A surprise find, buckyballs led to Nobel •
The scientific discovery that led to buckypaper virtually came from outer space.
In 1985, British scientist Harry Kroto joined researchers at Rice University for an experiment to create the same conditions that exist in a star.
“There was an extra character that turned up totally unexpected,” recalled Kroto, now at Florida State.
The surprise guest was a molecule with 60 carbon atoms shaped like a soccer ball. To Kroto, it looked like the geodesic domes promoted by Buckminster Fuller, an architect, inventor and futurist. That inspired Kroto to name the molecule buckminsterfullerene, or “buckyballs” for short.
For their discovery of the buckyball, Kroto and his Rice colleagues, Robert Curl Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996.
Separately, Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima developed a tube-shaped variation while doing research at Arizona State University.
Researchers at Smalley’s laboratory then inadvertently found that the tubes would stick together when disbursed in a liquid suspension and filtered through a fine mesh, producing a thin film: buckypaper.
