Today I found out all about Dymaxion and Buckminster Fuller. Such an interesting character: I can't believe I had never heard of him before.

Fuller was an American designer, architect and inventor – and much more.  He coined the phrase 'Spaceship Earth' and invented the geodesic dome. But he did so much more. In a way he reminds me of Jeremy Bentham in the way he tried to innovate in many widely different areas but was never really accepted by the insiders in those fields, and his story has some similar elements of pathos. Some people seem to think he was a bit of a crank and others maintain he was a visionary, before his time, and will be truly appreciated one day. That always makes for a fascinating story.

The word Dymaxion was one which Fuller invented as a brand name for some of his more interesting inventions. It is an abbreviation of Dynamic Maximum Tension and there was a Dymaxion House, Dymaxion Car and a Dymaxion Map.

The house was never really built, although one prototype is in a museum. It was a dome-like structure perfectly in tune with 1940s/50s America's view of a space age future, containing some ideas for using natural airflow to save fuel in heating and cooling which are extremely topical now, a grey water system for capturing and using collected rainfall, and a fog-based bathing system which was supposed to enable somebody to wash using only a cupful of water. The whole thing was made of aluminium and had the sort of style of a classic American diner trailer or Airstream caravan.

The car was a streamlined, multi-person, fuel-efficient (for the time) vehicle. The protoype crashed and killed the driver, so the machine never got made, but its concepts influenced many subsequent designs, particularly the VW micro bus.

The most intriguing idea for me was the Dymaxion Map. It was supposed to be a better way to represent the Earth in a flat projection with less distortion than the familiar Mercator projection. The map did not have a normal North-South aligment and was made by projecting the shapes of the continents onto an isocahedron then unfolding that. Its hard to desribe and really has to be seen to be believed.

Whether he was right or wrong I think the World is a better place for having had such marvellous characters as Buckminster Fuller and Jeremy Bentham in it.

Along the way I also learned something about radio which I suspect most if not all our radio engineers at work are unaware of: the term 'radio' was invented by a mate of Fuller's, Waldo Warren. Although Edouard Branly used the prefix radio- in 1897 to describe radioconductor, if it was not for Waldo we could still be calling them a wireless.  Mind you, according to a colleague at work they still do in Scotland anyway.