What brought fame to R. Buckminster Fuller?

R. Buckminster Fuller was the creator of the geodesic dome. These domes were often more than a hemisphere, sometimes a full sphere. The traditional way of making these was with ribs going vertically up to the top center and stringers in horizontal circles, rather like the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude on the earth's surface. Fuller's domes were made from a series of polygons joined along their edges, resulting in a lighter construction.

He has since become even more famous for something he didn't do. Chemists who were playing with carbon - carbon combinations theorised that carbon might be made to form molecules containing many carbon atoms and nothing else. One such was already well known, diamond. What was interesting about the new compounds was that some of the possibilities would be hollow.

The first of these proposals was for a hollow sphere; the structural diagram looked very like two geodesic domes stuck together to make a structure with holes all over its surface and a large void inside. The resemblance to one of the geodesic buildings designed by buckminster fuller was so striking that when the compound was eventually synthesised, it was named Buckminster Fullerene. They are now colloquially known as bucky-balls.

The strange outcome of all this is that Fuller has repeatedly been credited in print as the discoverer of Buckminster Fullerene. Even when it is pointed out that he was in fact an architect, not a chemist, writers are undeterred.