On this day, Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts. He was the great nephew of Cambridge-born transcendentalist writer and civil rights advocate Margaret Fuller.

He attended Harvard, but was expelled for lack on interest. He worked in a number of trade and factory jobs, experimenting and inventing technical mechanisms. By age 22, he was married, penniless, and on the verge of suicide. Then he had a vision, to give his abilities to humanity; he spent the remainder of his life working to solving the world's problems.

He created economic plans for developing countries, invented the geodesic dome and thousands of low cost homes based on it. He was one of the first to propose computerizing the US stock market. Fuller held 25 patents, received 47 honorary doctorates and the highest awards in the field of architecture. He circled the globe 57 times on speaking tours. In 1962 he accepted a professorship of poetry at the same Harvard which had expelled him as a young man.