Everything I Know

Where to start? This is about R. Buckminster Fuller, otherwise known as Bucky. He is most renowned for "inventing" the geodesic dome. That's dome structures constructed from triangles. He also had 42 doctorates and 27 patents when he passed in July of 1983.

Bucky was/is a mentor of mine. I first met him in the early 70's, but that's another story for another day. There are a number of interesting websites concerned with Bucky, but I have one particular one (or two) that I would like to share with you today.

In 1975, from January 20 thru February 1, Dr. Fuller conducted a seminar in the evenings over a period of two weeks. The seminar took place at Bell Laboratories and was videotaped. My aged recollection is that the total seminar ran 60 hours, although the official time is now declared as 42 hours. The following year, 1976, the bicentennial year, Bucky's offices at University City Science Center in Philadelphia made the tape available as an onsite video seminar. The cost, as I recall, was probably $200 or $300 and the sessions would run for two weeks in Philly at his offices. So I, and a half dozen to a dozen other people interested in Fuller and his ideas showed up in April to let Bucky rewire our thinking.

We were each given 25 typed pages of notes made by Bucky's editor, E.J. Applewhite, and I personally took over 220 pages of notes myself during those two weeks. Over the next 20 years, I would occasionally look at my notes only to rediscover that not much of what I had written seemed to make a lot of sense to me. I refused to throw them away, however. Then one day I decided to transfer the notes to electronic storage on my word processor. In typing up the contents of those 220 pages, it all came back, as I had always figured it one day would. What a fantastic seminar.

I had long expected that one day the seminar tapes would be available for sale. When that day finally arrived, I discovered that I did not have the cash available to purchase them. My patience continued, however. Finally, about a year and a half ago, while surfing the net I came across a transcription of the entire seminar at a website run by Bucky's heirs, his grandchildren: http://www.bfi.org/everything_i_know.htm . All 42 hours. And that's not all. Further investigation reveals a copy of the transcription complete with the entire 42 hours of audio, either in its entirety or selectively by individual paragraph: http://omnifelicity.com/bucky/Default.htm . And now I see that they have added the entire seminar in video - online at the same location. Please Note: if you are interested in printing out this seminar, have a stack of paper ready; it's about 425 pages.

For those interested in more on Bucky, the Buckminster Fuller Institute at http://www.bfi.org/ is a good start. In addition, we will be sharing more on Bucky on this Weblog in the future.