If Harry Kroto had not become a Nobel prize-winning chemist, he would almost certainly have enjoyed an equally distinguished career as a graphic artist or designer. Early in his career as a research scientist, he won a Sunday Times competition for a bookjacket and once described scientific graphic design as his “dream” job.
Later in life, he was given the opportunity to produce a children’s book in Japanese called “Benjy and Bruno in Nanoland” and, with the help of his wife, Margaret, and their two sons, David and Stephen, set about it with gusto. David, his younger son, created the characters of the little boy Benjy and his dog Bruno. While Margaret and Stephen refined the storyline, Kroto enthusiastically “pulled the graphics together” for publishing.
“He credits Meccano with his development of skills in scientific research
“The little boy and his dog become smaller by a factor of ten every time they encounter an object or animal that has a geodesic polyhedral structure in which pentagonal and hexagonal domains are involved, such as in the case of a soccer ball, the eyes of fly, viruses etc,” Kroto later recalled. “They finally become so small that they end up swimming along the veins of one of Benji’s friends. It is a book which attempts to give small children an idea of scale,” he wrote in his Nobel biography.
The football — and other geodesic structures of the sort mentioned in this little book — have, of course, been prominent in Kroto’s career. He was the co-discoverer of the geodesic molecule made up of 60 atoms of carbon, the third form of carbon after graphite and diamond, which he had named Buckminsterfullerenes after Richard Buckminster Fuller, the legendary American architect, futurist and designer of habitable geodesic domes.
He first proposed the existence of these so-called “bucky balls” in 1985 and was a hair’s breadth away from producing them in viable quantities in the lab when, in 1990, he was asked by the journal Nature to referee a scientific paper by a competing group of researchers who had managed to do just that in the form of crystalline C60 molecules. “It was totally convincing. I knew instinctively that it was correct,” Kroto remembered. “I wondered whether to commit suicide or go for lunch. What the hell — as any student knows — there is not a lot of difference between lunch in a university canteen and suicide. So I went for lunch.”
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Even so, Kroto, then at the University of Sussex, shared the 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry with his collaborators Robert F Curl and Richard E Smalley of Rice University in Houston, Texas, for the “discovery of carbon atoms bound in the form of a ball”. The number of carbon atoms in the enclosed shells or fullerenes can vary, which for this reason means that they can form numerous carbon structures of wide potential use in science and industry.
Fullerenes are formed when vaporised carbon condenses in an atmosphere of inert gas. The gaseous carbon can be captured by an intense pulse of laser light at a carbon surface, forming clusters of between a few and a few hundred atoms. The most famous cluster is C60, a bucky ball composed of 60 interlocking carbon atoms arranged like a geodesic dome, just like the European football made of pentagonal and hexagonal patches stitched together to form a hollow sphere. It was Kroto who suggested naming this new form of carbon molecule after Buckminster Fuller, whom he had known about from his early interest in all things related to graphic design.
“A lifelong supporter of Bolton Wanderers, he was full of boyish enthusiasm
When the discovery of C60 and its structure was published it met with considerable interest but some scepticism. That carbon would be found in such a symmetrical form greatly surprised the scientific community. Over the next five years, Curl, Kroto and Smalley obtained further evidence that the structure was correct.
An entirely new branch of chemistry — called fullerene chemistry — was born. Any molecule composed entirely of carbon is called a fullerene — it can be in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid or tube. In the 1990s, Kroto’s research focused on the nanoscale structure of these new materials, particularly nanotubes, which led to a wide range of new nanomaterials. As Kroto explained: “Our knowledge of the properties of fullerenes has grown considerably since the first discovery. For example, we know that a rope of carbon nanotubes would be 100 times stronger and only 1/6th the weight of a steel cable of the same diameter.” He predicted that the full benefits of the nanotechnology revolution that the discovery of C60 helped to initiate will take a generation.
The term “nanotechnology” is now used for the study of the control of matter on an atomic and molecular scale, dealing with structures with sizes less than 100 nanometres — a nanometre is one thousandth of a millionth of a metre — and has created new materials with a range of applications in electronics and medicine.
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Harold Walter Kroto — originally named Harold Krotoschiner but always known as Harry — was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, in 1939 and brought up in Bolton, Lancashire, where his mother was evacuated during the Second World War. His parents came from Berlin but his father’s family was originally from Poland.
They fled to Britain in 1937 to escape the Nazis because his father was Jewish. Kroto attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the actor Ian McKellen. He developed an interest in chemistry, physics and mathematics. As a child, he played for hours with a Meccano set and he credits Meccano with his development of skills in scientific research. He dismissed Lego and other similar toys as “technically trivial”.
According to Kroto, Meccano teaches the one skill that he considered to be the most important that anyone could acquire: the ability to screw a nut on to a bolt tight enough to hold but not too tight to strip the thread. “On those occasions (usually during a party at your house) when the handbasin tap is closed so tightly that you cannot turn it back on, you know that the last person to use the washroom never had a Meccano set,” he said.
His chemistry teacher believed that the University of Sheffield had the best chemistry department in Britain and so, in 1958, Kroto went there as a student, receiving a first-class honours degree in 1961. He married a fellow Sheffield student, Margaret Henrietta Hunter, in 1963. “Marg” later became a careers information officer at Sussex university. The couple had two boys. Stephen, their eldest, was born while the family was in Ottawa and became a film-maker and director who has worked with Sir Ian McKellen; David is a satirical graphics illustrator.
In 1964, Kroto gained a PhD in molecular spectroscopy from Sheffield. After two years’ postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Ottawa in Canada, and a year at Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill in New Jersey, he returned to England to start his academic career as a tutorial fellow at the University of Sussex. He became a professor in 1985, a post he held until 2005. He then became a Francis Eppes professor at Florida State University, where he continued his research on carbon nanotube-based devices. Kroto published about 300 research papers in scientific journals and a number of books. In 1996, he was knighted for contributions to chemistry.
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He won the Royal Society’s prestigious Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, given annually to a scientist who has done the most to further public communication of science, engineering or technology in the United Kingdom, in 2001. It was one of many honours bestowed on him. He was still enjoying public engagements in the last year of his life despite being confined to a wheelchair because of motor neurone disease.
A lifelong supporter of Bolton Wanderers, and a keen sportsman who, in his early life, never turned down a game of tennis, Kroto claimed to have three religions: Amnesty International, atheism and humour.
With an infectious grin and boyish enthusiasm, he was left-leaning politically. He railed against cuts to science funding and returned the honorary degrees awarded by the universities of Hertfordshire and Exeter because they closed their chemistry departments.
Although raised in the Jewish faith of his father, he claimed to have discovered atheism as a child when he ate croissants one Saturday while he was supposed to be fasting with his father. “I waited for a 10-ton Monty Python weight to fall on my head. It didn’t,” he said. “I am a devout atheist — nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those who, in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator.
Professor Sir Harold Kroto, chemist, was born on October 7, 1939. He died on April 30, 2016, aged 76