On July 1 in 1983, visionary-engineer-architect R. Buckminster Fuller dies at 87 in Los Angeles. After two expulsions from Harvard and a stint in the Navy, Fuller went into business with his father-in-law manufacturing unique modular homes. But after the company failed and his four-year-old daughter died, Fuller found himself one night in Chicago on the verge of suicide. In a flash of inspiration (he called it "a blind date with principle"), he committed his life to the nonprofit designing of things that maximized the social use of limited natural resources. He is especially remembered for designing the "Dymaxion" (called "the first streamlined car," it was omnidirectional, all-terrain, and bumpered all around) and designing the geodesic dome (still the only large building that can be theoretically set on the ground as a single structure and that has no limiting dimensions).
—from The Illustrated Almanac of Science, Technology, and Invention