The Genius of Buckminster Fuller

I never learned this in school. Did you? I wonder if perhaps we had learned this in school, our society would not be so short on attention span! We might be more willing to give our ideas time to come to life, instead of calling ourselves failures because society did not accept our genius right away.

Buckminster Fuller wrote: "The gestation period for an idea depends on the ultimate use of the idea / invention."

Very frequently I hear or read of my artifacts adjudged by critics as being 'failures'. because I did not get them into mass-production and 'make money with them'. Such money-making-as-criteria-of-success critics do not realize that money-making was never my goal. I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive. I saw that nature has various categories of unique gestation lags between conception of something and its birth. In humans, conception to birth is nine months. In electronics, it is two years between inventive conception and industrialized production. In aeronautics, it is five years between invention and operating use. In automobiles, it is ten years between conception and mass-production. In railroading, the gestation is fifteen years In big-city skyscraper construction, the gestational lag is twenty-five years. For instance, it was twenty-five years between the accidental falling of a steal bar into fresh cement and the practical use of steel-reinforced concrete in major buildings. Dependent on the size and situation, the period of gestation in the single-family residences varies between fifty and seventy-five years.

Because of these lags, the earlier I could introduce the conception model, the earlier its birth could take place. I assumed that the birth into everyday life of the livingry artifacts whose working conceptual prototypes I was producing would be governed by those respective-category gestation lags. I assumed my livingry inventions' progressive adoptions by society would occur only in emergencies. I called this emergence through emergency. For all of humanity to begin to break away from its conditioned reflexes regarding living facilities (home customs and styles), allowing them to be advantaged by my livingry artifacts, would take at minimum a half century to get underway. Since this was clearly a half-to-three-quarters-of-a-century undertaking, I saw at the outset that I best not attempt it if I was not content to go along with nature's laws.