"Guinea Pig B" and the Chronofile

During the course of my research, I had the good fortune of being in close proximity to the Buckminster Fuller Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and to have full access to its archives. I was stunned when I first realised the scope of the archives (considered to be one of the largest archives of a single individual in the United States)-both by its sheer size and by the enormous discipline Fuller had to exercise throughout his lifetime in order to consistently document every aspect of his life. It also struck me that very few have the privilege to access this archive because of its location and the fragility of the materials. The output during Fuller's lifetime as documented in the Chronofile is astounding: 300,000 geodesic domes built around the world, five million Dymaxion World Maps, twenty six published books and twenty eight patents. The institute is eager to have Fuller's work accessible to the larger public and has been digitising the archive and uploading it to the web site. But the amount of data is truly enormous, takes on many different forms, and because of the nature of his work, is very difficult to classify.

Buckminster Fuller began a chronological record of his life in 1907, and in 1917 at the age of twenty-two, he named it Chronofile. Fuller conceived of Chronofile during his participation in World War I, when he served in the Navy as a secret aide to the admiral in command of cruiser transports that carried troops across the Atlantic. After the war, he was charged with amassing a record of the secret records of all movements of the ships and the people on them. He was impressed by the fact that the Navy kept records chronologically rather than by separate categories such as names, dates, or topics. Inspired by the Navy's cataloguing system, Fuller decided to make himself the "special case guinea pig study" in a lifelong research project of an individual born at the end of the nineteenth century (1895), the year "the automobiles were introduced, the wireless telegraph and automatic screw machine were invented, and X-rays discovered" (Fuller, "Critical Path," 128). Along with his own documentation, Fuller was keenly interested in keeping a record of all technological and scientific inventions of the time. He thought it would be interesting not just to cull the attractive sides of his life, but also to attempt to keep everything: "I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record." (Fuller, "Synergetics Dictionary," 324). He dubbed himself "Guinea Pig B" (B for Bucky).

In 1927, Fuller became even more ambitious. He decided to commit his entire professional output to dealing with planet Earth in its entirety, its resources and cumulative know-how, rather than harnessing his output for personal advantage; he undertook, in his own words, "to comprehensively protect, support, and advantage all humanity instead of committing my efforts to exclusive advantages of my dependants, myself, my country, my team"(Fuller, "Critical Path," 25).

Fuller knew few people, and perhaps none, would understand his professional commitment to be a practical one, but since he firmly believed that it was, he worked to leave proof behind affirming this belief, and he proceeded to do so in a scientific fashion. At the end of his life, in addition to the Chronofile, which is considered to be the heart of his archives, he left behind the Dymaxion Index, blueprints, photos, patents, manuscripts and a large number of random elements. He saved all his correspondence, sketches, doodles made during his meetings, backs of envelopes and newspaper-edged notes-everything possible that was a record of his thoughts. He saved all films, videos, wire and tape recordings, posters announcing his lectures, awards, mementoes, relevant books, everything he published at various stages, all indexes, drafting tools, typewriters, computers furniture, file cabinets, paintings, photos, diplomas, and cartoons. He also kept an inventory of what he termed World Resources, Human Trends and Needs, and all the World Game records. The World Game was one of the first computer game concepts whose goal was to educate global thinking. Collections of data named World Resources and Human Trends and Needs was also intended to be used for this purpose. He assures his readers that the files includes many unflattering items such as notices from the sheriff and letters from those who considered him a crank, crook, and charlatan (McLuhan and Fiore 75).

Collecting and archiving for Fuller did not stop with himself, but extended to data collection of world resources as well-a project which became even more ambitious with the introduction of computer technologies:
  I proposed that, on this stretched out reliably accurate, world map of our Spaceship Earth, a great world logistics game be played by introducing into the computers all the known inventory and whereabouts of the various metaphysical and physical resources of the Earth. This inventory, which has taken forty years to develop to high perfection, is now housed at my Southern Illinois University headquarters. (Fuller, "Utopia or Oblivion," 112)  
Fuller is a great example of a person who became progressively concerned with documenting not only his own life, but also the world around him in the form of a database. With the advent of the computer he had plans to document all of Earth's data, and although he did not succeed during his lifetime, Fuller would be pleased to see that there is a massive collective effort to document every aspect of our lives today, from our molecular and cellular structure to all of our acquired knowledge throughout history.