Fullerenes

Brief History & Applications

What are Fullerenes?

Allotropes of carbon formed by 60 or more

of said atoms in a spherical configuration.

Also referred to as Buckminsterfullerene

(C60) or Bucky balls (C60+)
The Discovery of Fullerenes (1985-1990)
Buckminster Fuller’s
Biosphere – U.S.
Pavilion at the 1967
World Exposition in
Montreal.

The Fullerene Discovery Team in front

of the Space Science Building at Rice
University. Shown from left to right:
Sean O’Brien, Richard Smalley,
Robert Curl, Harry Kroto and James
Heath.
 The Story
• Monday, September 9 was climactic. Spheroids dominated the discussion. At some point during
the previous week Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes had been raised. Kroto and Smalley
thought hexagons made up the surface of geodesic domes. Then Kroto remembered a stardome he
once made for his children.
• “It was midnight,” Smalley writes, “but instead of going to bed I went to the kitchen for a beer.”
While sipping his beer, Smalley remembered the stardome, Kroto mentioned he made using
pentagons as well as hexagons. “I went back to my desk,” Smalley says, “cut a single pentagon
from the legal paper and began sticking pentagons around it. The hexagons automatically assumed
the shape of a bowl.” He had discovered that by interspersing pentagons among the usual carbon
hexagons (many carbon compounds have both five- and six-membered rings) the result would be a
geodesic dome with sixty vertices. Smalley had stumbled through trial-and-error on a
mathematical truth Fuller employed in his domes: a sheet of hexagons can be made to curl by
using pentagons. Sixty, it turned out, was the only number of atoms that could form a nearly
perfect sphere.
Applications