"Fuller drew upon a variety of sources to help him solidify his version of an industrially reproduced, prefabricated dwelling."
-- Becoming Bucky Fuller by Loretta Lorance, MIT Press 2009, p. 71
When Fuller resigned as president of the Stockade Building System, the company he formed with his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, he remained president of Stockade Midwest until November, and worked with lawyers on Stockade issues throughout early 1928. The conclusion seems to come in early 1929, since A. King writes to Fuller on 21 Jan 1929, "We expect to get the final papers of dissolution of The Stockade Building System, Inc. very shortly. Will you kindly forward to this office your certificates of stock in the Stockade Corporation." In February Fuller submitted 40 shares of Stockade Building System and requested 320 shares of The Stockade Corporation in return.
Fuller lost his cherished position as president along with some of the trust of his father-in-law, and began spiraling into a crisis of personal identity. The Stockade resignation was only one event of many that would follow:
* He would reunite and lived again with his wife, after living apart for six months;
* He would have a newborn daughter, four years after losing his previous child to illness;
* He would be beaten and robbed
Yet this was the Roaring Twenties. In Chicago, where Fuller lived, a frenzied optimism ruled. Jazz music, prohibition and Flappers' styles set a tone of freedom and individualistic empowerment, proving that old conventions could be discarded. Babe Ruth hit record home runs, airplanes set heroic distance records weekly, movies began talking, and wireless radio and wireless electric power seemed magical. A local 16-year-old girl from Joliet, Illinois was crowned Miss America, a title she would hold for the longest period of any American girl (Joliet was where Fuller founded a Stockade brick factory and he visited there frequently.
On the tragic side the largest flood in U.S.A. history engulfed the Mississippi basin and anarchists and Al Capone's gang set bombs and murdered dozens. And Fuller's idol Henry Ford, hero to him and most Americans, was being derided and \undergoing his own crisis. His Model T had lost market share, ridiculed as passe, while its inventor was paraded in the daily papers as an ignoramus, untrained in history, and on trial for publishing libels in his newspapers.
To this drumbeat of crisis, death and rebirth Mr. Fuller underwent his own personal identity crisis and transition. In long walks shaded by the towering Elm trees of Lincoln Park, long the waters of Lake Michigan, the sun shone as Fuller faced his failures. He was depressed, did not see a way out of it, and considered suicide, as countless other businessmen would do two years later after the crash of 1929. The Park itself was awash in legends of suicide, and ghosts from Suicide Bridge were said to wander there at night.
But suicide was not to be. Instead, visions of selfless commitment to Truth flooded his thoughts. The change probably took place over a period of months, between November 1927 to February 1928. By its end Mr. Fuller had radically changed his working methods, job focus, and way of speaking. He codified his own theory of spheres, tension and compression. He sought investors for a new lightweight shelter built on these new principles, and had set firmly out on the road that would lead to the discovery of tensegrity two decades years later.
At the heart of the transformation was his newborn daughter. He feared her dying a lingering diseased death as her sister had four years before. He measured her footprints, height changes and measured his own as well, in an act of intense identification with the unfolding of naive life. He began to aggressively research and aggregate documents, including reading diaries of his ancestors. He attempted to conceal his financial difficulties from his wife, but finally broke the news before Christmas 1927 that they could no longer live in luxurious surroundings, causing yet another crisis in his marriage.
At some point, probably February 1928, he read Margaret Fuller's account of her personal identity crisis. Shocked by the similarity of Ms. Fuller's thoughts about Truth and selflessness to his personal transformation, he adopted her outlook and story to such a degree that it became his own. Her insights mixed with other recent, unconventional ways of looking at reality, such as Claude Bragdon’s (1866-1946) multi-dimensional geometry, and Ouspensky's (1878-1947) theosophical writings.
Anything seemed possible, and Fuller soon started working on ambitious plans for a new kind of industrially produced shelter.
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