Kroto, Sir Harry

The British chemist Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto (1939-) was one of the three winners to share the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fullerenes, which are carbon atoms bound in the form of a structure that resembles a soccer ball. Kroto is currently a member of the Chemistry Faculty at Florida State University.

Sir Harry Kroto was born on October 7, 1939, in a small city called Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, England. Both of his parents were born in Berlin, Germany. His surname at birth was Krotoschiner; in 1955, his father changed it to Kroto. This name has its origins in the Polish town of Silesia. Because his father was Jewish, the family had to leave Berlin in 1930s with the onset of World War II, and moved to Britain. In 1955, his parents set up a small balloon factory in Bolton, Lancashire, and he spent much of his school vacations working at the factory. Although his parents were poor, they did everything they could to further Harry's education, and he attended Bolton School, with (in his own words) “exceptional facilities and teachers.” Kroto's favorite toy was a Meccano set, which he stated was a true engineering kit and teaching toy. “This is the sensitive touch needed to thread a nut on a bolt and tighten them [Page 386]with a screwdriver and spanner just enough that they stay locked, but not so tightly that the thread is stripped or they cannot be unscrewed,” he stated.

Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto is a British chemist and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Kroto calls himself a devout atheist. Early in life, he enjoyed art, geography, gymnastics, and woodworking. Later, he gravitated toward chemistry, physics, and math. His classes with Dr. Wilf Jary increased his interest in chemistry, and this fascination grew when he was introduced to organic chemistry by chemistry teacher Harry Heaney, now Professor at Loughborough in the United Kingdom. At the University of Sheffield, he played on the university tennis team, but left because he wanted to continue some form of art. He designed the covers of the student magazine, Arrows. Kroto was introduced to spectroscopy by Richard Dixon, and became interested in quantum mechanics. Kroto received a first-class honors B.Sc. degree in chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1961, and his Ph.D. (on the spectroscopy of free radicals produced by flash photolysis) from the same university in 1964. In 1963, he married Marg (Margaret) Henrietta Hunter.

In 1964, the couple moved to Ottawa, Canada. Kroto did his postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada, and at Bell Laboratories in the United States. In 1967, he began working at the University of Sussex, earned a full professor title in 1985, and was Royal Society Research Professor from 1991 to 2001.

In the 1970s, Kroto's research group searched for carbon chains in interstellar space. Between 1975 and 1978, they found two long molecules: cyanobutadiayne, and cyanohexatriyne. Kroto grew interested in laser spectroscopy, and joined Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at Rice University in Texas. He decided to use Rice's apparatus to simulate the carbon chemistry that occurs in the atmosphere of a carbon star. In September 1985, they found that carbon stars also produce C60 species, along with long carbon chains. For this finding, Kroto, Curl, and Smalley received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996.

...