R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller did not invent the concept of geodesy. This word had been used for at least a century by his time, to refer to a form of surveying. Once the degree of curvature of the Earth was known, it became necessary to take into account, in surveying, that on the surface of a sphere, the shortest distance between two points is NOT a straight line; rather, it’s a curved line.
Fuller’s innovation came about because he was trying to make construction affordable and transportable. He turned to geodesics to create durable, lightweight, easily assembled, disassembled, and moved structures to cover a maximum of space with a minimum of materials. Fuller’s designs can form complete spheres, but in a gravity field, hemispheres are commoner, although in designs for space habitats, spheres would be more common.
So what has this to do with the third elemental form of carbon molecules? (The first two, in case you’ve forgotten, are graphite and diamonds–graphite is planar, and carbon is cubical crystals). Well, happenstance, for one thing. It turns out that the first people to create buckyballs in a lab (or at least to recognize what they’d done) had some members who’d been to Expo ’67 (lucky them. I wanted to go SO bad…).
The American Pavilion at Expo ’67 (since repurposed as the Montreal Biosphère) was designed by Buckminster Fuller (then over 70 years old). The people who had been to see it remembered it (not quite accurately) as a sphere composed of hexagons.
So when they were trying to come up with a structure for a molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms (or some multiple thereof), it was natural for them to try to model the molecule using hexagons forming the surface of a sphere. Carbon atoms, after all, do easily form hexagonal bonds (the benzene ring is the prime example, but it’s not the only hexagonal bond–just the best known).
But it turned out it’s not POSSIBLE to make a sphere out of hexagons alone. People tried to model it, and it kept refusing to curve correctly. It was only when people realized that carbon also forms pentagonal bonds that they discovered that adding a few pentagons here and there made it possible to evenly tile a sphere.
Since the American Pavilion at Expo ’67 was the inspiration for their model, it was natural for the discoverers to call the resultant molecule ‘buckminsterfullerene’. But that formal name is more than a mouthful, so it tended to be shortened to just ‘fullerene’, and when referring to the spherical form, it’s now usually called, simply, a ‘buckyball’.
There are also (it turns out), NONspherical fullerenes. A lot of current excitement centers around carbon nanoTUBES. These nanotubes, especially when incorporated into composites, have a lot of interesting potential. Something to keep an eye out for.
For today’s less obvious question, consider: how can a thing be ‘unforgettable’ if you’ve never heard of it?
treraia 