One hundred years ago, inventor and engineer Buckminster Fuller graduated from Milton Academy. Hailed as one of the greatest minds of our time, Buckminster experienced ups and downs in his early adult years. He was expelled from Harvard twice before apprenticing as a machine fitter at a cotton mill machinery company in Boston. During two years of service in the U.S. Navy during World War I, he demonstrated an aptitude for engineering. Following the war, an executive position at a construction firm ended with his firing. But after his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, developed a new way of manufacturing reinforced concrete buildings, the two patented the invention together, earning the first of Buckminster’s 25 patents. Buckminster decided to make it his lifelong mission to use technology to revolutionize construction and improve housing.
In 1946, he received a patent for another breakthrough invention: the Dymaxion Map, which depicted the entire planet on a single flat map without visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the continents. After 1947, the geodesic dome dominated Buckminster’s life and career. Lightweight, cost-effective and easy to assemble, geodesic domes enclose more space without intrusive supporting columns than any other structure, efficiently distribute stress, and withstand extremely harsh conditions. Later in his career, Buckminster was recognized with major architectural, scientific, industrial and design awards, and he received 47 honorary doctoral degrees. Shortly before his death in 1983, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
A 1973 black-and-white photograph of Buckminster hangs in the School’s admission office. He signed it, “To: Wonderful Milton Academy, where I learned how to organize thought and was urged to ‘Dare to be true’ to what I learned from organized thoughts.”