Richard Smalley was born June 6, 1943, in Akron, Ohio, the last of four children. His mother was Esther Virginia (Rhoads) and his father was Frank Dudley Smalley, Jr., a successful publisher of trade journals. When Smalley was three, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended public schools. His mother finished a college degree while he was in high school, providing an interesting comparison and opportunity for exchanging ideas. His father had a basement workshop and a penchant that Smalley inherited for building and disassembling electromechanical devices. According to Smalley:
The principal impetus for my entering a career in science, however, was the successful launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the then-current belief that science and technology was going to be where the action was in the coming decades.
He took a chemistry class during his junior year in high school with his older sister, and it became a competition. He was hooked on science, especially chemistry.
His aunt, Dr. Sara Jane Rhoads, who was a professor of chemistry at Columbia University, suggested he attend Hope College in Holland, Michigan. After two years, Smalley transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He graduated in 1965, and accepted a job with Shell Chemical Company in Woodbury, New Jersey.
In 1968, Smalley married Judith Grace Sampieri. During that year, he was also accepted at Princeton University where he studied under Elliot Bernstein. He received an M.S. in 1971. Smalley then began postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, with Lennard Wharton and Donald Levy. Together, they developed supersonic beam laser spectroscopy. Smalley received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973.
In 1976, Smalley joined the faculty at Rice University, in Houston, Texas, as an assistant professor in the chemistry department. He continued to research laser spectroscopy. In 1985, working with Robert F. Curl and Harold Kroto on red stars, Smalley discovered a new form of carbon. The shape of the carbon clusters resembled the geodesic dome houses designed by R. Buckminster Fuller. They named the new form buckminsterfullerene, and the C60 carbon clusters became known by the nicknames of fullerenes or buckeyballs. In 1996, Smalley shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.
Smalley now researches nanotubes, the tubular form of fullerenes. He sees the future using buckeytubes in electronics, especially in highly miniaturized computer chips, as a means to break through the <100 nanometer barrier. He also sees the possibility of a chemical solution to molecules that construct other molecules according to precise parameters. In 1982, he became the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair in Chemistry. In 1990, Smalley was named professor in the
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