Buckminster Fuller

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American scientist, the brilliant engineer-inventor of the Geodesic dome which combines a series of tetrahedron skeletons, a writer and lecturer. Labeled both a crackpot and a genius, he was awarded nearly 40 honorary degrees from universities in the U.S. and the UK and was the author of 20 books, including his perhaps best-known work, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth," 1970. The son of a Boston tea merchant, Fuller attended Harvard for one year before being expelled for cutting classes. He met Anne Hewlitt in 1914 and after serving for three years as a Navy Officer, they married. When they lost their first child to pneumonia, he considered suicide. After working in his father-in-laws construction business for a half dozen years, he took his wife and second child to a poor section of Chicago and began to develop his radical theories and original designs. In his lifetime he held more than 2,000 patents. He and his family lived precariously, as he once said, "With enough money for a bowl of soup." His last 30 years were more comfortable, with lecture tours and teaching. Bucky, as he was affectionately known, died of a heart attack on 1 July 1983 while at the hospital visiting his ailing wife in Los Angeles, California. Link to Wikipedia biography