The Man Who Recorded Everything

Buckminster Fuller was expelled from Harvard twice — once for blowing his tuition money entertaining an entire vaudeville troupe. He worked as a meat packer. He went bankrupt. In 1927, at thirty-two, standing at the edge of Lake Michigan after his daughter's death, he seriously considered walking in and not coming back.

He did not walk in. Instead, he made a decision that was far stranger.

He decided to turn his life into an experiment. Specifically: to find out what one broke, unknown, discredited person could accomplish if he committed every waking moment to benefiting humanity. He would be his own test subject. And like any good experiment, it would need documentation.

Fuller began recording his life in fifteen-minute intervals. Every letter he received, he kept. Every letter he sent, he carbon-copied. Every bill, every sketch, every scrap of thought — filed. He did this not for a week, or a year, or a decade. He did it from 1920 until his death in 1983.

Along the way, he picked up twenty-eight patents, invented the geodesic dome, coined the phrase "Spaceship Earth," and for two years in the 1930s slept only in thirty-minute naps every six hours, apparently just to see if he could.

The archive sits at Stanford University. It measures 270 linear feet. They call it the most documented human life in history.

It began the night he chose to stay.