Tonight on NOVA, a scientific breakthrough goes unnoticed.
Of course, my response was, I was probably just junk.
Not junk, buckyballs, a new form of carbon that could revolutionize science.
Who will capture it?
Who will exploit its potential?
Once you know it might be there, and then you go to look for this rather elusive character, you may find it.
The competition is fierce, but the rewards are great, in the race to catch a buckyball.
Funding for NOVA is provided by Merck.
Pharmaceutical research, improving health, extending life.
Merck, committed to bringing out the best in medicine, and by Raytheon.
Through a commitment to technology, Raytheon offers a broad line of general aviation aircraft.
Raytheon, expect great things.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
Long a mystery of creation, diamonds were once endowed with magical traits.
Some believed they were forged by lightning bolts, others, that they were fallen stars.
Today we know this treasured stone is merely a crystal of one of Earth's most common elements, carbon.
Diamonds rise on molten lava from deep within the Earth, where white-hot heat and enormous pressure squeeze carbon atoms into gems.
There were thought to be only two forms of pure carbon on Earth.
In diamond, carbon atoms are tightly packed in a crystalline architecture.
This density causes diamond to sparkle brilliantly and makes it the hardest matter known.
Restructure the atoms and you create an entirely different substance, graphite.
Like diamond, nothing but carbon, but its atoms are layered in sheets that can slide and be cleaved, making graphite the soft opaque stuff of pencil lead.
For centuries, science held that these were the only two forms of pure carbon.
Then, in an astounding act of modern alchemy, simple sticks of graphite were unknowingly transformed into a precious new substance.
By chance, what science could not believe has been found, a new form of pure carbon.
For 10,000 some odd years, we've only had diamond and graphite.
Now at the end of the 20th century, we've discovered a third form of carbon.
Something that probably no one had ever before seen in the history of mankind.
I was there. I can say that I was there.
Chemistry has by and large been the subject of studying carbon. How could we have missed something like this?
This is a tale of insight, skill, and scientific surprises.
The Earthly discovery began with a look into space at the death of stars and the birth of planets.
Dying stars are shooting out carbon atoms.
The carbon in our body originated in space. Indeed, we now know that it was ejected from some star a long, long time ago.
And then was reprocessed and ended up on the Earth's biosphere.
What is absolutely fascinating, and certainly something that excited me when I first discovered it,
is that every one of us is made of carbon, and therefore every one of us is made of stardust.
In the early 80s, Harry Croto was studying stardust.
One thing we are not so sure about is what is the form of that dust? What is the structure?
How does the carbon nucleate to form these little lodges that go on to grow into planets?
In space, carbon atoms can exist alone or in chains and clusters.
Harry Croto suspected such carbon structures could answer a problem that long perplexed astronomers.
One key to unlocking a molecule's structure is light.
All molecules absorb light energy as it strikes them.
This absorption produces a specific pattern of dark bands, called an absorption spectrum.
Each molecule's absorption spectrum is unique, and like a signature, it can reveal the molecule's identity.
Astronomers studying absorption bands from space were baffled by certain signatures.
No one knew what in the stardust could cause them.
This puzzle intrigued a physicist near Kitt Peak Observatory.
The thing that got me most interested about astronomy was this amazing mystery of the diffuse interstellar bands.
None of these have yet been explained by anything on Earth.
So when I was a young assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and I began talking with the astronomers,
I began to realize that perhaps there's something out there that we hadn't made on Earth,
and perhaps the discovery of that would be a really exciting challenge to pursue.
So when I learned of this, I immediately, in my young wisdom, thought I knew the answer,
and even published a paper on it, which is of course wrong.
In 1982, Huffman took a sabbatical in the Black Forest of Germany, at the physics lab of Wolfgang Krachmer in Heidelberg.
They wanted to study the ultraviolet spectrum of tiny particles of carbon dust.
This is the, so to speak, historic machinery where Don Huffman and I made the first dust experiments.
It worked like an arc welder, pushing an electric current through sticks of graphite, but inside a bell jar, in a vacuum.
It made a cloud of vaporized graphite, carbon dust.
They collected the dust, and shining an ultraviolet light through it, produced a UV absorption spectrum.
And it was not at all what they expected.
At a wavelength of about 220 nanometers, instead of a smooth curve, they got a band with a double hump, a sort of double absorption band.
Krachmer dubbed this chameleon, a camel spectrum, and they were there after we called it the camel spectrum.
And that set off a discussion, a long-term discussion between Krachmer and I.
I have suggested originally that maybe we had a new solid form of carbon.
He was believing that it must be something very, very peculiar, and I was believing it was just junk.
And then I would suggest that, well, maybe we had long-chain molecules of carbon, such as were being discussed in those days.
And I was arguing it was just junk.
And then I think Krachmer maybe came up with some suggestions of his own.
And so we were arguing that this may be some kind of combined structure, which is new.
Of course, my response was, oh, it's probably just junk.
So junk was our favorite explanation for quite a few years for the spectrum.
Little did Huffman and Krachmer know that this sooty junk contained an invaluable treasure, one Harry Croto would look for in his own stardust research.
We were working on some longish-chain carbon molecules, and I wanted to do experiments in the laboratory to see whether we could simulate carbon star atmospheres and the chemistry in these objects, to see whether we could in fact see these long-chain molecules in the laboratory.
Houston, Texas.
Here was a device that would help Harry Croto conduct his stardust experiments.
In 1984, Croto traveled from England to Rice University, where researchers had the best system in the world for looking at clusters of vaporized atoms.
In this lab, he met the scientists who would become his partners.
Most materials like the silicon, for example, need to go to many thousands of degrees to be vaporized.
Well, there's an easy way of doing that with these modern lasers.
Here's a silicon disk, bring it on in, and as we come into the focus here, we're generating a little plume of silicon atoms, well over 10,000 degrees, easily hotter than the surface of any star.
But what good is it that it's just here in the air forming silicon oxide, actually? What we really want to do is to collect these silicon atoms as they're knocked off, aggregate them together in a little cluster into this big machine down here that we built to study those clusters on the fly.
Ultimately, it comes on into this large chamber, and on the inside of this, it strikes at the back the target material that we're trying to vaporize to produce clusters.
The clusters rush back, get ionized by another laser, and pushed up by an electric field to a mass spectrometer.
It counts how many clusters there are and how many atoms in each.
Overall, it's a very simple apparatus, although it looks rather forbidding.
Smalley was working on clusters of silicon, but when Harry saw the lab, he thought of carbon and stardust.
Hotter than the surface of any star. When I went over to Rick's lab and saw the machine in the flesh, it was just fascinating.
And almost immediately, I realized that if we substituted graphite for silicon that was in at the time, we can make a plasma similar to that which one has in the shell of a carbon star.
We could simulate that chemistry and perhaps make the carbon change that we had detected a few years earlier in space.
We told him that's fine, all this astrophysical stuff sounds very interesting, but it frankly wasn't really what we wanted to do in this laboratory.
After all, we already knew everything there was to know about carbon, at least we assumed to.
So we told Harry, yes, fine, some other time, maybe this year, maybe next.
Besides, an experiment like Harry's had already been done. The oil company Exxon is interested in carbon. They had put graphite into a similar system.
Carbon was a horrendous mess, made the machine absolutely filthy. But one of the interesting benefits of it was that we ended up seeing a very unusual mass spectrum.
This is the mass spectrum they produced. There were small clusters with odd numbers of carbon atoms, then a gap, then clusters with even numbers of atoms.
They suggested unusual carbon chains. But more curious were the clusters of 60 atoms, C60, which were twice as abundant. Exxon reported these but did not pursue it.
We did not identify C60 or C70 as being for stable or somehow unusual. But it's never a game.
I think, you know, in retrospect, we can say that I was being cautious. At the time I was being considered by most of my colleagues as being pretty wild, even daring to publish those results.
Well, almost a year and a half later, after I'd been to Houston, I got the call from Bob right out of the blue. He said that Rick had decided that we could do the experiment.
On one particular day, I gathered my students in and said, what's the worst possible thing that could happen? I said to Sean O'Brien, Jim Heath, and they said, Harry's coming.
I was so excited. I peached some money out of my wife's bank account, got the cheapest ticket I could and was there within three days.
Good morning, sir. It's Houston, your final destination.
I was keen on doing the experiment myself and really absolutely over the moon that I could do it.
What followed, none of them will forget.
Harry did run after run of graphite vaporized by laser with graduate students to help him.
Fellow chemist Bob Curl bounced ideas off the group.
Rick drifted in and out to see how they did. It was basic research at its creative best.
They saw evidence of the long chains of carbon atoms that Harry was sure existed in space.
They also saw something else, the clusters of 60 atoms that Exxon had seen, but more of them.
Again and again, they saw evidence of the long chains of carbon atoms that Harry was sure existed in space.
Again and again, 60 was the cluster that carbon preferred.
Now Rick really did get interested in what Harry was doing. Why did carbon atoms form such a stable cluster?
What was special about the magic number 60?
If there's any element we know how it bonds, it's carbon. And we know with many examples that carbon likes to bond usually with four other atoms.
And in fact in diamond, the pretty form of carbon, that's exactly what it does.
I have a model of a little piece of a diamond lattice here. You can see that each carbon atom, for example this little black dot,
connected through these green bonds to four other carbon atoms.
That is, except if they're on the surface, in which case there aren't the little black balls to connect with and these dynamic bonds don't know what to do.
Now, ordinary diamond doesn't have a problem with this because hydrogen is used to terminate each and every one of these bonds.
And in fact, if you have a diamond ring on your finger and you touch, you move your finger across the surface of the diamond, you're not touching carbon at all.
Because there's hydrogens on the surface and in fact you're rubbing a single atomic layer of hydrogen on the surface.
But we knew we didn't have any hydrogen in the machine.
Well, there is another way that carbon can bond that we know about as chemists and that's with just three other atoms.
And the most common form of this, as we know, is just plain old graphite, which is in fact infinite planes or effectively infinite planes,
huge planes of sort of chicken wire, lattices like this, connected six-membered rings, each carbon connected to three others.
And in graphite there's one plane against another stacked up. But once again, here are these edges.
These dangling bonds should attract other carbon atoms and make a cluster grow. Yet here they had a cluster that stopped at 60. Why?
We wondered what could possibly make it so strong. We thought about many possible structures.
And as it went up and down like a yo-yo on various runs that we did, we came to the conclusion that perhaps it was a closed cage of some sort.
Let's suppose we go back just to a single large sheet. And this has roughly 60 carbon atoms.
Obviously it has a lot of dangling bonds around the edges. But suppose somehow we're able to wrap around so that these dangling bonds here could connect to those dangling bonds.
Maybe there was some way of wrapping that sheet around to do it. But we couldn't really imagine how that would be done.
The team toyed with a novel idea.
One image which was in my mind from way back, it was that of Buckminster Fuller's dome at Expo 67.
The design of lightweight spherical structures was the life's work of the architect Buckminster Fuller.
360 degrees, therefore it becomes a plane and goes to infinity and won't return upon itself from the common center. It began to get then spherical.
His was the idea of the geodesic dome.
These are what we call geodesic radars.
In fact one time I had considered writing to him for a job because I was interested in many of his ideas.
But at the same time I was offered a job at Sussex. And so I finally plumped for a career in science rather than one in architecture and graphics and design.
Both Rick and Harry had visited the famous dome at Expo 67.
I remembered going into Buckminster Fuller's dome and pushing my son in a pram up amongst the escalators towards the struts, the intricate structure that held the dome together.
In fact one aspect of it is that it really did seem to be made up almost completely of hexagons.
Here after all we had a hexagonal sheet. Maybe if we figured out how Buckminster Fuller did this we could figure out how to curl these things around on each other.
The other thing that I remembered as well as Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome was a stardome, a map of the sky on a polyhedron that I made for my son's many years beforehand.
In my memory it had hexagons but it also had pentagons. I wondered whether it had 60 vertices and thought about bringing my wife and getting her to count it.
But I was going home the next day so I thought well I'll count it myself when I got there.
At Harry's farewell dinner they talked of layers of graphite, closed cages and C-60.
We were drawing on the serviettes and drinking Mexican beer and really very excited about what C-60 might actually be.
In fact they've taken away the serviettes in which we drew the structures unfortunately.
Rick went home, drew out and cut up little paper hexagons.
Harry went to bed thinking of the stardome stored in a box in his basement.
60 gummy bears joined by toothpicks was the scheme adopted by graduate student Jim Heath.
The candy model collapsed. The hexagons would curve only by cheating.
Hexagons side by side only make a flat surface.
Then Rick remembered the pentagons that Harry had talked of.
Hexagons around a pentagon. They automatically curved. They made a bowl shape.
Then more curves, more and more, all linking. A geodesic sphere. 60 points, 60 carbon atoms.
The shape of C-60 formed in Rick's hands.
I almost called to get Harry out of bed to tell him about it, but it was 3 o'clock in the morning.
I disciplined myself to go to sleep.
We couldn't be the first people in the universe to have discovered this structure.
They ought to know about the mathematics department. So I called up Bill Beach.
I said, Bill, sorry to bother you this morning, but we have this hot new structure for a carbon molecule.
And it has 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.
I wonder if you could bother asking one of your students to find out what this polyhedral object is and give us a call back.
And he did call back. Bob Curl answered the phone.
And the mathematics chairman said, well, I could explain this to you a number of ways, Bob.
But what you've got there, boys, is a soccer ball.
Imagine this excitement that you've discovered a way of putting 60 carbon atoms together that turns out not only to be beautifully symmetric, but it's a soccer ball, too.
Their paper to nature was a front cover story.
A really beautiful picture of C-60. It almost looks like you're looking at stars in the sky.
It was just such a fantastic moment that as I took the plane back, I was on such a high that I don't think, I think the airplane would have actually flown without the engines running.
They named their structure Buckminster Fullerene. Buckyballs. Perfect symmetry in a molecule. Symmetry enchanted the ancients.
The Greeks, then, have one word where we need to say...
A hollow cage of carbon. What properties it might bring.
The Greeks believed that perfect solids encased the fundamental elements. Fire. Earth. Air. And water. The icosahedron.
Slice off the points and the shape is C-60. A ball of carbon. A billionth of a meter wide.
Nature loves the geodesic sphere. It's seen in viruses and microscopic sea creatures.
Harry and Rick had hit on a mathematical law that any number of hexagons will curve to a sphere if linked by just 12 pentagons.
The expo dome had pentagons. A tortoise needs one to curve its shell. So did Harry's stardome.
It was so beautiful that it just had to be right. But there were people that needed convincing. Quite a lot.
And the question is, how could we set about proving that it had this structure?
That was really the next part in the story. And to me it was something like five long years in the desert.
They had never captured the elusive bucky. Only its traces. A cluster you cannot see or touch.
How do you prove the shape of something measured in electric fields held for only milliseconds in a laser beam in existence only as long as the experiment?
A cluster of 60 atoms was all they were certain of. The sphere. The soccer ball. All that was theory.
The theory ran into trouble from those who also had seen evidence of C60 before.
The Exxon team argued that maybe there were no more C60 clusters than other sizes, only that conditions in the laser might make them show up more.
C60 might not be special at all.
In Houston they tried to prove the structure by breaking the cluster apart and measuring the pieces.
This is Texas and we have big lasers and we have knobs we can turn up and we can make the laser tremendously powerful enough to drill through a hunk of metal.
We found that we could finally turn it up so that yes, finally C60 would fragment.
The amazing thing is that it fragmented by losing little C2 pieces, dimers of carbon. The result is just simply you've got a ball, you blast it with laser, it gets very hot, it evaporates C2 off the surface and it shrinks.
And as you keep blasting laser energy it shrinks more and more and more.
They got readings of C58, 56, 54 and on down until the strain on the atoms was too great.
It's just what you would expect if in fact it really were these closed cages.
When you blast it there aren't any edges, no places can just fall right off so it shrinks down until finally, critically, at C32 the next step is it bursts.
For most molecules that would already have been considered a proof of the structure.
But this is too important a molecule to just casually say you've proved it.
Exxon kept up the counterpoint. They said the whole thing could be just an experimental artifact.
In Sussex, Harry's team produced more theoretical models.
He worked out possible structures of other carbon clusters that had appeared in the laser.
A hypothetical family of fullerenes was born.
One thing that was clear was that all the pentagons were isolated and all the hexagons were linked.
That seemed to be a critical factor in the stability.
And I started to think at what stage that would occur again.
I knew it couldn't happen for anything less than 60 atoms.
And as I went on higher and higher I realized that I couldn't do it again until we got to the number 70.
We'd already got a structure for 70 in which we take the two halves apart and we put an extra 10 carbon atoms around the waste.
And then I realized that this explained the second peak.
Now we had found that the C60 signal always had a companion, C70.
And I used to call the two together the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
At that point, when you have a hypothesis which explains two major results, then you can be sure it's right.
And at that point I realized that I would not have to commit suicide over the Buttman's de Fullerene idea.
But these models were still only theory.
And further trouble lay ahead as Croteau and Smalley strayed into an area of science where they were left out of the question.
As Croteau and Smalley strayed into an area of science where they were outsiders.
It was natural to wonder about how such a beautiful molecule actually could form.
And we thought that perhaps it started off as this sort of saucer-shaped structure, which actually accumulated more and more carbon atoms,
and grew into these sort of bowl-shaped structures and further more into larger ones which actually overlapped.
Some of them would actually accidentally close and form C60.
But most of them we expected would overshoot and then spiral to form large structures like this,
ultimately ending up like this as large carbon microparticles.
And then we realized that probably we had a nice explanation of the way soot particles form.
Now we proposed this and it turned out to be rather contentious.
Those who study combustion, so-called soot chemists, were skeptical.
The mystery of how soot forms when carbon fuels burn has perplexed scientists for over a century.
Its solution could have enormous consequences for industries that use fossil fuels.
Croteau and Smalley's model was new and surprising.
The technological implications of that model, particularly the aspect of it which said that if you could terminate the growth of soot at C60,
so that by successfully closing the shell you would not grow larger molecules,
has the technological implication that if you could actually cause that to occur in systems that generate soot,
you would generate particles of such small size that they would probably not represent a significant health hazard.
But critics scoffed at the idea that buckyball chemistry helped create soot.
In none of the flames at soot chemists' study had buckyballs ever been found.
Many scientists skeptical that C60 even existed viewed Smalley and Croteau's soot proposal as more hot air.
To counter their critics they would need to capture C60 in a lasting form.
Harry, backed by the British government, bought a laser beam of his own.
If they could hold C60 in their hands, they could explore its true properties,
how it might be tied to soot, and other intriguing puzzles.
Harry's thoughts were on stardust.
Apart from proving it, there was another major impetus,
and that was the fact that I still felt that C60 had some tie-up with the diffuse interstellar bands.
And if that could be proven, that would solve one of the longest lasting problems in astronomy.
Could buckyballs be behind the mysterious absorption bands? Were they in the stardust?
The stability of C60 in intense laser light meant it might well survive if formed in space.
Turns out that C60 is extraordinarily photoresistant.
It is the most photoresistant molecule of anything we've seen,
which will be very important if C60 is to be found in space,
because in space molecules don't have sunglasses.
You've got all these stars out there. What's to protect this molecule from getting sunburned?
Over the hundreds of millions of years it's been wandering out in space.
But to find the absorption spectrum for C60, they had to make enough of it to analyze.
They hoped that somewhere in the lasers, C60 had remained intact,
but it was never to be found in the laser soot.
So for years, actually, squandering the life of my major graduate student, Jim Heath,
we scraped soots up, put them in test tubes, sloshed them around and looked,
and for years all we saw was soot sort of floating around or sitting at the bottom.
Well, it's a lot of fun to do for a while, but for a year and a half it gets to be kind of boring.
So we pretty well gave up.
The experiment at Rice came to an uncertain end.
But even without an actual sample of C60, theoreticians kept churning out paper after paper,
predicting the properties of such a molecule.
The perfect symmetry of C60 allowed scientists to calculate how a buckyball would rotate and vibrate.
They also could calculate how the molecule and its electrons would vibrate.
They also could calculate how the molecule and its electrons would move when struck by light.
C60's absorption spectrum, at least in theory, was available in print.
When Don Huffman read these predictions, they brought to mind his long-past experiment with carbon dust
and the surprising double-humped band he had produced.
When I saw the Crotos-Molle paper in nature, I was very excited because I immediately began to think
that perhaps the camel sample wasn't junk after all.
One of the calculations had to do with the ultraviolet spectrum to be expected a C60 molecule,
which had a series of very strong bands in the ultraviolet looking something like that, if I remember it.
And if one put that on the same scale as our camel spectrum, there was a nice, interesting correspondence there.
And this kept us wondering for a long time.
Unfortunately, that was about the time when I was very busy with other things
and I went to the laboratory and had trouble reproducing the camel spectrum.
So he sent a graduate student to make carbon dust that would reproduce the camel.
Well, this was my first job in the lab, so since not very many people expected it would work out,
there wasn't really very much pressure on me to produce results.
It's really a very simple experiment, which is a good thing, because it was such a long shot.
It's a simple, simple device. There's a carbon arc discharge in a vacuum chamber with a little helium in there.
There aren't very many things you can change. We changed the tip size, we changed the voltage and the current,
but it turned out that the most important thing was the pressure setting.
When you have the pressure at about 100 Tor, which is about a seventh of an atmosphere,
those two funny bumps, the camel spectrum comes back, the thing that we had seen in Heidelberg.
They sent the samples to Heidelberg, where Huffman's partner Kretschmer put them into an infrared spectrometer.
He saw four absorption bands, which, like the camel, were predicted for C-60.
The main result was that those samples, which also showed this peculiar UV feature, which we called camel hump,
these samples also show four infrared bands.
It's at almost exactly the same positions as predicted by theory for C-60.
And we did publish this, and we could show that the four infrared features, at least,
they are definitely produced by carbon alone, and they are not any kind of junk.
At the same time, we were very alarmed, because in publishing the samples,
at the same time, we were very alarmed, because in publishing the letter on the dust,
we had essentially given away the secret, and if we could figure out how to extract C-60 from the soot,
then any real chemists certainly could, and they probably were falling right behind us.
So the secret was out. Kretschmer presented their results at an astronomy conference in Capri,
and the paper found its way to Harry Croto.
Well, I received this paper, which my juror sent to me, and he wrote on the top,
Harry, presented at Capri. Do you believe this? Question mark.
When I read it, it was such a simple way of making C-60. I just couldn't believe it.
Kretschmer's paper showed how to make carbon dust containing C-60.
Croto wanted to go a step further, to extract C-60 from the soot.
He set two graduate students to the task.
The race was on.
This is pretty ropey old stuff, when me and Amit first worked on it.
It worked for about three or four days, and then all the electronics just burnt out,
so I had to rebuild all the equipment.
One of the things that we could do was the mass spec, and downstairs this was run by Ali Abdel Sada.
And in fact, this was the first time that we had done this.
What we could do was the mass spec, and downstairs this was run by Ali Abdel Sada.
And in fact, this is what happened. The sample was run while I was away in Scotland on holiday,
and we got this fantastic result. Ali came down, clutching this bit of paper, saying,
we have fantastic news. Do you want the good or the bad news?
And the good news was that they got this peak where we expected for C-60,
and the bad news was that the machine broke down, so we couldn't repeat it.
They'd made C-60, but how to separate it from the soot?
We'd been collecting it for several months.
So one Friday, one brave Friday, I had, I suppose, perhaps half this full of soot,
and I thought I'd better do something, and one idea.
It was just simply using a solvent to try and dissolve C-60 out.
So I got half of the soot I produced, and I basically just got some benzene,
put it in the tube, and shook it up with the soot.
Just shook it up, put it on the top of the shelf, and left it there over the weekend.
When I came in on Monday morning, there was this red solution.
I went round the laboratory going, look, C-60's in here.
And everyone was still going, yeah, OK, John.
But it worked out in the end, and in fact, that's exactly what it was.
For five days, Harry thought they had the first solution of C-60.
But then?
Well, I had a call from Nature, the journal, and they said, would I referee this paper?
So I said, fair enough, I knew a fair amount about this topic.
And they faxed me a copy of their paper, and it was a bombshell.
There they had beautiful crystals, they had infrared, they had an X-ray structure.
They had made the molecule beyond all doubt, and we had been pipped to the post.
It was, of course, Huffman and Cratchmer's paper.
The amazing thing is that the whole process was so incredibly simple.
Once we found that the carbon-60 was soluble as a red liquid,
all we had to do was dry it out, and that left us with a solid that we were so eagerly seeking.
The easy way to do that is just to pour it on a hot plate and let it dry for a few minutes,
and there's the solid that we wanted to do the experiments with.
Now, the way it really happened was Cratchmer called me from Germany and said,
if you just take a little vial of the red material and you put a drop of it on a microscope slide,
then you will see an incredibly beautiful site.
So I reproduced the experiment by putting a tiny drop of the red liquid on a microscope slide.
And in just a very few seconds, as a matter of fact, I was able to see these beautiful little crystals,
which were hexagonal platelets of brownish-orange color.
No longer fleeting traces in a laser, what Huffman saw was a new solid, pure carbon crystals.
We realized by this time that we were surely seeing a crystalline form of carbon-60,
which was really a genuinely new form of carbon,
and that we were probably the first people on Earth ever to even see this site.
This is the first ever film of a new carbon, buckyballs crystallizing before your eyes.
And as a solid-state physicist, it was incredibly nice to be able to say,
aha, now we've got something that we can really begin to experiment with.
We can see it and work with it. And that was really the moment of high excitement for me.
And here, suddenly, from a stunningly simple technique by physicists, my God, not chemists,
was the first macroscopic isolated amounts of carbon.
Of course, we'd been scooped, but it was so wonderful.
The solid form of C-60 called Fullerite was examined with a scanning tunneling microscope.
The image is fuzzy because the buckyballs are spinning,
but the structure and size of the molecules were confirmed.
Well, looking back at it now, after I've talked to Harry and Rick and gotten to know them pretty well,
I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for them because they were trying so hard to see the yellow stuff.
And we were sort of had it in our hands all the time.
We, in a sense, tried too hard with high technology and not just simply gone down and tried the simplest thing.
Let's just evaporate carbon, collect the soot, and see what happens.
But no matter, if we'd done it early on, then Huffman and Kretschmer couldn't have had so much fun.
Chemists the world over set out to make C-60, and there was a surge in sales of arc welders.
The pioneering spirit of buckymania led to some rather unlikely contraptions.
This apparatus should be in the Guinness Book of Records for the most number of arc welding power supplies ever connected in parallel at any time.
We need that many power supplies because we're vaporizing big sticks of graphite here, half-inch diameter.
We feed one in from either side here with some screw mechanisms.
When they meet in the middle, the arc that's formed is really quite ferocious.
We do that because we want to vaporize and make a lot of buckies.
But when we do it in this chamber, we have to get them out of there quickly, so we actually suck them out through the top here with something that's very much like a vacuum cleaner.
In fact, it is a vacuum cleaner. It's my personal home vacuum cleaner back in the back from Sears, and once again, a Sears Kenmore vacuum cleaner bag here to collect the soot.
We're actually a one-stop shopper at Sears.
From biochemistry to solid-state physics, buckyballs spawn new basic research.
These remarkable molecules of carbon impact a wide range of sciences.
In particular, C60 has shaken up organic chemistry on campuses and in industrial labs.
Organic chemistry is the study of the molecules that make up living things, and living things are carbon-based.
Fullerenes have added an entirely new dimension.
Now we have spherical molecules. We have benzene rings that are assembled in three dimensions on a sphere.
And the chemistry, and the rules of the chemistry of buck-mitzvah fullerene are entirely different from those that we are known to use, so we have to invent new chemistry.
At UCLA, they've looked at a bigger fullerene called C76, which comes in two varieties.
We see in this compound of 76, we see a helix that winds clockwise.
In the other compound of 76, we see a helix that winds counterclockwise.
Now, this is a general principle in the biological world. All biological material, sugars, DNA, peptides, proteins, are either left-handed or right-handed.
Life is handed. Out of graphite and inorganic flat material, we have made helical material just like biological material.
And this might be very interesting and might have importance for the origin of life.
Buckyballs also could radically shape technologies of the future, from super-strong fibers to superconductors.
Superconductivity allows the flow of electricity with no energy loss. It is the principle behind this experimental levitating train.
But current superconductors are impractical for widespread use, and scientists continue the search for better ones.
Fullerene-based superconductors may ultimately hold answers.
AT&T's Bell Laboratories has grown crystals of C60 and put potassium atoms in the spaces of the crystal lattice.
They found the crystal was an electrical conductor. Three weeks later, that it was a superconductor with no resistance to electricity.
That drew even more scientists to work on C60.
I happened to have been asked to be a referee on the conductivity paper from Bell Labs, however, and I will never forget the day I received that,
and opened it up and looked, and there were 18 authors on the paper, and I began to think, what am I doing in this field?
I am a lone researcher with a colleague in Germany competing with one of the finest groups in the world.
Here I am receiving telephone calls from all over the world, and not only can I not compete with Bell Lab, but I can't even hardly answer all the telephone calls I get.
Exxon also has become excited about the potential of C60 and has assigned scientists to many areas of fullerene research.
Hello, my name is Don Cox. I am currently the project leader.
Hello, my name is Sergio Goran. I prepare and characterize solvent-containing fullerene crystals.
I am Hans Thoman, and I am exploring the uses of fullerene in elastin.
I am Bill Shriver. I study the selectivity of fullerene reactions.
I am Long Chen. We are working on the functionalization chemistry of C60.
I am Glenn Miller, and I am studying the reactivity and structure of cationic and anionic.
One of our interests is to see what it is that you can do with C60 once you make it behave differently than it does just as a pure material.
And part of our research strategy is to in fact try to find if it can impact on the larger arena, perhaps an appropriate oil additive.
I certainly would love to be the company that finds a way of putting fullerene into a can of oil that would improve the performance of the engine oils.
I would love to be the first company to do that.
Carbon-60 is just a starting point for researchers. A whole new family of molecules is emerging.
Chains of buckyballs, polymers, molecular wires all become possible.
The basic properties and possible uses of this new breed of molecules are only beginning to be explored.
At the Naval Research Laboratory, scientists have calculated the strength of the atomic bonds of a buckyball.
Fired in a computer at a theoretical diamond surface with enough calculated energy to split any other molecule asunder, C60 would simply bounce.
The geodesic properties that made Buckminster Fuller's dome so strong also apply at the molecular scale.
You have this rather beautiful structure in many different forms, but they're all pretty nice.
And one could imagine trying to find ways of linking these materials together.
And there's a lot of interest in trying to build essentially buckyball structures.
Now what those materials would turn out once you successfully built them, I cannot predict.
We could coalesce the balls together. For example, just two balls together, if they're C60.
If we coalesce them together, it will look something like this object, which is a coalesced bucky tube, as it's currently called.
It's a hollow, graphitic tube. It's this long in this molecule, but you can imagine it getting infinitely long to be a fiber for that matter, or short various lengths.
Think of these tubes as being pipes in a nanometer architecture, in construction projects to build houses, factories, that all exist on a nanometer scale.
Where we can make, who knows what, catalytic reaction centers, photosynthetic centers, semiconducting devices.
A whole range of technology may be waiting for us on the nanometer scale.
These bucky tubes are super-strong fibers with diamond-like strength, yet flexible and resilient.
Perhaps one day, the basis of earthquake-proof cables and all sorts of materials.
Scientists have now trapped a host of different atoms, even radioactive ones, inside C60, creating bucky cages.
The race to catch a bucky ball may be over, but a new era of research has just begun.
It took questions about the nature of stardust to lead unexpectedly to this burgeoning new science.
I remember getting to the breakfast table one morning and asking in all sincerity to my kids and my wife,
am I really dreaming about this? Is it possible we really have found a new form of carbon?
Because we're not all that brilliant people, and why did it happen to us?
When it certainly could have happened to many, many people along the way, I think.
All it needed was someone to do this experiment. In fact, the arc lamps in projectors,
that one used to see in the old days, they must have been making C60.
If someone had looked at the material inside those bulbs, they would have been able to extract C60 a long time ago.
We know that it's in Bunsen burners, so everyone, when they were at school,
who switched on a Bunsen burner and turned it to yellow, has actually made C60.
Once you know it might be there, and then you go to look for this rather elusive character, you may find it.
Since C60 was captured in a lasting form, scientists have looked for it in every conceivable natural source.
Ironically, one of the few places it has been found so far is in the deposit from laboratory benzene combustion,
in the soot that soot chemists have been studying for years.
Now that it's been found in a flame, that one can extract C60 from soot, it looks as though the soot community
now will give us a little bit more credit for possibly being right than they were prepared to do at the time.
Where soot chemists once doubted C60 even existed in flames, they now see a low-pressure flame system
as one of the best ways to make buckyballs.
Buckyballs, today created for research, soon could be called upon for industrial use.
We spent five years now working with this molecule, and to some extent the science of C60 has changed.
It's become technology in some areas. People have it in their hands. It's no longer a figment of one's imagination.
For me, we're going to do some work in this area. We're going to probe its organic properties.
We're going to probe some applications in soot chemistry. But part of my work will go in a different direction.
Everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of doing carbon-60 research, and this is something that happens in science,
but it worries me a little bit, frankly, as to my involvement in it, because I tend to like to be off by myself.
That's one reason I like to live in Arizona, because I don't like crowds very much.
Really, I like working in the dark. For me, science is something to do with fun and solving puzzles,
where I really don't know what the answer is. To some extent, I know too much about C60 now.
I have a difficult decision to make as to whether or not to continue in the many interesting things that there still are to do in fullerene research,
or whether it's time to go chase some more obscure puzzles that still are out there to be solved.
But what about the initial stardust puzzle?
This is a kind of irony of the whole story, that even though we found C60 and we were keen to observe it,
or to say that this may also be abundant in interstellar space, at least in my view it looks like that it is not very abundant at all in interstellar space.
If that's so, of course, in a sense we've all been failures in this, but what a wonderful failure it's been, actually.
I take it not really as a disappointment.
I believe it is there, and it would be rather nice to feel that in fact we were on the right track.
There are some interesting features in space, and C60 certainly can fit them better than any other proposal that has been made up to now.
I'm a believer, and I think ultimately we'll find that it is there.
But others say C60 is nothing like a match for the mysterious absorption bands.
They're wrong.
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