I don't believe anything in that article. Buckminster Fuller was a bit of a con artist. He lied profusely about his projects, painting them in a flattering light. He also put a lot of effort into setting the record to match his own made-up version of events.
Lines like this..
"The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced."
reek of his fiction. I would guess that in reality there were serious practical reasons why the bathrooms were never produced.
Fuller wasn’t a con artist. He certainly had a few ambitious projects that went poorly, but he believed in them and made every effort to deliver on them. He was skilled at building hype and publicity around his projects, and directing attention away from negative aspects, but that is the type of skilled PR necessary to succeed in projects like that, and isn’t lying.
Lying is lying. Doing it for the purposes of business might be considered acceptable in many modern societies, that doesnt make it not lying though.
A man died in Buckminster's stupid car and he lied about it, blaming and denigrating the victim rather than the true killer: his own negligence.
Constant self serving lying, fabricating claims, and so on, seem to be standard practice in business, stuff like "fake it till you make it". That doesn't mean it's not ethically reprehensible however.
None of this is accurate, from everything I've read about these events, I haven't found any evidence of him lying or fabricating claims, unless you consider lying by omission, whereby he didn't volunteer negative things during interviews. Some may consider that unethical, but I strongly disagree with that perspective. Nobody has a responsibility to volunteer negative information about themselves when it impedes their own life goals. There is a longstanding legal and philosophical precedent for this- consider for example the 5th amendment. People volunteering negative info about themselves are generally socially dysfunctional and suffering from low self esteem, not being ethical or honest. I see this a lot with people that are serially unsuccessful in both business and dating- they will spew out every mistake or negative about themselves to people they just met, and turn them away before they get a chance to connect, doing themselves a grave injustice. Fuller was doing important work, and he had an ethical responsibility to portray it in a positive light, such that humanity could realize it's benefits.
Moreover, your posts seems to be consistent with a recent popular trend to smear the image of inventors of the past with misinformation. I believe this is symptomatic of a terrible cultural trend whereby all accomplishment and success is seen as a type of theft, rather than understanding that it's often contributing real value to humanity. It is my belief that this is driven by a desire to rationalize nihilism and mediocrity.
Lines like this.. "The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced." reek of his fiction. I would guess that in reality there were serious practical reasons why the bathrooms were never produced.