QI The Book of the Dead

wrote in 1969. Like each of the other lives in this chapter, his story is about having a vision and trusting it. ‘Faith’, he once remarked ‘is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.’
    The Fullers had always done their own thinking. They wereNew England nonconformists known as Transcendentalists, who rejected religious authority in favour of personal inspiration. Like Blake, the Transcendentalists saw both humanity and nature as manifestations of the Divine. They included amongst their number the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), the nature writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) and Fuller’s great-aunt, Margaret Fuller (1810–50), author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the first major feminist work in the United States.
    The young ‘Bucky,’ as he was called, was extremely shortsighted. Until he was fitted with glasses, he refused to believe that the world was not blurry. His father, like so many of the fathers in this book, died at a young age, but his family was well established and wealthy, and so, like four generations of his family before him, Bucky was sent to Harvard. It was here that his long battle with authority began. Halfway through his first year he withdrew his entire college allowance from the bank to romance a Manhattan chorus girl and was promptly expelled. He was readmitted the next year and thrown out a second time for ‘irresponsibility and lack of interest’. He would later write:
    What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities .
     
    In the end, theman who was to become the greatest architect of his age didn’t graduate. The only degrees he ever received were the forty-seven honorary doctorates he was awarded many years later.
    After brief stints in a textile mill and a meat-packing company, Fuller joined the navy during the First World War. As a boy inMaine he had amused himself by making tools out of odds and ends and he put this to good use inventing a winch-like device for rescuing the pilots of navy aeroplanes, who often ended up head down underwater. Thanks to this, he was selected for officer training at the US Naval Academy, where he studied engineering. Leaving the navy to marry his wife, Anne, in 1917, he started a business with her father making bricks out of wood shavings, his first environmentally aware project. Both the marriage and the business were very successful until 1922, when the Fullers’ four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, suddenly died from polio.
    This affected Fuller terribly. He was devoted to her, and he and Anne had already nursed her through the 1918 flu epidemic and a serious bout of meningitis. The day before she died she had asked him for a walking cane similar to the one he had always used since he had damaged his knee playing football. He then left the family home on Long Island for an overnight trip to watch Harvard, his old college team, play. When Harvard won, Fuller spent the night carousing with his friends. By the time he rang Anne the following afternoon, Alexandra had fallen into a coma. He rushed back home and, when he arrived, she regained consciousness just long enough to ask if he had got the cane. He had forgotten all about it, and Alexandra died shortly afterwards. Fuller was inconsolable, and his life began to fall apart. He started drinking heavily and neglecting the business. Eventually Anne’s father lost patience, bought him out and then sold the company on for a fraction of its potential value. Fuller began an intense affair with a teenage girl. When she ended it, his mental health deteriorated sharply. In 1927, aged thirty-two, he walked to Lake Michigan and stood at the water’s edge, contemplating suicide.

    At that moment, Richard Buckminster Fuller found himself suspended several feet above the ground, surrounded by sparkling lights. Time seemed to pause and he heard a voice say:
    You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. You and all men are here for the sake of other men .
     
    It was at this point that Fuller realised he had faith – faith in what he called ‘the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call God’. This inspired him to conceive his ‘lifelong experiment’, which was ‘to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual