Background

Richard Errett Smalley was born on June 6, 1943, in Akron, Ohio, the United States into a close-knit family with Midwestern values. His father, Frank Dudley Smalley Jr, was a self-made industrious man, equally dedicated to his family. Starting his career as a carpenter he retired as the CEO of several trade journals.

His mother, Esther Virginia (nee Rhoads), named him after the English king Richard the Lion-Hearted; but as she was a good American, she always called him "Mr. President." She was an extraordinary woman, who earned her bachelor’s degree when Richard was in his teens.

Edward was the youngest of his parents’ four children and possibly the most favorite. The three elder siblings were Clayton, Mary Jill, and Linda. The family settled in Kansas City, Missouri when Richard turned three.

At Kansas City, he spent hours collecting single-celled organisms from the local pond and watching them under a microscope with his mother. She also taught him about music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and mechanical drawing. From his father, he learned to build things and to fix mechanical and electronic equipment.

Education

When the time came, Richard Smalley was admitted to the Southwest High School in Kansas City, Missouri. The most significant event during this period was the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Although the incident aroused in him an interest in science, he was still an erratic student.

In 1959, he was introduced to chemistry for the first time. Suddenly he became a serious student and spent a lot of time cooped up in the attic, preparing lessons. Although he also liked physics, chemistry was his first love.

Another important influence in his choice of subject was his mother’s younger sister, Dr. Sara Jane Rhoads. She was a professor of chemistry and one of the first women to become a full professor in the United States.

Robert spent the summer of 1961 working in Dr. Rhoads laboratory; an experience, which drew him closer to chemistry. In fall, he graduated from school and on her suggestion, entered Hope College (in Holland, Michigan) with chemistry.

However, after two years at Hope College, Robert Smalley shifted to the University of Michigan and in 1965 earned his Bachelor of Science degree from there. He then joined a polypropylene manufacturing plant owned by Shell Chemical Company in Woodbury as a chemist and was assigned to the quality control laboratory.

The two years at the laboratory were a broadening experience for Smalley. Thereafter he was shifted to the Plastic Technical Center at the same site. Here he worked on developing analytical methods for various aspects of polyolefins.

Although he enjoyed working at Shell he soon realized that it was time to start his graduate work. Therefore, he joined the Princeton University in the fall of 1969 and started working with Elliot R. Bernstein on 1,3,5-triazine, a heterocyclic benzene analog, earning his Doctorate in 1973.

Career

In 1973, even before Smalley actually defended his thesis and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree, he joined the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow. Here, he worked with Donald H. Levy and Lennard Wharton to develop a supersonic beam laser spectroscopy. Meanwhile, at Rice University in Houston, Robert F. Curl had made significant progress in laser spectroscopy. Smalley now wanted to collaborate with him and therefore, after the completion of postdoctoral work, he joined Rice in the summer of 1976 as an Assistant Professor.

Here too he set up a laser supersonic cluster beam apparatus, but it was adapted to use pulsed dye lasers in the ultraviolet. With it they could study more ordinary molecules such as benzene. Concurrently, Smalley worked to set up the Rice Quantum Institute, which was officially established in 1979.

In 1982, he was named the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor in Chemistry. Along with teaching he kept on his research work and continued improving his apparatus.

Sometime in the early 1980s, after intense research work, his team found a way to use a pulsed laser, directed into a nozzle, to vaporize any material. Moreover, it could now be used to study the properties of nanometer-scale particles, which consist of a precise number of atoms.

Professor Curl was highly impressed by Smalley’s apparatus and soon the two scientists began working on semiconductors like silicon and germanium with it. Simultaneously, at the University of Sussex, Professor Harold W. Kroto was working on astronomical dust formed by carbon-rich grains expelled by old stars like R Coronae Borealis.

Kroto now wanted to see how carbon chains, found in the dusts, were formed. On being informed about Smalley’s apparatus, he traveled to Houston towards the end of 1985.

At Rice University, Curl, Kroto, and Smalley began their collaboration. Along with their graduate students James Heath, Yuan Liu, and Sean O’Brien, the three scientists began exposing graphite surface to laser pulses.

They did find the long carbon chains they were looking for, but unexpectedly they also found carbon molecules with 60 and 70 atoms. On further probe, they found C60 were more common. It was a hitherto unknown substance.

Therefore, they began to investigate it. Within eleven days, they established that the molecule is one nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) in size and its atomic arrangement resembles two conjoined geodesic domes. Subsequently, they called it Buckminsterfullerene, after Buckminster Fuller, the American architect, who invented the geodesic dome.

In 1986, Smalley was selected as the Chairman of the Rice Quantum Institute. Concurrently, he continued to work on nanotechnology. He strongly believed that only nanotechnology could solve the most pressing problems of the earth, especially the need for clean energy and water.

In 1990, he also became a Professor in the Department of Physics at Rice, a post he held concurrently with that of Professor of Chemistry at the same university. At the same time, he began to work for establishing the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

In 1996, he gave up the Chairmanship of Rice Quantum Institute and became the Director of Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, a position he held until 2001. Subsequently from 2001 to 2005, he was the Director of Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, also at Rice.

Richard Smalley gave a presentation on December 2, 2004, titled Symposium X - Frontiers of Materials Research. In which he laid out the Terawatt Challenge. To provide the technology for accomplishing our energy goals, what we need to do is to find the “new oil” - a basis for energy prosperity in the 21st century that is as enabling as oil and gas have been for the past century.

“To solve the energy challenge, we will have to find a way to produce, every day, not just what we are producing right now, but at least twice that much. We will need to increase our energy output by a minimum factor of two, the generally agreed upon number, certainly by the middle of the century, but preferably well before that.”

At the time of his presentation, the world consumed on average 14.5 terawatts of power, the equivalent of burning 220 million barrels of oil per day. Thinking to the future, Smalley estimated that by 2050, we would require 60 terawatts to comfortably support the world’s population, which is estimated to be around 10 billion. He said: "Not only must the world effectively quadruple its energy production. These new energy sources cannot add to atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is generally accepted to be a cause of global warming.” With this presentation, Smalley laid out the Terawatt challenge - to generate renewable, clean energy to meet the global demand.

Achievements

• 

  In 1996, Richard Smalley received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Curl and Kroto "for their discovery of fullerene."
  
  Apart from Nobel Prize, he also received numerous other prizes such as Irving Langmuir Award (1991), E. O. Lawrence Memorial Award (1992), APS International Prize for New Materials (1992), Franklin Medal, The Franklin Institute (1996), American Carbon Society Medal (1997) and others.
  
  He was also elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (1987) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2003.
  
  Richard Errett Smalley has been listed as a noteworthy Chemistry and physics educator, researcher by Marquis Who's Who.
  
  In 2005, the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) that he helped to build was renamed as The Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. Later it was merged with the Rice Quantum Institute and is now called Smalley-Curl Institute (SCI).
  
  In 2015, the US Senate passed a resolution crediting Smalley as the “Father of Nanotechnology."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, 10-Volume Set

    (Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology is the Wor...)

    2004

• movie

  • Nobelity

    (This engaging documentary takes a stunning look at the wo...)

    2006

• publication

  • Workshop on "Carbon Nanotubes" - Opportunities, Requirements and Challenges 1998

Religion

Richard Smalley was reared as a Darwinist by his mother and remained a religious skeptic for most of his life. However, just a few years before cancer took his life at age sixty-three, Smalley became first a theist and then later a committed Christian. In his words, “Recently | have gone back to church regularly with a new focus to understand as best | can what it is that makes Christianity so vital and powerful in the lives of billions of people today... Although | suspect | will never fully understand, | now think the answer is very simple: it's rue. God did create the universe about 13,7 billion years ago, and of necessity has involved Himself with His creation ever since. The purpose of this universe is something that only God can know for sure, but itis increasingly clear to modern science that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned to enable human life...The burden of proof is on those who don't believe that "Genesis" was right, and there was a creation and that the Creator is still involved."

Politics

Later Smalley also became the leading advocate of this technology. Smalley played a key role in the establishment in 2000 of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, federal research, and development program.

Views

Smalley is best remembered for his creation of the laser supersonic cluster beam apparatus and subsequent discovery of the third allotropic formation of carbon called the Buckminsterfullerene or buckyball.

At the University of Chicago, he pioneered a technique that combined laser excitation of molecules with their cooling by supersonic jets of gas. He demonstrated that the method greatly simplified the complex spectra of the molecules' energy levels, and allowed complexes bound together by very weak van der Waals interactions to be created and observed. On arriving, in 1976, at Rice University in Houston, Texas - where he was to stay for the rest of his career - he rapidly created a series of spectroscopic tools based on this technique that are used to this day. Smalley's approach was to conceive a way to investigate a chemical system or phenomenon, construct the necessary sophisticated apparatus, do enough work to show the true potential of the method, and move on. Each new project was better than the last, offering further valuable scientific information.

The discovery of the fullerenes, which led to his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996, grew out of one such project. In this, Smalley was studying jet-cooled molecular clusters formed by the condensation of laser-vaporized metals or semiconductors. In March 1984, the British chemist Harry Kroto, whose radio astronomy observations had detected long carbon-chain compounds in interstellar clouds, visited Rice. Kroto saw the vaporizing graphite in Smalley's apparatus as a way of testing his idea that these chains were being formed by the condensation of species ejected from carbon-rich stars. When the experiments were finally performed at the facility in September 1985, proof for the formation of carbon chains between 7 and 12 atoms long, the size range of the astronomical observations, was indeed found.

The experiments also showed striking evidence that more interesting, much larger carbon clusters of between 40 and 80 atoms were being formed simultaneously. The particularly high abundance of the C60 cluster could only be explained if it were a stable, closed cage with 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal interlocking faces, rather like a football, or soccer ball. Because of the transatlantic conflict between the experimentalists over the exact name of the ball and the sport it belonged to - and because the structure was reminiscent of the geodesic domes of the architect Buckminster Fuller - the C60 structure was named buckminsterfullerene. A more general examination of the number of carbon atoms in the other, differently sized clusters that were found led to the gradual realization that they must all be carbon cages consisting of exactly 12 pentagons and a number of hexagons that grew with increasing cluster size.

Efforts in Smalley's laboratory to make a macroscopic sample of buckminsterfullerene were abandoned fairly quickly after experiments to vaporize a graphite rod using a laser left no trace of C60. The isolation in 1990 of a mixture of C60 and C70, using an apparatus consisting of a carbon arc inside a bell jar, seemed ridiculously simple compared with Smalley's high-tech approach. Smalley reinvestigated the laser vaporization technique and found that the amount of C60 produced depended strongly on the temperature of the wall of the quartz tube that surrounded the graphite rod: no C60 was obtained when it was at room temperature, but there was a 20% yield at 1,100 °C.

The isolation of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), announced in June 1993, soon drove Smalley's attention and considerable powers to another domain. The development of synthesis techniques for SWNTs was a challenge unlike anything Smalley had encountered before 1990, and virtually all that was known as the need for a metal catalyst - iron, cobalt, or nickel. Soon Smalley found that, by impregnating these metals into the graphite rods used to make C60 in the laser vaporization experiments, he could create SWNTs in the form of ropes containing more than a hundred individual tubes. Between 1993 and 2005, Smalley found a generally better way of making the tubes, as well as ways of cutting them up, performing chemical reactions on them and producing them in solution. In the last week of his life, desperately ill with leukemia, he was enthusiastically receiving progress reports in his hospital bed and suggesting new ideas and experiments.

Towards the end of his life, Richard Smalley had begun to say, “If it ain't tubes, we don't do it." He had become fascinated by the prospect that fullerenes - the massive carbon molecules with distinctive geometrical shapes that he had co-discovered in 1985 - might be re-formed into single-walled nanotubes with exciting properties. In particular, he dreamt of making a metallically conducting cable of billions of these carbon nanotubes, which, for the same weight, would be many times stronger than steel. Smalley's time ran out before he achieved that goal; nevertheless, the legacy of this research already extends far beyond the confines of materials science, to such diverse fields as energy technology and medicine.

Quotations: "Clean water is a great example of something that depends on energy. And if you solve the water problem, you solve the food problem."

"I like the word “nanotechnology.” I like it because the prefix “nano” guarantees it will be fundamental science for decades; the “technology” says it is engineering, something you’re involved in not just because you’re interested in how nature works but because it will produce something that has a broad impact."

"The principal impetus for my entering a career in science … was the successful launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the then-current belief that science and technology were going to be where the action was in the coming decades."

"Times change. But life and science go on."

"We are the only species that can destroy the Earth or take care of it and nurture all that live on this very special planet. I’m urging you to look on these things. For whatever reason, this planet was built specifically for us. Working on this planet is an absolute moral code. … Let’s go out and do what we were put on Earth to do."

Membership

Smalley was a member of different scientist associations and organizations, such as American Physical Society (division chemical physics), American Association for the Advancement of Science, NAS, American Chemical Society (division physical chemistry), Materials Research Society, American Academy Arts and Sciences, Sigma Xi and others.

• Princeton University

  Harold W. Dodds Fellow , United States

  1973

• 

  division chemical physics

  American Physical Society , United States

• 

  American Association for the Advancement of Science , United States

• 

  National Academy of Science , United States

• 

  American Chemical Society , United States

• 

  Materials Research Society , United States

• 

  American Academy Arts and Sciences , United States

• 

  Sigma Xi , United States

Personality

The single-minded obsession that Smalley brought to nanotube research was in fact rather out of character. In his early career as an independent researcher, he had tended to create a new research field about every two years, often abandoning them with equal frequency.

Smalley's ability to vacuum up information, organize it, and use it for the creative scientific endeavor was prodigious. He always tackled the most challenging problems, was indefatigable in the pursuit of answers, and in all arguments met logic with logic. Smalley had a whimsical sense of humor and tremendous personal charisma. Others usually found it to their advantage to follow his lead, as a collaboration with Smalley generally resulted in excellent scientific results.

Physical Characteristics: In his later days, Smalley suffered from leukemia. He said about his illness: "In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks."

Quotes from others about the person

• "Rick was a proud scientist, proud of what he had achieved and particularly proud of any students in his group who had green experimental fingers similar to those he had himself. The ability to get a difficult experiment to work successfully was the supreme quality he admired. It would be fair to say that he had very strong opinions on the merits of other scientists and few measured up to his, in my opinion somewhat restricted, subjective definition. There were very few whom he considered worthy rivals." - Harry Kroto, chemist.
  
  "Although Rick [Richard Smalley] made enormous contributions to science, I believe his worldwide contributions in making so many of us aware of the huge energy problem is even greater and longer-lasting than the beautiful science that he discovered." - Alan G. MacDiarmid.

Connections

Richard Smalley was married four times. On May 4, 1968, he married Judith Grace Sampieri. They had a son named Chad Richard Smalley, born on June 8, 1969. The marriage broke up in 1978.

From 1980 to 1994, he was married to Mary L. Chapieski.

In 1997, he married JoNell Chauvin, with whom he had a son, Preston Reed Smalley. His third marriage ended in 1998.

Thereafter, he tied the knot with Deborah Lynn Sheffield Smalley. The couple remained married until his death in 2005. From this marriage he had two stepdaughters; Eva Kluber and Alison Kluber.

Father:

Frank Dudley Smalley

Mother:

Virginia (Rhoads) Smalley

Spouse:

JoNell Marie Chauvin

Spouse:

Mary Lynn Chapieski

Spouse:

Judith Grace Sampieri

Spouse:

Deborah Lynn Sheffield Smalley

colleague:

Harold Kroto

Son:

Chad Richard Smalley

(born June 8, 1969)

Son:

Preston Reed Smalley

(born August 8, 1997)

colleague:

Robert Floyd Curl

colleague:

James Heath

colleague:

Yuan Liu

colleague:

Sean O’Brien

References

• Wires of Wonder: Q&A with Richard E. Smalley
• Scientific American Volume 285
  2001