The simple dome tent-or is it?

Its a simple dome tent right?  You see them in every camping equipment catalog.  They have become the norm and a standard in the backpacking industry, but where did they come from? 

Everyone is familiar with a wall tent.  They are the tents we all made as kids from a blanket and a couple of chairs.  Add a couple of poles some rope and tent stakes and now you have the 'A' framed structures famous in every army movie ever made.  But who invented the dome tent and what is it?  In the late 1940's a visionary man embarking on a lifelong experiment in improving the housing problems of humanity proved the viability of a structure that he described as the tensegrity dome.  The man was R. Buckminster Fuller.  The tensegrity dome is a form where the major parts of the structure, the covering and the members, are not in direct contact with one another.  From that basis he derived a dome comprised of a network of triangles which when placed in a matrix roughly make a semi-sphere.  The more triangles placed together, the more round the structure.   He called it a geodesic dome. 

Using both tensegrity and geodesic principles a small company in Menlo Park California, Shelter Systems, headed by Bob Gillis applied Fuller's proven theories and designed his first dome tent in 1976.  The 'Oval Intention' was a revolution for hiking, backpacking and camping enthusiasts.  A dome tent has many advantages over a wall tent.  Its stronger, lighter, more aerodynamic, requires less parts to assemble, is more energy efficient and has more usable space than its walled counterpart.  Bob Gillis holds major patents that provide for dome tent manufacture and has licensed these to the industries most prestigious brands.  Companies such as North Face, Sierra Designs, Mountain Hardware and Marmot are reliant on Bob Gillis' patents.  The well known flexible poles that make assembling a dome tent such an easy task are covered by a Gillis patent. 

So the next time you simply 'pop-up' your dome overlooking that beautiful valley, think about what you might have to do if it weren't for R. Buckminster Fuller's vision and Bob Gillis' application of his vision.