Buckminster Fuller was truly a man ahead of his time. His lifelong goal was the development of what he called 'Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science' – the attempt to anticipate and solve humanity’s major problems through the highest technology by providing 'more and more life support for everybody, with less and less resources.'
Fuller was a practical philosopher who demonstrated his ideas as inventions that he called 'artifacts.' Some were built as prototypes, others exist only on paper, all he felt were technically viable. He was a dogged individualist whose genius was felt throughout the world for nearly half a century. Even Albert Einstein was prompted to say to him, 'Young man, you amaze me!'
On the verge of suicide once, it suddenly struck him that his life belonged not to himself but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called 'an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.' Over the next fifty-four years, he proved, time and again, that his most controversial ideas were practical and workable.