Buckminster Fuller - Quirks

Quirks

Fuller was a frequent flier, often crossing time zones. He famously wore three watches; one for the current zone, one for the zone he had departed, and one for the zone he was going to. In this respect he follows the jazz drummer Buddy Rich, who in the Pete Atkin / Clive James song “The Wristwatch for a Drummer”, also “wears three, one on the right wrist, one on the left, and the third one around his knee”. The wristwatch in question is the imagined “Omega Incabloc Oyster Accutron 72” for which “Buckminster Fuller designed the case” Fuller also noted that a single sheet of newsprint, inserted over a shirt and under a suit jacket, provided completely effective heat insulation during long flights.

He experimented with polyphasic sleep, which he called Dymaxion sleep. In 1943, he told Time Magazine that he had slept only two hours a day for two years. He quit the schedule because it conflicted with his business associates' sleep habits, but stated that Dymaxion sleep could help the United States win World War II.

Fuller documented his life copiously from 1915 to 1983, approximately 270 feet (82 m) of papers in a collection called the Dymaxion Chronofile. He also kept copies of all incoming and outgoing correspondence. The enormous Fuller Collection is currently housed at Stanford University.

If somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay 90s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century—as far into the twentieth century as you might live. I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record.

In his youth, Fuller experimented with several ways of presenting himself: R. B. Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, but as an adult finally settled on R. Buckminster Fuller, and signed his letters as such. However, he preferred to be addressed as simply "Bucky".