My unsung hero of science: Buckminster Fuller, the architect who wanted to redesign the world (and inspired a nanosized one)

On November 14 1985, a letter announcing the discovery of a superstable species of carbon appeared in the science journal Nature. Even the letter’s title, C₆₀: Buckminsterfullerene, caused a stir among the journal’s scholarly readers.

Molecules are usually named with sterile precision. This one was named after the American architect and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller (Bucky to his friends), whose geodesic domes had become icons of modern design in the 1950s and 60s.

Fuller’s...