Smalley, Richard Errett (1943-2005), an American physical chemist, was one of the team who founded a new branch of chemistry when they discovered fullerenes, which are forms of carbon in which large numbers of atoms link together in the form of closed cages. Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Robert F. Curl, Jr., of the United States and Sir Harold W. Kroto of the United Kingdom.
Smalley was born on June 6, 1943, in Akron, Ohio. In settling on chemistry as his career, he was influenced by his school chemistry teacher, by his older sister, and by the example of his aunt, Sara Jane Rhoads, the first woman to become a full professor of chemistry in the United States.
Smalley took his first degree in chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1965, and then began several years with the Shell Chemical Company, involved with the manufacture of plastics. He began postgraduate study at Princeton University in New Jersey, studying crystals of organic (carbon-containing) compounds at low temperatures.
Smalley moved to the University of Chicago in 1973. The group he joined shone laser light into gases and found complex patterns of wavelengths in the emerging light. These patterns were largely due to the rotation of the molecules, but the researchers were interested only in the part due to vibrations of the molecules. To reduce the rotation of the gas molecules, Smalley proposed adapting a technique for cooling gases close to absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature (–273.15 °C). At such low temperatures, rotation of molecules in the jet of particles would cease. Smalley and his collaborators successfully developed his idea into a new technique of chemical study.
Smalley began teaching and conducting research at Rice University in Houston in 1976. There he and his co-workers found ways of vaporizing any material by means of intense pulses of laser light. The vapor atoms would form clusters of a size he could control, and the clusters could be cooled and studied. The same field was being explored by Exxon Corporation (now part of Exxon Mobil Corporation), a large petroleum company, to which Smalley had provided a copy of his equipment, under contract.
In 1984, Harold Kroto, visiting Rice from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, requested that the technique be tried on carbon. He wanted to simulate the formation of chains of carbon atoms in interstellar space, puffed out from the atmospheres of stars. Smalley and his collaborator Robert Curl carried out the experiment on Sept. 1, 1985. When they did, they found the molecules Kroto was looking for, but also something much more interesting. The materials produced contained large numbers of 60-atom groups. They soon established that these groups were not mere clusters of atoms, but something previously unsuspected: molecules of carbon consisting of atoms tightly bound into a spherical cage. Smalley and his colleagues wrote a paper for the scientific journal Nature describing this new form of carbon. Later it turned out that the Exxon researchers had seen signs of the molecules earlier than the Rice group, but had failed to interpret them correctly.
Smalley and his co-workers dubbed the 60-atom molecule buckminsterfullerene in honor of R. Buckminster Fuller, an American engineer. The giant molecules resemble geodesic domes, hollow structures Fuller designed for buildings (see Fuller, Buckminster ). Other large carbon-cage molecules were discovered, and are known collectively as fullerenes. Smalley’s group increasingly concentrated on fullerene tubes, believing that important new technologies would be built on the fullerenes’ unique properties. In 1997, he became the director of Rice University’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. Smalley died on Oct. 28, 2005.
