Grave of a Famous person: R. Buckminster Fuller - Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Watertown, MA

R. Buckminster Fuller

Watertown, MA

N 42° 22.186 W 071° 08.753

Short Description: 

The grave of author, poet, designer, and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller is located between Pyrola and Bellwort Paths in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Long Description:

The grave of R. Buckminster Fuller and his wife is marked by a pair of granite markers. The ground level marker is a granite rectangle containing the image of the geodesic figure known as a buckyball or the organic chemical known as buckminsterfullerene and is inscribed:

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

"CALL ME TRIMTAB"

JULY 12, 1895 - JULY 1, 1983

MARRIED JULY 19, 1917

ANNE HEWLETT FULLER

JANUARY 9, 1896 - JULY 3, 1983

A second marker, a raised granite rectangle is inscribed:

"CALL ME

TRIMTAB"

BUCKY

A trim tab is a small device that helps stabilize an enormous ship or aircraft. He used the trim tab as a metaphor for his philosophy that one small person can make an enormous difference in society.

Richard Buckminster Fuller, more commonly known as Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, MA. He attended Milton Academy and then Harvard College before serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I, as a radio operator. While teaching at Black Mountain College in NC he developed a form that would make him famous: the geodesic dome.

Buckmimster Fuller was also a prolific poet and writer. He published over 30 works of poetry, science, and fiction as well as an autobiography in which he coined or popularized terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. Wikipedia list the following Bibliography:

4d Timelock (1928)

Nine Chains to the Moon (1938)

Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization (1962)

Ideas and Integrities, a Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963)

No More Secondhand God and Other Writings (1963)

Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return (1963)

What I Have Learned: A Collection of 20 Autobiographical Essays, Chapter "How Little I Know", (1968)

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968)

Utopia or Oblivion (1969)

Approaching the Benign Environment (1970)

I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

Intuition (1970)

Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth (1972)

The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (1960, 1973) Earth, Inc (1973)

Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale (1975)

And It Came to Pass — Not to Stay (1976)

R. Buckminster Fuller on Education (1979)

Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1979)

Buckminster Fuller – Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario (1980)

Buckminster Fuller Sketchbook (1981)

Critical Path (1981)

Grunch of Giants (1983)

Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (1983)

Humans in Universe (1983)

Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity (1992)