On this day in 1959 Richard Buckminster Fuller was granted the patent for SELF-STRUTTED GEODESIC PLYDOME. U.S. Patent No. 2,905,113.
This invention arises in the discovery that when perfectly flat rectangular sheets are shingled together in a three-way grid pattern and are fastened together where they overlap in the areas of the geodesic lines of the pattern, a new phenomenon occurs: there are induced t in each flat rectangular sheet, elements of live cylindrical struts defining two triangles of the grid edge to edge in diamond pattern. The effect is to produce a three-way , geodesic pattern of cylindrical struts by inductive action so that, when the sheets are fastened together in the particular manner described, the struts are created in situ. Thus the fiat rectangular sheets are triangulated into an inherently strutted spherical form to produce what we may for simplicity term a self-strutted geodesic plydome. The flat sheets become inherent geodesic; they become both roof and beam, both wall and column, and in each case the braces as well. They become the weatherbreak and its supporting frame or truss all in one. The inherent three way grid of cylindrical struts causes the structure as a whole to act almost as a membrane in absorbing and distributing loads, and results in a more uniform stressing of all of the sheets. The entire structure is skin stressed, taut and alive. Dead weight is virtually non-existent. Technically, we say that the structure possesses high tensile integrity in a discontinuous compression system.
