Good at Being Gods

Caleb Crain

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller
Yale, 257 pp, £35.00, July 2008, ISBN 978 0 300 12620 4

In the recent Pixar movie Wall-E there is a conflict between two different visions of technology. From one angle, technology appears to be humanity’s overlord: the movie imagines that in the future a megacorporation called Buy N Large will so exhaust and pollute the planet that it will have to whisk its customers away on a luxury outer-space cruise ship for their own protection. From another angle, technology appears to be the only thing capable of saving humanity’s soul. Wall-E, a scrappy, pint-sized robot left behind to tidy up Earth, scavenges for mementos of human culture, finds evidence of resurgent plant life and falls in love. The two visions are inconsistent but inextricable: Wall-E is himself a Buy N Large product.

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[*] Houghton Mifflin, 256 pp., $25, October 2007, 978 0 618 65825 1.

† Megan Marshall wrote about Margaret Fuller in the LRB of 15 November 2007.

Vol. 30 No. 24 · 18 December 2008 » Caleb Crain » Good at Being Gods (print version)
Pages 29-32 | 3483 words

Letters

From Paul Taylor

Caleb Crain misrepresents the work and achievements of Buckminster Fuller (LRB, 18 December 2008). He states, for example, that Fuller was ‘put in charge of selling wood-fibre bricks designed by his father-in-law’, and ‘failed at selling them’. In fact Fuller developed the material and invented the machinery for manufacturing the bricks (the story is told in the biography by Lloyd Steven Sieden that Crain refers to).

Fuller was a persistent critic of finance capitalism in his writings, but not anti-business. It was a long-standing principle of his not to pursue money for its own sake. Crain sneers that Fuller wasn’t ‘much good at making money’, yet writes a few paragraphs later that in the 1950s, the geodesic dome patent ‘was soon earning more than a million dollars a year’.

To say, as Crain does, that the dome was ‘made out of triangles’ is about as revealing as saying that factories are made out of rectangles. And Fuller didn’t say that ‘he saw no greater value in hand-made domes than in mass-produced ones.’ On the contrary, he emphasised that the design required precision manufacture of the sort that only industrial machine tools could provide.

Paul Taylor
London SE16

From Caleb Crain

To rebuke me for slighting Buckminster Fuller’s achievements, Paul Taylor points out that Fuller ‘developed the material and invented the machinery for manufacturing’ the wood-fibre bricks that he sold as a young man (Letters, 1 January). That’s true, but so is what I wrote, namely that Fuller’s father-in-law designed the bricks, that Fuller was in charge of selling them, and that he failed at this task. In his 1989 biography, Lloyd Steven Sieden writes that Fuller was in charge of ‘every aspect’ of the company’s operation, ‘including sales, marketing and management, as well as engineering’, and was later to ‘admit that he was a terrible businessperson’. As Sieden tells it, Fuller fell short as a salesman, not as an engineer, and for the purposes of my summary, this seemed salient as a factor that may have contributed to the suicidal despair he experienced soon after.

Taylor also claims I was wrong to write that Fuller ‘saw no greater value in hand-made domes than in mass-produced ones’. But in Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology (1980), Witold Rybczynski writes that

In an interview appearing in Domebook 2 Fuller was asked if he thought that there was any conflict between making geodesic domes by hand and mass producing them with high technology. Fuller answered that he himself had experienced the excitement of personal experimentation, ‘but after you’ve done it for a while and so you really feel it and understand it, you’ll feel that … there are more important things to do.’

Caleb Crain
Brooklyn