Inventor, designer, and futurist, born in Milton, Massachusetts, USA. The great-nephew of Margaret Fuller, he left Harvard early and largely educated himself while working at industrial jobs and serving in the US Navy during World War 1. One of the century’s most original minds, he free-lanced his talents, solving problems of human shelter, nutrition, transportation, environmental pollution, and decreasing world resources, developing over 2000 patents in the process. He wrote some 25 books, notably Utopia or Oblivion (1969) and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). A professor at Southern Illinois University (from 1959), he became in his later decades a popular public lecturer, promoting a global strategy of seeking to do more with less through technology. His inventions include the Dymaxion House (1927), the Dymaxion Car (1933) and, foremost, the geodesic dome (1947). He has the distinction of having both his names used for a scientific entity, the fullerene (also known as a ‘bucky-ball’), a form of carbon whose molecule resembles his geodesic dome.