On November 14 1985, a letter announcing the discovery of a superstable species of carbon appeared in the science journal Nature. Even the letter’s title, C₆₀: Buckminsterfullerene, caused a stir among the journal’s scholarly readers.

Molecules are usually named with sterile precision. This one was named after the American architect and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller (Bucky to his friends), whose geodesic domes had become icons of modern design in the 1950s and 60s.

Fuller’s spherical domes were designed to be lightweight yet strong, with each triangular element distributing stress evenly across a curved framework. C₆₀ was the atomic analogue of these domes, built not from steel struts but carbon atoms – each joined by strong bonds with three of its neighbours to create a tiny spherical cage.

This new allotrope of carbon was so stable and symmetric that it redrew the map of molecular architecture. It kicked off a scientific sprint that led, barely a decade later, to the 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry for English scientist Harold Kroto and his American colleagues Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery.

Fullerenes (now nicknamed Buckyballs) had always existed on Earth – in candle soot, volcanic emissions and ancient minerals. But their scientific discovery emerged from an attempt to simulate the chemistry of carbon-rich red giant stars.

The discovery opened the era of nanotechnology – the manufacture and manipulation of materials at previously impossibly small scales. But this is not the only way Fuller’s name is remembered in science.

Who was Buckminster........

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