QI The Book of the Dead

might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise’. Specifically, his mission was to plan the survival of humanity. He started compiling his ‘Chronofile’, a vast scrapbook that included a daily diary, recording all his ideas, copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, even his dry-cleaning bills. In it, he called himself ‘Guinea Pig B’ (B for Bucky). By the end of his ‘lifelong experiment’, this ‘lab notebook’ took up 270 feet of shelving. Fuller claimed, with some justification, that he had the most-documented life of any human being in history.
    After his mystical experience, he locked himself away for a whole year to read and think. He emerged convinced that the secret to saving the world was better design. His axiom was ‘maximum advantage from minimal energy’, a principle he observed throughout the natural world in the structure of plants and animals. He started with housing: he already had some experience in construction and knew that cheap, efficient ‘machines for living’ (as he called them) were needed all over theworld. Ignoring thousands of years of building tradition, he went back to first principles. What if he based house design on the human frame, or a tree, hanging everything off a trunk or backbone – a system that used gravity instead of fighting it? And what if he made it from the lightest materials, like those already being used in aircraft manufacture? The result, prototyped in 1929, was the first entirely self-sufficient, portable house. Looking like an aluminium yurt, it was suspended on a central pole, ran on a diesel generator and recycled its own water so it didn’t need plumbing. Plus, it was light enough to be airlifted anywhere it was needed. It was called the Dymaxion house – ‘dymaxion’ from a contraction of ‘dynamic’, ‘maximum’ and ‘tension’. It slept four, and was priced at $1,500 (about $40,000 today), which meant it could be marketed as ‘a house that costs no more than a car’. Although it never went into mass production, it put Fuller’s name – and Dymaxion’s – on the map.
    Over the next two decades, Fuller created Dymaxion cars and Dymaxion bathrooms and, especially, the Dymaxion globe. This was an atlas of the world projected on to an icosahedron (a solid geometrical figure with twenty sides, each of which is an equilateral triangle) rather than a sphere. It had no ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘south’ or ‘north’ and it could be unfolded into a flat map of the world. Unfolded one way it showed how the world’s land masses join together; the other way did the same thing for the oceans. Laid out flat either way, it was a much more accurate representation of the world than traditional atlases but, being composed of twenty triangles, startlingly unfamiliar to look at.
    Few of these conceptual innovations made Fuller any money but he persevered, taking part-time jobs to keep his wife (and his second daughter, Allegra) clothed and fed. In order to be takenseriously, he gave up smoking and drinking and started eating carefully. ‘I found that if I was talking about my inventions and drinking, people just wrote them off as so much nonsense,’ he explained. His diet consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak and Jell-O. He experimented with a technique for sleeping as little as possible, to squeeze more out of his day. ‘Dymaxion sleep’, as he inevitably called it, involved training himself to take a thirty-second nap at the first sign of tiredness. He tried it for two years, averaging only two hours’ sleep a day, but had to stop because his colleagues at work couldn’t keep up.
    Then, in 1948, came the great leap forward that changed it all. Fuller had been teaching at Black Mountain College, a liberal arts foundation in North Carolina that acted as a summer camp for the elite of American avant-garde culture. Other faculty members included the composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham and abstract Impressionist painter Willem de Kooning.
    Always trying to ‘do more with less’, Fuller had gone on thinking about the lightest and strongest possible building. The simplest way of enclosing space is a regular pyramid, or tetrahedron, each side of which is an equilateral triangle. (It is also much stronger than anything with rectangular sides.) The most efficient way to enclose