On July 12, 1933, the first Dymaxion car was completed. The car, like the name, was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller. The completion marked the inventor’s 38th birthday. The car was nineteen feet in length, weighed about 2,700 pounds, and cost $8,000.  Fuller applied for a patent on October 18, 1933, and it issued as U.S. Patent No. 2,191,057 on December 7, 1937

The Dymaxion was unveiled on July 21 at the Locomobile plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to three thousand observers. Fuller himself was filmed behind the wheel of the car, which he accelerated to seventy miles per hour at Seaside Park. The mayor of Bridgeport spoke at the event, after which Fuller drove him back to city hall.

Alford F. Williams Jr., the head of the aviation products division of Gulf Refining Company, bought the prototype as a promotional vehicle for air shows. A short while later, the car was involved in a serious accident while being driven around Chicago by a Gulf employee. The prototype was severely damaged, and the driver died. Gulf repaired the vehicle, and used it at promotional events as intended. It was later sold it to an engineer who had tested it at the National Bureau of Standards. After changing hands again, it was used to advertise soft drinks, but was destroyed in 1943 when it caught fire after being refueled.

Today, only the second of three prototypes Fuller built survives, at the National Automobile Museum, in Reno, Nevada. This prototype, a small number of replicas, and photographs and newsreels are all that remain of Fuller’s vision for cars of the future.