Nanotechnology

In 1987, my alma mater hosted a chemist from the University of Sussex named Sir Harold Kroto.  I was fortunate enough to sit in on his lecture which detailed a collaboration between Dr. Kroto and two chemists from Rice University, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. During the lecture, Dr. Kroto showed a box with a soccer ball inside of it.  He closed the lid and waved his hand; when he opened the box the soccer ball had vanished and been replaced by a plastic model of a molecule with 60 points joining pentagons and hexagons, similar in shape to a soccer ball.  The plastic model was of C60, a new form of carbon discovered by Kroto, Smalley, and Curl, for which they would eventually share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

This new molecule also resembled the geodesic dome, a structure popularized by an American architect from Chicago name Richard Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was not the original inventor of the geodesic dome, but he developed and popularized the idea in the 1940s, eventually receiving a U.S. patent for it.  Fuller was interested in the geodesicdome because it was extremely strong for its weight and because a sphere has the largest volume with the least surface area.  He envisioned using the geodesic dome in all types of structures: houses, cars, museums, etc.  C60 was given the common name buckminsterfullerene (buckyball for short) in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s work. (Read more…)