Kroto, Sir Harold (1939-2016), a British chemist, shared in the discovery of fullerenes, a new form of the element carbon in which large numbers of carbon atoms bind together into spheres or tubes. He was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for chemistry, together with American chemists Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Richard E. Smalley (see Curl, Robert Floyd, Jr. ; Smalley, Richard Errett ). The three scientists made their discovery in 1985.
Harold Walter Kroto was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and brought up in Bolton, Lancashire, England. He gained his Ph.D. degree from Sheffield University in 1964. Kroto then worked with the Canadian National Research Council in Ottawa. He used spectroscopy (the study of the pattern of wavelengths in the radiation given out or absorbed by a substance) to study reactions triggered by light. Kroto became a lecturer at Sussex University in the United Kingdom in 1967. He studied the spectroscopy of carbon compounds in stars and interstellar space, using microwaves (short radio waves). He found that chains of carbon atoms occurred in these materials, and he wanted to see whether they could be formed in the laboratory.
In 1984, Kroto traveled to Rice University in Houston, in the United States, where Smalley and Curl had developed techniques for producing clusters of atoms. They vaporized materials with laser beams, and then cooled them to suppress the thermal rotation and vibration of their molecules. Clusters of atoms then formed in this process. Smalley and Curl had tried their technique on metals and on other materials. Kroto proposed that they try it on carbon, to see whether chains of carbon atoms would be formed. In September 1985, they did so, and found what Kroto was looking for. But they also found what appeared to be clusters of 60 carbon atoms. The three scientists decided that these were actually a new type of carbon molecule. The atoms were arranged in a pattern reminiscent of the panels of a soccer ball, forming 12 hexagons (six-sided shapes) and 12 pentagons (five-sided shapes). The same pattern appears in the panels of geodesic domes, structures designed by the American engineer R. Buckminster Fuller called geodesic domes (see Fuller, Buckminster ). So the scientists named this new form of carbon buckminsterfullerene.
The team produced only tiny amounts of buckminsterfullerene. Kroto and Smalley spent five years conducting chemical tests, trying to confirm experimentally the structure they had proposed in theory. In 1990, physicists Donald R. Huffman of the United States and Wolfgang Kratschmer of Germany discovered a way of producing large quantities of buckminsterfullerene. Other closed-cage forms of carbon have been discovered, and there is now an enormous research effort under way into these fullerenes, as they are called. Kroto continued to take part in this effort. He also founded the Vega Science Trust to create high-quality science programs for television. He died on Apr. 30, 2016.
