Richard E. Smalley (1943–2005)

In 1996 Richard E. Smalley shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl, Jr., and Sir Harold Kroto for their discovery of fullerenes, a form of carbon in which atoms are arranged as closed shells. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, Smalley had pioneered supersonic beam laser spectroscopy. At Rice University, he was founding director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory.

In 1985 Smalley and his collaborators discovered a new crystalline form of carbon in which single bonds and double bonds alternate—a configuration that was highly symmetrical and aromatic. The group had refined an experiment directing a laser at a carbon surface to vaporize it, then condensed the carbon atoms in an atmosphere of inert helium gas. The most abundant of the resulting clusters contained 60 carbon atoms. Reassembled in three dimensions, the C60 molecules resembled a soccer ball, which led the researchers to name them buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs, after the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller, who designed a similarly shaped geodesic dome.

Further experiments proved that buckyballs and all carbon clusters with an even number of carbon atoms—thereafter called fullerenes—form closed structures. In the early 1990s researchers discovered fullerene-related carbon nanotubes. These long, thin tubes with round, domelike ends have tremendous potential to replace synthetic materials such as carbon fiber.

Smalley won numerous awards in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute, the Madison Marshall Award, the Harrison Howe Award, the William H. Nichols Medal from the American Chemical Society, and the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics from the American Physics Society.