scientist” at the United States Institute of Behavioral Research, in Washington. While this sort of recognition is highly gratifying to one who has always been something of a maverick, working outside the scientific Establishment, it has come as no particular surprise to him. Fuller long ago reached the conclusion that nature has a basic coördinate system, and he has been convinced for a good many years that the discovery of that system would eventually reunite all the scientific disciplines.
To the younger generation, the most stimulating thing about Fuller is probably his exhilarating contention that we have arrived at the threshold of “an entirely new philosophical era of man on earth.” For the first time in history, he argues, man has the ability to play a conscious, active role in his own evolution, and therefore to make himself a complete success in his environment. According to Fuller, this dazzling prospect was opened to us by Einstein’s concept of energy as the basis of the universe. “Einstein shattered the Newtonian cosmos,” he said recently. “In the famous first law of dynamics, Newton had said that a body persisted in a state of rest or constant motion except as it was affected by other bodies; he was assuming that the normal condition of all things was inertia. Einstein realized that all bodies were constantly being affected by other bodies, though, and this meant that their normal condition was not inertia at all but continuous motion and continuous change. The replacement of the Newtonian static norm by the Einsteinian dynamic norm really opened the way to modern science and technology, and it’s still the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history.”
More specifically, the new era was made possible by the phenomenal acceleration of science and technology in the twentieth century—a process that really began, Fuller says, during the First World War, when industry suddenly moved, in his words, “from the track to the trackless, from the wire to the wireless, from visible structuring to invisible structuring in alloys.” A good example of this process can be found in the performance of chrome-nickel steel, an alloy that was used for the first time in the First World War, to make cannon barrels more durable; because of an invisible molecular pattern that is created when chromium, nickel, and iron are combined, the resultant alloy held up under conditions of intense heat that would have quickly melted all three of its components separately. Most of the major advances in science and technology since 1914 have been in this invisible realm, which Fuller calls “synergy”—a term that can be defined as the behavior of whole systems in ways unpredictable by the individual behavior of their sub-systems. So far, Fuller maintains, the newest technology has been applied principally to the development of military power, or weaponry, rather than to housing and education and other aspects of what he calls “livingry.” Nevertheless, the shift of industry to the new invisible base has brought about such spectacular gains in over-all efficiency, such demonstrated ability to produce more and more goods and services from fewer and fewer resources, that mankind as a whole has inevitably profited. According to a statistical survey that Fuller made some years ago for Fortune, the proportion of all humanity enjoying the benefits of the highest technology had risen from less than six per cent in 1914 to twenty per cent in 1938. Today, Fuller places forty-four per cent of mankind in the category of technological “have”s, and it is his frequently stated conviction that by devoting a larger share of their industrial budget to world livingry the “have”s could very quickly bring the entire human race into contact with the highest technology, at which time the weighty problems that oppress us now—war, overpopulation, hunger, disease—would simply cease to exist.
To achieve this utopia, Fuller proposes a worldwide technological revolution. Such a revolution would not be led by politicians, and, in fact, would take place quite independently of politics or ideology; it would be carried out primarily by what he calls “comprehensive designers,” who would coordinate resources and technology on a world scale for the benefit of all mankind, and would constantly anticipate future needs while they found ever-better ways of providing more and more from less and less. One big question, of course, is whether the political and economic convulsions of the present era will allow the comprehensive designers time to carry out this kind of revolution. Fuller thinks that there is still time, but he also thinks that time is rapidly running out for humanity, and it is this belief that keeps him in virtually constant motion around the world, talking to students and training them to think comprehensively as they continue his search for nature’s basic patterns.
It is probably fitting that Fuller, as a true world man, should have no real home these days—or, rather, that he should feel at home wherever he happens to be. There is, however, one spot on the globe that comes reasonably close to being a fixed point in his life. Whenever possible, he tries to spend some part of each summer in Maine, on Bear Island, which has been owned by members of his family since 1904, and he has often referred to this place as the source of most of his ideas. “My teleological stimulation first grew out of boyhood experiences on a small island eleven miles off the mainland, in Penobscot Bay of the state of Maine,” he writes of Bear Island in the first chapter of “Ideas and Integrities” (Prentice-Hall), a recent volume of essays that constitutes his intellectual autobiography. With this statement in mind, I wrote to Fuller last spring in England, where he was just completing a one-month visiting professorship in the Department of Architecture at Bristol University, to ask if I could spend a few days with him on Bear Island. He wrote back immediately, inviting me to select a date in August for my visit.
Bear Island, I knew, has been preserved in virtually the same state of development as when Fuller’s grandmother bought it, in 1904—no telephone, no electricity, no running water—and this strikes some of Fuller’s friends as an odd setting for a man whose life is devoted to making the highest technology serve a hundred per cent of humanity. At the same time, I thought, it could be an ideal setting for someone like Fuller, who has always been interested in finding out how nature really works. The island lies approximately in the middle of East Penobscot Bay, about twelve miles east of Camden. Visitors usually take a boat over from Camden, on the mainland, but I had been staying with friends farther Down East and had therefore arranged to come over from the town of Sunset, which is only five miles from Bear on Deer Isle and can be reached by bridge from the mainland. Fuller and several members of his household had spent the afternoon buying groceries and other provisions in Stonington, the nearest town of any size on Deer Isle, and I met them all on the Sunset dock. In addition to Fuller, there was Mrs. Alphonse Kenison, a younger sister of Fuller’s, who has missed only three summers of her life at Bear Island, and who, more than anyone else, has kept the place going through the years; his niece Persis and her husband, Robert Alden, a young New York radio-network executive, and their two children; another niece, Persis’s sister Lucilla Marvel, and two of her children; and Pearl Hardie, a Maine native who lives for much of the year on Bear Island, where he acts as caretaker of the half-dozen buildings on the island and man of all work, as his father did before him. For the first time in years, Fuller’s wife, Anne, had not come to Bear Island this year; she was visiting their daughter, Mrs. Robert Snyder, in California.
Fuller put down a carton of canned goods he had been carrying, and came to greet me, smiling warmly and exposing what looked like a recently chipped front tooth. He is a rather stocky man, powerfully built, and with a massive squarish head and a stubble of white hair cut so short that it stands straight up, and he looked, I thought, about twenty years younger than someone who had celebrated his seventieth birthday the month before had any business looking. His face was almost unlined, and it was also deeply tanned from a recent Aegean cruise. Somewhat heavy features and owlish eyes, magnified enormously by thick lenses, which he has worn since boyhood, can make him appear a bit severe, and at times even forbidding, but that impression is immediately dispelled by his open, toothy, and utterly ingenuous smile.
Fog began rolling in as we finished loading the supplies aboard a motor launch, which was operated by Mr. Hardie, and by the time we had left Sunset Harbor, it was too thick for us to see much of Penobscot Bay. During the trip over, though, Fuller enthusiastically identified each landmark as it materialized through the mist. “There’s Eagle,” he told me, pointing out a large, wooded island. “And there’s John Quinn’s boarding house, where we stayed that first summer of 1904—the summer my father fell in love with Bear Island and talked his mother-in-law into buying it for the whole family. Nothing changes here, you see—that house looks exactly the same as it did then. I really think if my grandmother were to come back tomorrow she’d recognize almost everything.” He went on to say that his grandmother, Caroline Wolcott Andrews, had also bought two neighboring islands, Compass and Little Spruce Head, which formed part of the same deed, but that it was on Bear, with its fine natural harbor, that they had built a large house in 1905, bringing in all the necessary materials and labor from Boston aboard the schooner Polly, a hundred-year-old vessel that had served as a privateer in the War of 1812. “I used to row over to Eagle and back every day for the mail when I was a boy here,” Fuller said. “Four miles a day, often in very bad weather. It made me awfully tough—something I’ve never lost, by the way.”
Although he scarcely looked it, Fuller admitted to me that he was feeling a little run down at the moment. His schedule had been particularly demanding lately, and he had arrived only the day before—several days later than he had planned. From Bristol he had gone to Paris, to address an international assembly of architectural students, and from there to Athens, where he took part in a symposium sponsored by Constantinos Doxiadis, the Greek city planner, on board a chartered cruise ship; then he had flown back to the United States for a round of engagements, the most recent of which had been a conference at Princeton on how to improve the level of scientific education in the nation’s secondary schools. Fuller told me that for the first time in his life—perhaps because he had turned his ankle rather badly one evening on the Greek yacht while dancing the Twist—he had actually begun to feel his age. “I gained twenty pounds on this last trip,” he added confidentially. “It’s one of the really big problems on this kind of schedule—big, rich dinners everywhere, and all that airline food. I really need a few weeks of this Bear Island atmosphere.”
Approaching Bear Island in the fog, we could catch only occasional glimpses of its rocky shoreline. The island is about a mile long and half a mile wide, and is heavily wooded with spruce, pine, and white birch. Rounding the northernmost point, where the land rises sharply to a high bluff, we caught sight of the shingled roof of a large house, and a minute or so later Fuller pointed to an opening in the trees where we could just make out the shadowy arcs of an unfinished geodesic dome that had been, I was told, a family summer work project two years before. “I think it’s marvellous coming in with the fog this way,” Fuller said as we nosed slowly into the quiet harbor. “With any luck, it will clear tomorrow, and then you’ll be able to see where you are. We have a seventy-five-mile sweepout here, so there’s quite a lot to see.” (Like many other unfamiliar words that crop up in Fuller’s casual conversation, “sweepout” is a term borrowed from one of the scientific disciplines—in this case, astronomy; he used it to mean the range of activity that the eye could take in on all sides of Bear Island on a clear day.)
On the dock to meet the boat were a number of small children, most of them members of Mr. Hardie’s family, and several adults, including Mrs. Leslie Gibson, another niece of Fuller’s, and Professor Sidney Rosen, from the University of Illinois, and his wife. Professor Rosen, a science teacher who also writes biographies of great scientists for young readers, had been assigned by his publisher to write one of Fuller, and he was there to gather material for it. All the small children immediately began clamoring for Fuller’s attention. (They all called him Uncle Bucky, and I have observed that nearly all adults who have spent more than five minutes with him find it natural to call him Bucky.) He had to ask the children to repeat their questions several times into his ear, which he cupped patiently with one hand—his hearing, damaged during the First World War, has deteriorated quite a bit in recent years. This difficulty did not appear to discourage the children in the least, or to make even the youngest ones shy of him. After a certain amount of confusion, the supplies were transferred from the launch to a weathered jeep driven by Fuller’s sister, Mrs. Kenison, and the rest of us walked up to the main house, on the bluff.
When most of us had assembled in the big house before dinner, Fuller came downstairs carrying a large blue bullhorn, which he had purchased during his stay in England. He explained that he had found it a great boon at conferences and seminars, where he used it not as a loudspeaker but as a directional antenna; the horn had an electronic amplifier that worked both ways, he said, and by pointing the cone at a speaker across the room, holding the voice box near his good ear, and pressing the amplifier button, he could hear perfectly. “I used to be a real menace at conferences,” he told us. “I had to have everything repeated. People kept telling me I should get a hearing aid, but, you see, I’ve tried that several times, and it has convinced me that nobody really knows anything about how we hear. Hearing aids are non-selective—they just amplify all sounds. But I hear some sounds perfectly well—maybe even better than you do—and when those are amplified for me, it’s actually painful. With this marvellous device, though, I can be selective. I can pick up sounds just by pointing.” He held the horn to one ear and pointed it at Professor Rosen, across the room. “Say something in your normal voice, Sidney,” he demanded. Rosen said something too low for me to catch. Fuller said he could hear him perfectly. He passed the bullhorn around the room, so that everyone could try it out, and he slung it around his neck on a white cord when we went to dinner, which was served, like all meals at Bear Island, a few hundred feet from the main house in a farmer’s cottage that was on the property when Fuller’s grandmother bought it. It turned out that there was not enough room at the crowded table to use the bullhorn comfortably, so he soon gave up trying. The sound of many voices reflected off a low ceiling apparently made it almost impossible for Fuller to hear what anyone said, and, sitting at one end of the table watching the others but taking little part in the conversation, he looked, in the flickering light of kerosene lamps, a little sombre and withdrawn.
When dinner was over, though, he suggested to Professor Rosen and me that we stay on at the table and listen to a few things he had to tell us. As I knew from previous meetings, there is no such thing as an ordinary conversation with Fuller. One question is enough to set him talking for an hour or more, and often a question is not even necessary. His talk follows a process that the cyberneticists call “positive feedback,” in that each idea sets off a whole flock of related ideas in something like geometric progression; Fuller seems never to have forgotten anything he ever knew, and his command of statistical detail is awe-inspiring. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of these monologues is that, no matter how long and labyrinthine the digressions that crop up along the way, he invariably returns sooner or later to the primary subject of his discourse, and everything turns out to have been relevant. On that particular evening, he talked for a little longer than three hours. His voice gathered strength and momentum as he went along, and he could clearly have continued for another three hours if his listeners had been up to it. The main subject was his own system of mathematics, which he has been evolving for nearly half a century, and which underlies all his work in other fields.
Fuller began by telling us about meeting C. P. Snow in England two years ago. He said he was sympathetic to Snow’s view that there is a gap between the “two cultures” —the sciences and the humanities—but he did not agree that this gap had been caused by a spontaneous aversion to industrialization on the part of literary men. In Fuller’s opinion, scientists had caused it. Soon after the discovery of electromagnetics, in the nineteenth century, he said, scientists had decided that because electrical energy was invisible, it could not be represented to the layman in the form of models, and so they had decided to stop trying to explain what they were doing in terms that the layman could understand. “That’s really the great myth of the nineteenth century,” he said. “I told Snow the basic reason for the split was that science gave up models.”
Having made sure that this point was firmly established, Fuller set off on a survey of his self-education in mathematics. “At Milton Academy, in Massachusetts, where I went to school, I just loved mathematics,” he said. “I found I could get A in it whether or not they liked my face. I was severely cross-eyed then, and not a favorite student ever, and I really believed I was getting bad marks in my other subjects because the teachers didn’t like me. But they couldn’t do that in mathematics. At the same time, there were certain things that the mathematics teacher was saying and doing that I didn’t think were really valid, but it was a game you could learn to play, and you could do it right and get your A. For example, we’d been taught fractions, and one day the teacher—it was a woman—said, ‘I am now going to teach you a better way. It’s called decimals.’ She didn’t say why she hadn’t shown us the better way to begin with. She showed us that an eighth is point one two five, and a quarter is point two five, and a third is point three three three, and so on with threes, out the window and over the hill. I noticed that some of these numbers went out the window and others stayed in the classroom, and I didn’t think she really knew what she was talking about. I thought she was very pretty and appealing, and if that’s the way she wanted to play the game, I’d play it her way, because I’d been brought up to believe that adults knew all the answers and that you were just supposed to shut up and learn, but I also thought she wasn’t on any very profound team.
“Later on, we came to geometry. The teacher made a point on the blackboard, then erased it and said, ‘That doesn’t exist.’ She made a row of points, and said, ‘That’s a line, and it doesn’t exist, either.’ She made a number of parallel lines and put them together to form a plane, and said it didn’t exist. And then she stacked the planes one on top of the other, so that they made a cube, and she said that existed. I wondered how you could get existence out of nonexistence to the third power. It seemed unreasonable. So I asked her, ‘How old is it?’ The teacher said I was just being facetious. I asked her what it weighed and I asked how hot it was, and she got angry. The cube just didn’t have anything that I thought was existence, but I thought I was probably being unfriendly, and so I shut up. I got A’s in all my science work, and when I got to Harvard I didn’t go on with mathematics, because it was so easy—just a sort of game you played. I thought I’d take something really difficult, like government or English.
“I was kicked out of Harvard. I spent my whole year’s allowance in one week, and I cut classes and went out quite deliberately to get into trouble, and so naturally I got kicked out. I was sent to work in a factory in Canada making cotton-mill machinery, and I did very well there. It was a very important phase of my life, for I met shop foremen and machinists, and got to know a lot about their tools and about metals in general. I did so well that Harvard decided I was really a good boy and took me back the following year, but obviously I couldn’t stay at Harvard very long. [In his autobiography, Fuller wrote that what really bothered him at Harvard was the social institutions.] So I cut classes and got fired again. This time, I enlisted in the Navy, where again I began to do very well. Well, one day in 1917 I was standing on the deck of my ship looking back at the wake—it was all white because of the bubbles—and I began wondering idly how many bubbles there were back there. Millions, obviously. I’d learned at school that in order to make a sphere, which is what a bubble is, you employ pi, and I’d also learned that pi is an irrational number. To how many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? And I reached the decision right at that moment that nature didn’t use pi. I said to myself, ‘I think nature has a different system, and it must be some sort of arithmetical-geometrical coördinate system, because nature has all kinds of models.’ What we experience of nature is in models, and all of nature’s models are so beautiful. It struck me that nature’s system must be a real beauty, because in chemistry we find that the associations are always in beautiful whole numbers—there are no fractions. And if nature can accomplish all those associations in beautiful whole numbers to make all her basic structures, I thought, then the system will turn out to be a coördinate system and it will be very, very simple. And I decided then, in 1917, that what I’d like to do was to find nature’s geometry.”
Instead of using points and lines and planes, which had no objective existence, Fuller decided to see what would happen if he started with vectors, or lines of force, which had appealed to him very much when he studied Galileo’s diagram of forces in school. He liked vectors tremendously, he said, because they were descriptions of actual physical events. “Your vector has a length that is proportionate to the product of the velocity times the mass, he explained.” Vectors represent energy events, and they are discrete. All my geometry would therefore be discrete geometry, and you wouldn’t have to worry about infinity and things going out the window all the time. I was interested in exploring a geometry of vectors, which always represent energy events and actions in respect to other energy events and actions. The vector has velocity, and time is a function of velocity, so such a geometry would automatically have a time dimension. The qualities I had wanted in the Greek cube which the Greek cube didn’t have—of heat and weight and age, and so forth—would be implicit in the velocity and the mass that would be translated into energy. . . . Can you fellows go on taking this, or are you getting too tired? You’re going to get awfully sleepy in this Bear Island atmosphere. ”
“No, no,” Professor Rosen said. “We’re fine.”
What followed was a detailed account of the mathematical steps by which Fuller, through his study of vectors, came to the conclusion that nature’s geometry must be based on triangles. “The triangle is a set of three energy events getting into critical proximity, so that each one with minimum effort stabilizes the opposite angle,” he said. “Now, I found that a quadrilateral—a square, for example—will not hold its shape. No rubber-jointed polygon holds its shape except one that is based on the triangle. So I said, ‘I think all nature’s structuring, associating, and patterning must be based on triangles, because there is no structural validity otherwise.’ This is nature’s basic structure, and it is modellable.”
Fuller had been picking up steam right along, and by this time he was talking very rapidly. Pausing to take a Japanese felt-tipped pen from his pocket, he proceeded to illustrate the next phase of the lecture with vigorous drawings on a white pad. “Now, if I’m going to subdivide the universe with triangles, how many triangles will it take to give me a system that will have both an inside and an outside?” he asked. “I found that two triangles just fall back on each other and become congruent. I found that it takes a minimum of three triangles around a point. When you put in three triangles, with three common sides, around a point, they form a fourth triangle at the base and what you get is a tetrahedron. We know that nature always does things in the simplest and most efficient way, and structures based on tetrahedrons are the structures that nature uses—these are the only babies that count. All the metals are made up of some form of tetrahedron. All the other shapes you find in nature are only transformable states of the tetrahedron. This is what nature is really doing.
“All right, getting back to Snow, then, I showed him how I could make a model of any of nature’s structural relationships by using triangulation as the basis. Everything was now back in modellable form, I told him. And soon after that Snow said on the radio that he believed that the chasm between the sciences and the humanities could be closed—that the conceptual bridge had been found.”
A gust of wind buffeted the cottage, throwing open the doors on both sides and scattering the loose sheets of paper that Fuller had torn from the pad. It was eleven o’clock. When the doors had been secured again, Fuller poured himself a cup of tea from a large pot he had been working on ever since dinner. It was quite clear that the Bear Island atmosphere was not making him sleepy. He talked for a while about the immense changes that were taking place in the world, and how the really significant developments were going on quite independently of politics, and this brought him to the subject of the fourth Dartmouth Conference, held in Russia the previous summer, which he had attended.
“The Dartmouth Conference was instituted several years ago,” he explained. “The first one was held at Dartmouth College, and this one, the fourth, was in Leningrad. It’s supposed to be a meeting of prominent Soviet and American citizens, in a wide variety of different fields, to talk over any and all problems. There were twenty-one Russians at our last meeting and sixteen Americans, and that’s the way it’s been right along—the Russians have been more thorough in appointing people from all parts of their society, most of them the top men in their field. We had some very exciting people, though. We had Paul Dudley White—the Russians told me they considered White the world’s greatest cardiologist, and that they trusted him more than any other American; the poor man is so trusted by both sides that he hardly has any time to himself anymore—and we had James Michener and John Kenneth Galbraith and David Rockefeller. One of the Russians got up during a seminar and said, ‘Mr. Rockefeller, I’m an old Bolshevik, and I must say you’re very different from what I’d always thought of as a capitalist.’ They liked him very much. It was a wonderful meeting, and it was decided that it would end with a prognostication by a Russian and a prognostication by an American.
“We had talked very frankly and freely, and we were all somewhat aghast to find that whatever we wanted to do or thought should be done about the problems between us would inevitably be defeated by the bureaucracies on both sides. The Russians, though, were convinced that they had one fundamental advantage over us. They kept saying, ‘We have a singleness of purpose in Russia, while in America you’re completely competitive and you’re always cancelling out each other’s good effects.’ They said it with such earnestness—they were really convinced it was true. And some of the Americans were not able to answer right away whether it was true or not.
“At any rate, I was chosen to give the American prognostication. The Russian one took up the whole morning, and I had the whole afternoon—fabulous. I always speak spontaneously, because I’ve found that it really is possible to think out loud. Although I seemingly go over and over the same inventory of thoughts and experiences, I find that each time I do, I learn something new, and that I have to change or rearrange what I’ve learned, and that I’m not allowed to carry out yesterday’s myths. Anyway, I found myself standing up and talking in the following way. I said, ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you here, because you’re all so ignorant.’ Well, they were surprised by that, and I was surprised, too. But then I had to make good on it, so I said, ‘Many of you think of yourselves as scientists, and yet you go off on a picnic with your family, and you see a beautiful sunset, and you actually see the sun setting, going down. You’ve had four hundred years to adjust your senses since you learned from Copernicus and Galileo that the earth wasn’t standing still with the sun going around it. I’ve made tests with children—you have to get them right away, before they take in too many myths. I’ve made a paper model of a man and glued him down with his feet to a globe of the world, and put a light at one side, and shown them how the man’s shadow lengthens as the globe turns, until finally he’s completely in the shadow. If you show that to children, they never see it any other way, and they can really understand how the earth revolves the sun out of sight. But you scientists still see the sun setting. And you talk about things being “up” or “down” in space, when what you really mean is out and in in respect to the earth’s surface. And you say that the wind is blowing from the northwest, which means that there must be a place called northwest that it’s blowing from—being blown, I suppose, by one of those little fat-cheeked zephyrs that used to be drawn on maps. When you scientists say the wind is blowing from the northwest, what’s actually happening is that there’s a low-pressure area sucking it toward the southeast, pulling the air past you. So why don’t you say the wind is sucking southeast, which is what it’s really doing?’ Well, by this time the Russians were all laughing. They were off their high horse. Next, I told them that young people were always wondering what it was like to be on a spaceship, and that my answer was always, ‘Well, what does it feel like? Because that’s what you’re on.’ The earth is a very small spaceship. It’s only eight thousand miles in diameter, and the nearest star is ninety-two million miles away, and the next star after that is billions of miles away. This spaceship is so superbly designed that we’ve had men on board here for about two million years, reproducing themselves, thanks to the ecological balance whereby all the vegetation is respiring all the gases needed by the mammals and the mammals are giving off all the gases needed by the vegetation, even though they may think they’re just making hot air. The bees go after the honey, which is all they’re interested in, and quite inadvertently their little tails knock off the pollen that fertilizes the vegetation. And so I said that in America we’re all bees, and we’re all after our honey, and inadvertently our little tails knock off quite a lot of pollen, and inadvertently we’ve made some contributions. Well, the Russians really had a good sense of humor. They realized they were all just after honey themselves, and that their whole argument about singleness of purpose was pretty silly, and that the whole thing was working quite independently of politics.
“And so I said, ‘I don’t know any man who really knows anything about himself. I don’t think anybody in this room can stand up and tell me what he’s doing with his luncheon. And no one can stand up and say that he’s consciously pushing each of his hairs out of his head in preferred shapes and colors, and I doubt whether anyone even knows why he has hair. In fact, I don’t know anybody who really knows anything. But it’s very important to recognize what we don’t know, and to realize that so far man has been moderately successful in his environment despite his ignorance.’ Then I went into Hoyle’s prediction that hundreds of millions of planets are going to be discovered, and that not all the human beings on all the planets will have lived to fulfill their functions, and I said, ‘I think we have a very borderline case here, and it’s about time we began to make some sense.’ That’s where I really started my talk. My main prognostication was based on the point that, for the first time in the history of the world, man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations. And from this point on we’re not going to be allowed to be innocent anymore. From now on, we’re going to have to be very responsible, or the show is not going to work.”
Fuller broke off and looked from Rosen to me and back, a sudden smile illuminating his face. “You must find it strange to sit here all this time and hear me talk about me,” he said. “But the fact is I really am pure guinea pig to me. I set out many years ago to see what would happen if an individual did certain things. Back in 1927, just after our second child was born, I committed myself to as much of a fresh start as a human being can have—to try to go back to the fundamentals and see what nature was really up to. But I was all alone, and up against the massive corporation and the massive state. ‘Can the unsupported individual really get anywhere?’ I asked myself. Because I’m not impractical, I’m not a blind idealist. How could I work in the system without capital backing? And I came to the following conclusion: In the universe, everything is always in motion, and everything is always moving in the directions of least resistance. That’s basic. So I said, ‘If that’s the case, then it should be possible to modify the shapes of things so that they follow preferred directions of least resistance.’ I made up my mind at this point that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions. It’s like the principle of a ship’s rudder, which is something I thought a lot about as a boy here on Bear Island. The interesting thing about a rudder is that the ship has already gone by, all but the stern, and you throw the rudder over, and what you’re really doing is to make a little longer distance for the water to go round; in other words, you’re putting a low pressure on the other side, and the low pressure pulls the whole stern over and she takes a new direction. The same in an airplane—you have this great big rudder up there, with a little tiny trim tab on the trailing edge, and by moving that little trim tab to one side or the other you throw a low pressure that moves the whole airplane. The last thing, after the airplane has gone by, you just move that little tab. And so I said to myself, ‘I’m just an individual, I don’t have any capital to start things with, but I can learn how to throw those low pressures to one side or the other, and this should make things go in preferred directions, and while I can’t reform man, I just may be able to improve his environment a little. But in order to build up those low pressures I’m going to have to really know the truth.’ ”
Fuller broke off again, and poured himself a last cup of cold tea. The wind made a sudden restless sound in the fireplace chimney. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Of course, I know that you can’t get to the truth,” he said slowly. “Heisenberg was right about that—the act of measuring does alter what’s being measured. But you can always get nearer to the truth. It’s something you can get closer to, even though you never get to it. And today the young people really want to know about things, they want to get closer to the truth, and my job is to do all I can to help them. The child is really the trim tab of the future. At any rate, that’s the sort of thinking that came out of Bear Island, and that’s probably enough for tonight, isn’t it?”
Exposure to an hour or more of Fuller’s conversation can give rise to extremely varied reactions. Not infrequently, people meeting him for the first time are so taken aback by what seems to them a torrential outpouring of ego that they hear nothing he says, and go away in a state of shock. Others are convinced that, having suffered for years at the hands of people who refused to take his ideas seriously, he is simply enjoying his revenge. Such reactions are rarely experienced by students, who pack lecture halls to hear him and often keep him talking long after the scheduled time. A Fuller lecture can easily run for six hours, and upon occasion he has talked, with only incidental breaks, from eight o’clock in the morning until past midnight. After the first hour, which is usually perplexing, students find themselves tuned in to the unique Fuller wave length, with its oddly necessary word coinings and its synergetic constructions. They dig his humor, which often appears as a sort of wry comment on his own verbal style—as, for example, when digressing to students at the University of London about bird ecology not long ago, he described how “the male birds fly off to sweep out areas of maximum anticipated metabolic advantage,” then paused and added, reflectively, “Worms.” What’s more, students seem to feel that there is really very little ego involved in his monologues, that Fuller is pure guinea pig to Fuller, and that when he talks about himself and his experiences, his tone is that of an objective, if greatly interested, third party. Nothing irritates Fuller more than occasional implications by journalists that he is a non-stop talker who loves to hear himself hold forth; he never talks, he says, unless he is invited to do so, but he cannot limit himself to one or two aspects of a complex subject. Since 1927, which he looks back on as the critical year in his life, he has taken himself and his experiences as raw material for a series of experiments aimed at improving man’s environment, and to anyone who is interested he will provide the results, in comprehensive form.
What happened in 1927 was that Fuller, at the low point of his career, gave serious consideration to the idea of committing suicide and then rejected it in favor of what he has called “a blind date with principle.” For several years after he resigned from the Navy, in 1919, he had done rather well for himself. He had worked as assistant export manager for Armour & Co., and, in partnership with his father-in-law, a New York architect named James Monroe Hewlett (Fuller married Anne Hewlett In 1917), he had formed a company to exploit a building-block method of construction, patented by the two men, which was used in two hundred and forty houses and small commercial buildings over a five-year period. In 1922, the Fullers’ daughter, Alexandra, had died, just before her fourth birthday, after a succession of illnesses culminating in spinal meningitis. Fuller began drinking heavily; he recalls that he used to stay up all night drinking, and still have enough energy to work twelve or fourteen hours the next day. When his father-in-law was obliged to sell his stock in the building-block company in 1927, Fuller, a minority stockholder, was informed by the new owners that his services were no longer needed. This blow came shortly after a second daughter, Allegra, was born to the Fullers. In the belief that he had made a complete mess of his life thus far, Fuller considered what seemed to him the only two courses open to him: he could do away with himself, thereby giving his wife and new baby a chance to find someone better equipped to take care of them, or he could devote the rest of his life to the service of something greater than he was, and try to get straightened out that way. In the light of his background—eight generations of Boston idealists, Unitarian ministers, and transcendental thinkers (Margaret Fuller was his great aunt)—the answer was never really in much doubt. In his autobiography, Fuller tells how he stood on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, where he was living at the time, and found himself saying, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe.”
Fuller moved his family into a slum neighborhood in Chicago, cut himself off from contact with everyone he had known before, and began, he says, to do his own thinking. It seemed to him that, purely by chance, he had already acquired a great deal of valuable experience, having repeatedly found himself working in areas that gave him an insight into the new world of accelerating technology. In the Navy, particularly, his exposure to the principles of ballistics, logistics, radio electronics, and naval aviation had given him a glimpse of future industrial developments that would make it possible—through the use of the new alloys, for example —to do more and more with less and less. This sort of technological movement seemed even then to promise, if carried far enough, a reversal of the old Malthusian concept of the economic forces at work in the world. Malthus had said that the world’s population would always multiply more rapidly than the available food supply, and Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest had seemed to provide a melancholy solution to this perennial problem, and also an ecological justification of war. But if technology could provide more and more goods from fewer and fewer resources, it was conceivable that man could convert himself from an inherent failure, as Malthus had depicted him, into a success in his environment. Technology, of course, is dependent on science, for it requires the discovery by science of certain basic patterns in nature that can be isolated and reproduced by industrial processes. In 1927, then, Fuller dedicated himself to a search not only for these patterns but also for ways in which they could be made to benefit his fellow-man. He is almost alone among twentieth-century scientists in having thus concerned himself at all times with the social implications of his discoveries.
Although society has not always been ready to accept what Fuller has come up with since then, he insists that not one of his inventions has been a failure. His first Dymaxion house, a circular dwelling unit suspended by cables from a central mast, was a successful exploitation of the discovery that the tensile strength of certain metals and alloys is far greater than the strength of the same materials when used in compression. (The term “Dymaxion,” with its overtones of “dynamic” and “maximum,” was coined by a pair of public-relations men for Marshall Field’s, the Chicago department store, where the house was first exhibited, in 1929.) Fuller’s Dymaxion three-wheeled automobile, of which three prototypes were built between 1933 and 1935, could turn in its own length; it could also develop a speed of a hundred and twenty miles per hour using a standard ninety-horsepower Ford engine. His 1943 Dymaxion Airocean World Map was the first cartographic system to receive a United States patent, and was one of the first Fuller inventions to arouse the serious interest of other scientists; it shows the whole surface of the earth in a single flat view with no visible distortion. In 1944, the government agreed to release high-priority aluminum alloys for Fuller’s Wichita House, a new version of the Dymaxion circular unit. It was to sell for sixty-four hundred dollars, and was scheduled to go into mass production as an emergency solution to the postwar housing shortage, but with the end of the war and the end of rationing the arrangement fell apart. Like a die-stamped, mass-producible bathroom unit that Fuller had designed earlier, the Wichita House was ultimately the victim of caution and inertia in the building industry. Fuller had decided long before that housing was technologically the most backward of all the major industries, and he continued to concentrate his efforts in the field of shelter
In 1947, Fuller produced the discovery that made him famous—the geodesic dome whose basic, patented formula comes straight from nature’s geometry. For a while, all geodesic domes were manufactured by two companies Fuller set up for that purpose, Synergetics, Inc., and Geodesics, Inc. But now he has licensed about two hundred construction and other firms to do the actual manufacturing and building under his patent, and for every dome sold he receives a royalty of five per cent of the selling price. Fuller’s domes are now spread throughout the world—more than three thousand of them, according to a recent count. They range in size from small living units to a huge maintenance and repair shed, three hundred and eighty-four feet in diameter, that was put up in 1958 for the Union Tank Car Company in Baton Rouge, and they are just as suitable in the Arctic, where geodesic Radomes house the listening devices of the Air Force’s Distant Early Warning Line, as in Equatorial Africa, where Fuller has taught natives to make them out of bamboo, or on the top of Mount Washington, exposed to the highest wind velocities on the North American continent. The Marine Corps has adopted air-liftable geodesic domes as its advance-base shelters, and the Department of Commerce has been using them since 1956 to house its exhibits at international trade fairs. Fuller’s domes are a product of his geometry of vectors, their prodigious strength arising from a patented formula that combines interlocking tetrahedrons and icosahedrons so as to balance the forces of tension and compression and thus distribute stresses evenly throughout the structure. Because their strength is all in the invisible mathematics, they can be made of almost any material, including paper, and because the basic structural formula is simple, they can be assembled by unskilled labor, using color-coded parts, in unbelievably short order; in Hawaii, for example, a hundred-and-forty-five foot-in diameter dome was assembled in one day by the Kaiser Aluminum company, in time for a symphony orchestra to give a concert inside it that same evening. Although Fuller has farmed out the production of his domes to individual licensees, he has more requests than he can handle to adapt the basic design for various purposes. Right now, he is designing several domes for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a huge dome to cover the Mexico City Plaza de Toros, and a huge geodesic sphere to serve as the United States Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair. (Fuller was named the official architect for the United States Pavilion in Montreal, although he has no architect’s license and must have all building contracts signed by an associate, a young man named Shoji Sadao.) The domes have brought Fuller wealth and fame, but there are times when he grows a little tired of hearing about them. They are, after all, only one application of a lifetime’s research. He once told his friend and biographer Robert W. Marks, “I did not set out to design a house that hung from a pole, or to manufacture a new type of automobile, invent a new system of map projection, develop geodesic domes or Energetic Geometry. I started with the universe—as an organization of regenerative principles frequently manifest as energy systems of which all our experiences, and possible experiences, are only local instances. My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe. I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”
Although, technically speaking, Fuller is not an architect, he has come to be recognized as a powerful force in contemporary architecture. Leading architects here and abroad often make a point of praising his contributions in their field, even though what he has done, in a sense, has been to challenge the whole basis of their aesthetic, pointing out that the supposedly modern and functional Bauhaus-derived architecture of our time is only superficially functional and not modern at all. It is almost as though the architectural profession had chosen to avoid Fuller’s challenge by pretending to agree with what he says.
At breakfast the morning after the three-hour lecture on mathematics and other matters, Fuller, seeming not in the least winded, talked for quite a while about the deficiencies of contemporary architecture. He had come to breakfast in a bright-orange slicker, looking somewhat disconsolate, with the announcement that only about ten per cent of the runoff from a brief, hard rain that had taken place during the night had gone into the cisterns; he had been out checking the gutters and rainspouts, and had found most of them badly clogged. This bit of non-functionalism—the drinking water on Bear Island comes from a spring, but water for washing is collected as runoff—led him, by way of a chance remark, to a discussion of the Bauhaus idea and how it differed from his own work.
“You see, the very essence of the Bauhaus was what happened to Germany as a consequence of the First World War,” Fuller said. “Having lost the war and suffered so much destruction, the Germans had the problem of rebuilding with very little money. Obviously, one of the things they could do without was decoration. Walter Gropius and those people looked at American industrial engineering about this time, and decided maybe they could turn that into an aesthetic. They didn’t make any engineering contributions. These men simply used the hard edge that had been developed in engineering. They didn’t invent a new window or a new structural principle, or anything like that; they didn’t go in back of the walls and take a look at the plumbing, for example. Mies van der Rohe, who was the most perceptive of all of them, saw the glasswork in American stores and began making drawings of buildings that were all glass. Now, I was proposing something completely different at that time. I was saying that the same science that had gone into weaponry and the development of the advanced technology of the aircraft industry had also made it possible to make very much lighter and more powerful structures. I had come to the conclusion in 1927 that Malthus might be wrong, you see, because I’d realized that real wealth is energy, not gold, and that it is therefore without practical limit. Einstein and Max Planck demonstrated once again that energy could neither be created nor lost and that it left one system only to join another—the famous law of conservation of energy. And this meant that wealth was not only without practical limit but indestructible. Man’s intellect, his ability to tap the cosmic resources of energy and make them work for him, had really caused wealth to be regenerative, or self-augmenting. The main thing, then, was to use this great energy-wealth to help man instead of to kill him—for example, in designing ways to house the third of humanity that was without adequate shelter. At any rate, that was very different from what Gropius taught his students. And now Mies tries to confuse me by saying ‘Less is more’ —meaning, I suppose, that less decoration is more effective. But that’s hardly the same as doing more with less in making an airplane.”
After a moment’s reflection, Fuller continued, “Architects, engineers, and scientists are all what I call slave professions. They don’t go to work unless they have a patron. But architects are the most slavish of all, and they work under a system that hasn’t changed since the time of the Pharaohs. When you’re an architect, the patron tells you where he’s going to build, and just what he wants to do. And he says, ‘My brother’s in the hardware business, and my wife wants this, and here’s the building code, and the labor laws, and here are the zoning regulations, and here’s Sweet’s catalogue. I don’t want anything special outside of it.’ So the architect is really just a tasteful purchasing agent. He discovers he’s inherited a skeleton frame and guts and all he can do is put in curtain walls—what I call exterior decorating. And for this you don’t really need an architect at all. Only about four per cent of the building done in America involves architects, in fact. So who does design what you build? I’ve found that the real design initiative comes from way, way out, and gets into the prime contracts for hardware and so forth, and I’ve also found that the important hardware comes originally from those people who are producing the weaponry—battleships and airplanes. The first electric-light bulbs were developed for use on board battleships. The same thing with refrigeration and desalinization plants, which the Navy has had for half a century.
“You see, it surprises people when you tell them that since the last ice age three-quarters of the earth has been water, and that of the one-quarter that is land very little has been lived on. Ninety-nine per cent of humanity has lived on only about five per cent of the earth—a few little dry spots. Now, the law has always been applicable only to this five per cent of the earth, and anyone who went outside of it—the tiny minority that went to sea, for example—immediately found himself outside the law. And the whole development of technology has been in the outlaw area, where you’re dealing with the toughness of nature. I find this fascinating and utterly true. All improvement has to be made in the outlaw area. You can’t reform man, and you can’t improve his situation where he is. But when you’ve made things so good out there in the outlaw area that they can’t help being recognized, then gradually they get drawn in and assimilated. A good example of what I mean is going on right now in the space program. I’m on the advance-research team of NASA, on a consultant basis, working with some very good people on this problem of how to keep man in space. Now, the real purpose of the space programs at the present time is simply to get the highest weapons advantage, and the side that gets it will rule the universe. This is greatly hidden from people by all the talk of getting to the moon, but the space platform, the military advantage, is really it. In order to maintain advantage in space, though, where there’s no atmosphere and no water and no sewer lines and no berries to eat, for the first time in history you have to look out for man. Not just for the weapon but for the individual. And this is really the most significant part of the whole thing, as far as I’m concerned. Until now, making more effective weapons on earth never involved making life better for man. The little container that sustains man in space will actually be the first scientific house in history. Inadvertently, man is trying for the first time to learn how to make man a success. It’s inadvertent, but it’s being done.
The whole question of design initiative is central to Fuller’s vision of utopia. The initiative must be wrested from the military strategists by comprehensive designers, he says, if we are to escape destruction. And where are the comprehensive designers to come from? Despite his reservations about most modern architects, Fuller is convinced that the leaders of the great new technological revolution will come from the architectural profession, which, in an over-specialized age, is almost the only profession that is trained to put things together and to think comprehensively. Architectural training must first be thoroughly overhauled and placed on a new footing, however, and Fuller has been doing quite a good deal lately, trim-tab fashion, toward that end. For some time, he has urged the creation of research centers at leading architectural schools, where students and professional architects can work together in anticipation of future needs, and within the last few years a number of universities in this country and abroad have set up such centers, which are often under Fuller’s direct guidance. Fuller has visited a hundred and seventy-three colleges and universities, all told, and architectural students at a great many of them now exchange information and keep in touch with each other and with a “World Resources Inventory” that Fuller has set up at Southern Illinois University—a vast compilation of data on raw and organized resources, human trends, and projected human needs. These developments encourage Fuller to believe that the comprehensive design initiative is finally getting into the right hands. He devotes a large proportion of his time and energy now to coordinating this worldwide student movement, which remains, at his insistence, loosely organized and resolutely non-political. In Paris last June, at an assembly for architectural students held in conjunction with the International Union of Architects’ Eighth Biennial World Congress, the students adopted a proposal by Fuller that the years from 1965 to 1975 be designated as a World Design Science Decade. The goal, simply stated, is “to render the total chemical and energy resources of the world, which are now exclusively preoccupied in serving only 44 per cent of humanity, adequate to the service of 100 per cent of humanity at higher standards of living and total enjoyment than any man has as yet experienced.”
B y the time Fuller had concluded his remarks on architecture and the design initiative, it was nearly one o’clock. The weather had cleared during the morning. A benign sun presided over the blue water and dark-green islands of the bay, and the seventy-five-mile sweepout left one’s eyes feeling freshly washed. Following the custom of summer people in all latitudes, several members of the family came to lunch with the observation that it had turned into “a real Bear Island day.”
Later that afternoon, I set off with Fuller for a tour of the island. The weather was magnificent and he took deep breaths as he walked, stopping short when he wanted to say something, then forging ahead rapidly with short, vigorous strides. He had his two-way bullhorn slung around his neck, but he scarcely ever bothered to use it. “I really feel quite wonderful,” he announced at one point. “When I got here, three days ago, I was in terrible shape, and already I’m getting my energy back.”
We crossed a long meadow sloping away from the main house and past the dining cottage, and headed toward the heavily wooded southern end of the island. On the way, Fuller stopped to show me a small graveyard—three headstones in a neatly fenced plot. “When my grandmother bought this island,” he said, “the settlers were down to two families—the Parsons and the Eatons, both fishermen-farmers. They moved back to the mainland, and we agreed to keep up their little burial ground. We’ve found gravestones all over the island, you know, some of them going back a century and a half, and we’ve also found eleven cellar holes, which shows you how much life there’s been here. These islands have been lived on for generations. The earliest settlers from England were massacred when they tried to build on the mainland, but islands were easier to defend. You’ll find that the British charts of 1765, or thereabouts, show all the Penobscot Bay islands, many with the same names they have today. You must get my sister Rosie to tell you about the early history of the island sometime. She knows a lot about it. Get her to tell you about the time the Seventh-Day Adventists came here to wait for the end of the world.” (I did ask Mrs. Kenison about the Adventists that evening, and she told me that in 1901, or thereabouts, all the members of this sect in Bangor had rowed over to Bear Island one day, climbed trees, and settled down to wait for the end of the world, which they expected momentarily. No one knew why they had picked Bear Island. When the scheduled event failed to take place, they climbed down and rowed back.)
We pushed on into the woods. Fuller paused at frequent intervals to sniff the wild raspberry and balsam and other forest scents, which he said were especially delicious just after a rain. His hearing and eyesight were not all they might be, he said, but his sense of smell had always been very good. Our path, which had followed the edge of the high bluff at the northern end of the island for a while, now descended until we were only a few feet above the sea, which sparkled brightly through a green curtain of spruce. We passed a rocky beach and continued around a point, until Fuller led the way down to a smaller beach consecrated to nude male bathing (the ladies’ beach is nearer to the main house and similarly secluded). Fuller stood facing the water, smiling his toothy smile. “Everything I can really remember begins here,” he said happily. “There’s Eagle Island, where I used to row for the mail every day. And there’s Butter, and Fling, and Burnt, and Dagger, and Sheep, and Oak, and around there is Horse Head and Colt Head. Time and time again, the views of this bay are in my mind as I go around the world. And the atmospheric conditions, the sudden changes you get. That northwest wind that came in last night and pushed the doors open—it always comes suddenly that way. It just cleans everything out. You can understand how it was on an island, can’t you, old man? All the things that had to be done, all the chores. And then I often felt like being by myself, so I started making experimental houses on different parts of the island. I didn’t have any regular allowance, but I’d have money left over from birthdays and things, and I’d buy a hammer and some nails and start making a house. . . . Well, I think if we’re going to swim we’d better do it now.”
Fuller started to remove his clothes, laying them out carefully on the warm, jagged rocks, which he identified for me as the top of the Allegheny range and probably among the oldest geological formations in existence anywhere. As he was untying his sneakers, he reached down and picked up a pebble that was almost a perfect tetrahedron. A moment later, he found another, and then another. It was amazing, he said, how often you came across this shape on the beach. Fuller took off his socks and then put his sneakers back on, and warned me to do the same; the tide was out, and the bottom would be strewn with sea urchins. His next bit of instruction concerned the art of swimming in Maine water. By going in and out very quickly several times, he said, and warming up between plunges, one could build up a tolerance to the cold. On our fourth entry, the crystalline water actually did seem a trifle less numbing, and I was prepared to believe that after a while it might become almost comfortable. Fuller warmed up between plunges by skipping stones on the water. He claimed he could skip any stone I found, whether it was flat or not, and he had no failures. Just as we were coming out of the water for the last time, a big seal surfaced near the rocky point some twenty yards away; he gave us a long, incredulous look and then vanished silently.
I had asked earlier to see Fuller’s new dome. We went there directly from the beach, retracing our path through the woods and then cutting in back of the dining cottage. The dome stands above the harbor on a high point of land, looking out toward one of the other two Fuller-owned islands, Compass, and, beyond that, to the Camden Hills, on the mainland. Put up two summers ago to replace an earlier, paperboard dome that had been destroyed by a falling tree in a storm, this one is what Fuller terms a “tensegrity” structure—meaning, he said, that the forces of discontinuous compression and continuous tension that hold it together are entirely differentiated, or separate. The compression members are two-by-four timbers. They are held apart—not joined together—by the tension members, light Dacron cords, in such a manner that a stress exerted anywhere on the surface is immediately distributed throughout the entire structure, rendering the whole construction immensely strong. As I stood inside the dome, which Fuller had not yet got around to covering with a plastic skin, the sense of lightness, grace, elegance, and unseen strength was strangely exhilarating. It was easy to understand why Fuller, throughout his career, has had the immediate and enthusiastic support of artists, if not of engineers and architects. While he greatly appreciates this sort of recognition, and values highly his long and close friendships with such artists as Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder, he makes it clear that in his own work aesthetics plays only an incidental role. “I never work with aesthetic considerations in mind,” he told me that afternoon. “But I have a test: If something isn’t beautiful when I get finished with it, it’s no good.”
Our path back to the main house led past a sturdy little farmer’s cottage, which Mr. and Mrs. Kenison and their children now occupy each summer. Mrs. Kenison asked us in to have a cup of tea and to inspect a new room that Mr. Hardie had nearly finished building for them, and a little later I left Fuller there, chatting contentedly in his sister’s parlor. His affection for every member of the family is apparent at all times, but it had struck me that he reserves a special fondness for Mrs. Kenison, as she does for him. “Bucky really became the head of our family after our father died, in 1910,” Mrs. Kenison told me that evening, after she had filled me in on the Seventh-Day Adventists. “He was both father and brother to me, and I just adored him always. Of course, he did worry Mother. Mother was left with four children and very little money when Father died, and Bucky’s improvidence was her despair. I can remember how night after night she used to bawl him out and I’d sit in the next room just shivering. And then she would get the husbands of her friends to bawl him out. He had a terrible time in school, you know, although he always got good marks. He couldn’t play games, because of his glasses, and he was almost always in trouble. Mother so wanted him to be a success, and I’m afraid she died without knowing that he ever would be.”
Actually, Fuller came rather close to a major success in 1933, the year before his mother died. His first three-wheeled Dymaxion car, built by a team of hand-picked mechanics in Bridgeport, had stopped traffic in New York and other cities and drawn considerable publicity nationally, and some engineers believe that it might very well have revolutionized the automobile industry if it had not suffered a stroke of exceptionally bad luck. Just outside the main gate of the Chicago World’s Fair, the Dymaxion car was rammed by a conventional vehicle, which happened to belong to a city official. The Dymaxion was overturned and its driver was killed. The other car was immediately towed away from the scene, and its involvement completely escaped the notice of reporters, who subsequently ascribed the accident to the Dymaxion car’s “freak” design. (“THREe-WHEELED CAR KILLS DRIVER,” ran a headline in one paper.) A later investigation disclosed the true facts, but the stigma remained, and in order to erase it, Fuller put his whole inheritance from his mother’s estate into the production of two more automobile prototypes. Unfortunately, when the two new Dymaxion cars had been completed and sold—one to a racing driver, the other to Leopold Stokowski—two of the subcontractors whom Fuller had engaged presented a bill for a great deal more than the sum he thought they had originally agreed on, and then sued for the difference. Fuller, dead broke, was unable to pay. He held a one-eighth interest in Bear Island, and the two men then came to Maine and pressed a claim to it. A local judge awarded it to them. Several years later, Mrs. Kenison managed to buy back her brother’s share, and Fuller paid her back as soon as he could.
During my talk with Mrs. Kenison after dinner, the whole family gathered in the living room of the main house to watch Fuller put on a visual demonstration of his mathematics. He went upstairs to his room and returned with a bag full of bright-colored plastic rods and rubber elbow joints, which he had had a toy manufacturer make up for him, and proceeded to construct out of them five geometrical shapes—a dodecahedron, a cube, a tetrahedron, an octahedron, and an icosahedron. Seated gnomically on a bench by a window, with his audience gathered in a half circle around him, he took up each shape in turn and showed us that the cube and the dodecahedron, no matter how you tried to prop them up, invariably collapsed, while the other three, whose structural basis was the triangle, held their shape. The accompanying explanation was rather complex, and it was close to midnight by the time he had finished it. He was then prevailed upon to sing, in a faltering but dogged tenor, some lyrics he had once written to the tune of “Home on the Range.” They began like this:
Several of Fuller’s listeners took the end of his song as an opportunity to retire. The rest of us followed him outdoors to look at the full moon and feel the earth’s rotation. If you stood with your feet wide apart and faced the North Star, he explained, you would, after a certain length of time, begin to sense the motion of the earth in the night sky as it turned with you aboard. You could actually feel it, he said, as a pressure on your left foot. After about fifteen minutes, several of us said that we were beginning to get something like the sensation he meant, and this pleased him enormously. When I finally left to go to bed, Fuller was explaining triangulation more fully to one of his nieces, out there under the great dome of the stars.
During the four days that I spent on Bear Island, it often occurred to me that the highly stimulating and occasionally exhausting “Bear Island atmosphere” that Fuller had talked about the first night was more or less directly the product of his own presence there. He never seemed to tire, although he seldom went to bed before two in the morning—four hours’ sleep, he said, was his usual quota. When the rest of the family got together for cocktails in the late afternoon, Fuller might go upstairs to his room to work on one of several articles or books he was writing; he gave up alcohol during the Second World War, he told me, not because he could not handle it but because he had decided that people who did not want to take his ideas seriously often ascribed them to his drinking habits. One of the writing projects that occupied him during my visit was a personal summing up of what he had learned from life, which had been commissioned by the editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins. Fuller had decided to cast it in a unique quasi-poetic form that he refers to as “mental mouthfuls and ventilated prose. He has written a number of things in this form, including an unfinished “Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization.” It all began in 1936, when he was asked to write a technical paper for the Phelps Dodge Corporation. A director of the company found the paper totally incomprehensible, and said so. Somewhat miffed, Fuller gained an audience with the man and proceeded to read the paper aloud to him in carefully metered doses, watching his face to make sure that each portion was understood before he went on to the next. “Why don’t you write it that way?” the director asked when he had finished reading. Fuller went home, rewrote the paper in metered doses, and resubmitted it. “This is lucid,” the director said. “But it is poetry, and I cannot possibly hand it to the president of the corporation for submission to the board of directors.” Fuller insisted that it wasn’t poetry at all but simply a chopped-up version of the original prose report. The director said he was having two poets to dinner at his house that night, and would show the paper to them and ask their opinion. The following morning, he called Fuller into his office again, and said, “It’s too bad—they say it’s poetry.” The report was finally put back into prose form, though with a great many dots, dashes, and asterisks to separate the mental mouthfuls. Ever since that time, however, Fuller has frequently found himself putting down his thoughts in the ventilated form. He showed me the rough draft of his article for the Saturday Review, and I saw that it contained a number of the ideas he had been discussing at somewhat greater length during the last few days. At one point, I read:
Nature as it presented itself on Bear Island certainly offered unlimited stimulation to Fuller’s thought processes. I was constantly fascinated to see how, his interest having been piqued by some bit of flora or fauna, he could suddenly take off on long and adventurous flights of erudition. The simple act of cutting out a spruce sapling that had elected to seed itself in a stone retaining wall started Fuller thinking about pruning as an art—the art, he said, of “killing without killing.” This led him, by a lightning transition, to a discussion of the whales that came up through the Bering Strait each year, and of the Eskimos who spoke of the whale with love as their great brother and said that the great brother asked them to kill him very expertly, so that he would return in great numbers the following year. “And all this, by the way, is very close to the ancient bull worship in Crete,” Fuller added. “The bull is, of course, the male fertility, and the killing of the bull in Crete was something that had to be done very beautifully and expertly, which is really what goes on today in the bull ring, although in a debased form. The Cretans played games of jumping over the horns and doing acrobatics on the back of the bull and dancing around him all day long.” Fuller went on to describe the clothing worn by the Cretans at these ancient bull festivals, and then said that it had been taken over by gypsies from northwestern India on their way to Spain, and this brought him, quite naturally, to the true history of flamenco dancing, which, he said, the gypsies had also taken over from the Cretans. Flamenco, he explained, had originated on shipboard. It had grown out of the sounds made on the hard decks of Cretan ships—sounds echoed in the staccato clatter of the dancer’s heels in the classical flamenco. Fuller demonstrated a flamencolike dance step, which he had learned, he said, from a South American Indian.
Once Fuller has embarked on one of his verbal flights, I found, he is virtually impervious to distraction or discomfort. As we were coming out of the water rather late one afternoon, while the last rays of the sun lingered on the men’s beach, the subject of New Zealand came up, and in short order he was well launched on the story of his visit to the Maori anthropologist who was also Keeper of the Chants, and his theory of how the Maori navigators had discovered the prevailing wind patterns in the southern latitudes known as the roaring forties, and had used them in sailing around the world as long as ten thousand years ago. It was an interesting story, but by the time he had come to the end of it, the sun was well down behind the trees and a cool breeze was blowing from the northeast (or sucking, rather, from the southwest). Suddenly noticing that I looked a little chilly—I had felt that it would somehow be in poor taste to get dressed before Fuller did, and while he was talking—he quickly put his clothes back on and then led the way to the house at a fast trot, pausing only to pick up an exceptionally good example of “our friend tetrahedron.” Fuller himself was not a bit cold.
The whole story, as Fuller sees it, of the tie-in between the earliest history of navigation and the development of mathematics emerged the next morning. Fuller rowed me over in his dinghy to Little Spruce Head—a thickly wooded island, which he now owns outright, having bought out the rest of the family’s shares in it—and we spent the morning exploring it. On the way over, he talked nostalgically about the Swedish-built Nagala, a thirty-metre sloop he had owned, describing her as the most beautiful boat ever designed. He had sold her the year before (retaining the dinghy, in which we were at that moment afloat), because he used her seldom, but he still dreamed about the boat and often thought of buying her back. She was a needle, a wraith, he said, and the emotions you felt about her were of the same kind as the emotions you felt about a beautiful woman. I asked how he had come by her name. He explained that in most languages “na” was the ancient word for the sea—the root of all marine words like “navigation” and “navy” and “nautical”—and that Naga had been the great serpent god of the sea in prehistoric times. When man took the tremendous risk of going to sea in boats, Fuller said, he gradually learned that by making a snake’s path in the water—that is, tacking—he could navigate against the wind, and this was really the beginning of science and technology, and the beginning of the idea, which we now associate with the Western cultural tradition, though it was born in the South Seas of the Pacific, that nature could be studied and made to serve man’s needs and desires. “Nagala,” of course, was simply the feminine form of “Naga.”
On the way back to Bear Island, I took the oars and asked Fuller to go on talking about the early history of navigation, and he outlined his theory on the subject, which is nothing less than comprehensive. At the beginning, he said, when men first put to sea, on rafts, they just drifted away from the mainland of Asia on the Japan Current, going where God seemed to will. Much of the philosophy of the Orient may have stemmed from this willing submission to fate as sensed in nature, he said—this drifting away and never coming back. Then, after many centuries, successors of these earliest seagoing drifters who had found their way to the South Seas, and who may very well have been Maoris, learned how to steer their rafts with crude log rudders and, eventually, how to put up masts in the form of live trees, whose leaves caught the wind, and gradually there evolved the proa, with a mast and sail that could be moved from one end of the boat to the other, and this led, in turn, to the philosophically and technically enormous step of into-the-wind sailing. The men who dared go against God’s will and sail into the wind, Fuller said, also wanted to be able to come back where they had started from, and this was the real beginning of navigation. The sailors of the South Seas made the world’s first navigating devices, which were crude combinations of notched sticks that could be used to plot the position of a boat between two fixed stars—the only visible points of reference. And this early three-point navigation, Fuller said, was the beginning of mathematics—the first system of true calculation, as opposed to the simple scratchings on rock that landlubbers used in counting their livestock
Gathering verbal momentum but still managing to direct my own somewhat serpentine rowing efforts, Fuller described how the earliest navigators gradually spread throughout the island world of Micronesia, and how they had gained great influence, because of their seemingly magic power to go great distances and return with treasure from no one knew where; they guarded the secrets of navigation, he said, and even lived apart from the other members of their tribe while they were onshore. They became the high priests and witch doctors and spiritual leaders of their people, and they continued to develop their secret mathematical knowledge, and their successors grew more and more proficient at mathematics and astronomy, and more and more daring in their navigation. They reached India, where they built tall star-sighting towers on the mainland, and they learned how to ride the monsoons across the Indian Ocean in dhows until eventually they went overland to the Mediterranean. The descendants of these navigators formed the priesthood of the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, became famous as Phoenician navigators, and established the brilliant and powerful Minoan civilization on Crete, still without relinquishing the secrets of the mathematical knowledge that was the source of their power, and their descendants, in turn, pushed on, in bigger and more seaworthy boats, all the way up the Atlantic coast of Europe to England and Scandinavia, where they became known as Vikings, and down the rivers of Russia and out across the North Atlantic to Greenland and America. When the Ionian Greeks overwhelmed the Minoan civilization at Knossos, on Crete, however, the secret mathematical code was finally broken, and immediately afterward, to the amazement of all subsequent historians unacquainted with Fuller’s theory, Greek science suddenly blossomed forth with quadratic equations and other highly advanced methods of calculation. “And now,” Fuller said, “We come to the Garden of Eden story in the Old Testament, and we find that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, and I am going to tell you that Eve was not a woman at all—she was the boat. Boats have been feminine from the beginning, and Eve was the ribbed, deep-sea ship that took the man Adam into the great globe-girdling experience that proved to him the earth was round and therefore finite. And the apple from the tree of knowledge represented the earth, and the serpent was Naga, the great god of the sea, and this is really the very, very long-hidden story.”
As Fuller told it, the whole rousing saga sounded absolutely irrefutable. He expects to write a book about it within the next year or so—one of five books by him that the Macmillan Company has contracted to publish—and the film director John Huston, a friend of his, has said he wants to make it into a motion picture.
There is no doubt whatever in Fuller’s mind that the whole development of modern science and technology has resulted from a willingness on the part of a very few men to sail into the wind of tradition, to trust in their own intellect, and to take advantage of their natural mobility. According to Fuller, the influence of this tiny minority, the navigator-priests of pre-history who ventured into the outlaw area and returned with the new wealth that was knowledge, was always far greater than that of the kings or other rulers to whom they were officially subject, and the situation is no different today; it is modern technology, rather than political leadership, that directs the real movement of contemporary history. “Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months over two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death,” he has written. “Take away the politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries and leave them their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production, and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.”
The colossal irony of our time, of course, is that the scientific knowledge that has made utopia possible has also made world suicide a distinctly plausible alternative. As Fuller once put it, “Either war is obsolete or men are.” The issue will be decided one way or another within the next thirty years, he believes—but not by the politicians. Much as the political leaders in Russia and America might like to divert science and technology from weaponry to livingry, they are prevented from doing so by the opposition leaders within their own systems, who would use any relaxation of the national military posture as evidence of weakness or treason. “It comes to those who discover it, all round the world, as a dismaying shock, to realize that continuation of the weapons race and of cold and hot warring are motivated only by intramural party fears of local political disasters,” Fuller wrote last spring. “The world’s political fate does not rest with leaders at the summit, expressing the will of world people, but with the local ambitions and fears of lower-echelon political machines, within the major weapons-possessing nations, whose vacillation is accompanied by an increasing spread of the atomic weapons-possessing nations. . . . All political machine professionals of all political states will always oppose loss of sovereignty for their own state. Solution of the impasse, if it comes at all, must clearly come from other than political initiative.”
Fuller is sure that the solution can come only from a design revolution to be carried out by today’s students. Time after time during my stay on Bear Island, he returned to the subject of the student movement, on which he pins all his hopes for the future, and he returned to it once more in the last conversation I had with him before leaving. We had gone for a swim that morning, and were thawing out on the warm rocks and talking about automation. Fuller has a lot of thoughts about automation (which he prophesied many years ago), and he has recently published a little book called “Education Automation” (Southern Illinois University Press), about coming changes in the educational process, that is creating quite a stir in academic circles. The essence of his theory is that education will be the major industry of the future, for automation increasingly will make the old concept of work obsolete and everyone will spend more and more of his non-leisure time in research and reëducation to keep up with a constantly accelerating technology. “Everybody will be going back to school periodically,” he told me. “But, of course, the university itself won’t be anything like what it is now. We’ll get rid of all the teachers who are just holding on to their jobs in order to eat—all the deadwood, which is the biggest problem in a university anyhow. The deadwood will get fellowships to study or work on their own, and TV will come in to take over most of the actual teaching. There will be a large technical staff making documentary movies. The university is going to become a really marvellous industry, with tools like individually selected and articulated two-way TV that will permit any student anywhere in the world to select from a vast stockpile of documentaries on any subject and watch it over his own TV set at home. The individual is going to study mainly at home. And the great teachers won’t have to spend their time delivering the same lectures over and over, because they’ll put them on film. The teachers and scholars will be free to spend their time developing more and more knowledge about man’s whole experience—past, present, and future.”
“But what about the students?” I asked. “How will they react to being cast adrift in a world of impersonal educational machinery? Isn’t part of the answer implied in the recent disorders at modern multiversities such as U.C.L.A.?”
Fuller considered the question. “You know, young people sometimes have an infallible sense about these things,” he said, at last. “In my youth, we used to talk about ‘square shooters.’ Today, when a student calls somebody a ‘square’ he means something entirely different. It doesn’t imply that he’s lost respect for integrity, or anything like that. A ‘square’ these days is somebody who’s static, immobilized, obsolete—as obsolete as the square box in architecture. Today’s student knows instinctively that his world is dynamic, not static, and that the normal state of affairs is constant change and evolution. He also knows that a great many of our venerated institutions, educational and otherwise, are obsolete, and these are what he’s reacting against all over the world, sometimes rather violently. Look here, old man, the present crop of university students are the Second World War’s babies, and they’re astonishingly different from any previous generation. A lot of them were born when their fathers were away at war, and a lot of them were looked after by baby-sitters while their mothers worked in munitions factories. Besides which, they are the first humans to be reared by what I call the third parent—television—which helped them from the very beginning to think ‘world.’ And look what’s happened in the world since they were born. First off, the atomic bomb. When they were about four years old, the giant computers began commercial operation. When they were eight, men climbed Mount Everest. When they were ten, they were immunized against polio. When they were twelve, Sputnik went up and the first civilian nuclear reactor went into operation. When they were thirteen, the atomic submarine Nautilus crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic under the North Polar ice. When they were fourteen, a Russian rocket photographed the far side of the moon and returned to earth. When they were fifteen, the bathyscaphe took men down to photograph the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s deepest hole. When they were sixteen, a Russian orbited the earth in a rocket. When they were seventeen, the DNA genetic code for the control of the design of all life was discovered. This generation knows that man can do anything he wants, you see. These people know that wealth is not money—that it’s a combination of physical energy and human intellect—and they know that energy can be neither created nor destroyed and that intellectual knowledge can only increase, and that therefore total wealth cannot help but increase. They also know that they can generate far more wealth by coöperation on a global scale than by competition with each other. And they realize—or at least they sense—that utopia is possible now, for the first time in history. All past ideas of utopia were unrealistic, because it was assumed that Malthus was right and there would never be enough physical resources for more than a tiny proportion of humanity to live in comfort. No one ever thought of invisible technology doing more with less. Previous utopians didn’t think in terms of airplanes getting to increase their power thousands of times over while reducing their engine and airframe weights per horsepower by ninety-nine per cent. No one thought of communications going from wire to wireless. No one thought of a communications satellite weighing a tenth of a ton and outperforming seventy-five thousand tons of transatlantic cables. For the present generation of students, though, these are the facts of life. And yet they see their political leaders locked in the same old static mentality, still putting everything into weaponry, although it’s perfectly obvious where that’s taking us.”
Fuller fell silent. After a moment or so, he got up and walked to the edge of the water and stood there, looking across at Eagle Island, and then, with a quick motion, he stooped to pick up a stone and send it skipping fifty feet out into the bay. I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly two o’clock. The boat taking me over to Sunset was to leave at two-thirty, so we headed back toward the main house. On the way, I asked Fuller whether he felt that there was anyone in his own generation working in the same direction he was. He stopped to ponder the question. He stood stock-still, his eyes raised reflectively, and then said, “No, not really. I’ve been hopeful at times, but I find they don’t really take the fundamental initiative. I just seem to be a maverick in that respect. And I didn’t decide to take the initiative because I thought I was so good, either—it was only because no one else was doing it.”
We walked on up the path, and came out into the meadow below the main house. As I caught up with Fuller, I saw that he was smiling his chip-toothed smile. “You know, in Greece last month, Doxiadis gave a big dinner party, at which he asked me to make a speech,” he said. “And when it got to be time for the speech, Doxiadis got up from the table and said that he was not going to introduce me—he was going to leave that to a member of my own generation. And up to the platform stepped his daughter, who graduated two years ago from Swarthmore. Lovely girl. Well, I sort of liked that. And then, after dinner, this same girl asked me if I would speak to a group of young postgraduate-student friends of hers from the university in Athens—young scientists and mathematicians—and naturally I said I’d be glad to. It turned out to be one of the most fascinating evenings of my life. I found that all these young people were really thinking. Their questions were brilliant, and they had such a clear grasp of the important issues, and their interest and their enthusiasm were so great—it was a strange thing, but I felt as though all the centuries had rolled back and I was really talking to the young thinkers of ancient Greece. We didn’t break up until three-thirty in the morning. I don’t believe I’ve ever felt such a spirit as I did that night, just two weeks ago. It’s this sort of thing that makes me so sure we’re going to come through. Everything centers more and more on the young people, but they’re up to it. World is going to work for world, that’s all.”
After I had said my goodbyes at the main house, Fuller insisted on walking down to the dock with me. On the way, he invited me to join a contest he was sponsoring, with a substantial prize for the person who came up with the best substitute for the word “sunset.” It bothers him quite a bit that his summer mailing address—c/o Sunset Post Office, Maine—happens to involve a term of which he disapproves on scientific grounds, although he ruefully admits that it will not be easy to hit on a satisfactory replacement for “sunset,” with its entrenched poetic associations. I said I would do my best.
Mr. Hardie had the engine of the launch warming up when we arrived. I put my suitcase aboard, and turned around to find that Fuller had gone off to look for something on the little strip of beach near the dock. He returned in a few moments, smiling broadly, and handed me a rather lumpy but undeniably tetrahedron-shaped stone. “Goodbye, old man,” he said, raising his voice above the noise of the engine. We shook hands, and I climbed aboard. He stood at the end of the dock until the launch was far out in the bay, waving energetically from time to time, and looking, for the moment, as though there were absolutely nothing in the world that he had to do. ♦
