Richard

In 1963 a classmate of mine told me that an architect was going to speak at Kent State University and that a group was going to the presentation.

I was rather naive about famous architects or any architects for that matter, never heard of R. Buckminster Fuller (Bucky) and only with a bit of encouragement decided to tag along with my friends.

The lecture did not start well. When was this guy going to talk about architecture. He talked about physics, mathematics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and just went on and on and on. Just about 3 hours on.

Somewhere in the middle of the presentation it began to dawn on me that this fella was no light weight. He wove everything together. All of these different divisions of information that we call professions suddenly had no boundaries between them. I was not exactly sure how that happened so I started to read his books.

In one book, and I have not been able to track down the passage (maybe someone out there on the interweb can help) he describes government thinking following the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The USA had to catch up and education was the key.

The question became 'what was education going to look like to develop successful innovative scientists'. So there was a study done, of course. Those scientists who were considered innovative, successful and respected by their peers were identified. Each was asked about the most important factor that prompted them and contributed to their outstanding work.

The answer came back that it was the influence of one person, a mentor, at some point in their life, that created the spark, the interest, devotion and ultimately hard work to accomplish what they had done.