Sir Harold Kroto – obituary

Kroto and his colleagues carried out this procedure over 11 days in 1985 and found that clusters of 60 carbon atoms, C60, were the most abundant and stable, suggesting a symmetrical structure. They proposed that C60 was a “truncated icosahedron cage”, a football-shaped polyhedron with 20 hexagonal surfaces and 12 pentagonal surfaces, the same structure as the geodesic dome designed by the American architect R Buckminster Fuller for the 1967 Montreal World Exhibition.

The researchers duly named the newly discovered structure buckminsterfullerene.

Until this breakthrough, there were only two known forms of pure carbon: graphite and diamond. The discovery of the unique structure of C60 was proposed in the journal Nature and, although it was scientifically satisfying, it had a mixed reception. No physicist or chemist had predicted that carbon could be found in such a symmetrical form, but subsequent experiments carried out by Kroto and others have proved that the spherical geodesic structure is, in fact, correct.

The study of C60 and other fullerene clusters has opened up an entirely new branch of chemistry, with potential applications ranging from rocket fuel to anti-Aids drugs; new discoveries in the field continue to fill the scientific journals. Yet the story of the discovery of fullerenes was a classic case of “useless” pure science producing something unexpected and of huge commercial potential.

Harold Walter Kroto was born on October 7 1939 at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, where his mother had been evacuated on the outbreak of war.

His family name at that time was Krotoschiner (his father changed it to Kroto in 1955) after a town in Silesia, where his Jewish father’s family originated. Both parents, though, were born in Berlin and had come to Britain as refugees in the 1930s.

In Germany, Kroto’s father Heinz had run a family business printing faces and other images on toy balloons. During the war, he was interned on the Isle of Man as an “enemy alien”. Kroto’s mother and her baby were moved to Bolton in 1940.

After the war his father became a toolmaker at an engineering company in the town and, in 1955, set up his own small factory again, making balloons as well as printing them. Young Harold spent much of his school holidays working at the factory.

Kroto was educated at Bolton School Boys' Division, where, at first, he particularly enjoyed geography, gymnastics, woodwork and art, showing a particular talent for graphic design, and played the Duke of York to Ian McKellen’s Henry V in the school play.

By A-level, however, he had gravitated towards chemistry, physics and maths and, encouraged by his chemistry teacher Harry Heaney (later Professor at Loughborough) he applied to study the subject at Sheffield University.

There, alongside his studies, Kroto played for the university tennis team, reaching the Universities Athletics Union finals twice, and served as president of the Students’ Athletics Council. He also learnt the guitar well enough to play in student folk clubs and became art editor of the student magazine, designing the magazine’s covers and advertising posters, and also painting murals and backdrops for student balls. As a research student he won a Sunday Times book-jacket design competition.

As his university course progressed, Kroto’s interests shifted from organic chemistry to quantum chemistry and spectroscopy and, after graduating with a First, he remained at Sheffield to do a doctorate in the Spectroscopy of Free Radicals produced by Flash Photolysis – with Richard Dixon.

After two years’ postdoctoral research in electronic and microwave spectroscopy at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, followed by a year at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he returned to Britain to take up a postdoctoral position at Sussex University, where he quickly became a lecturer. He was elected a professor there in 1985 and from 1991 to 2001 he was a Royal Society Research Professor.

Kroto helped to build Sussex University into a centre of research using microwave spectroscopy, a science which, thanks to the growth of radioastronomy, could be used for analysing the structure of gas in space. He became particularly interested in giant stars and interstellar gas clouds where, to his surprise, he found evidence of very long and abundant carbon chain molecules.

Convinced that these carbon compounds had been formed in stellar atmospheres, not in clouds, he determined to find some way of simulating the chemical reactions involved and got in touch with Richard Smalley at Rice University in Houston, Texas, whose research was in cluster chemistry, an important part of chemical physics.

Smalley had designed and built a special laser-supersonic cluster beam apparatus able to vaporise almost any known material into a plasma of atoms. Their collaboration would lead to the discovery of fullerene.

Returning to Sussex, Kroto continued to work on the implications of the discovery of fullerene for fundamental chemistry and for the understanding of carbon based materials. Lean and energetic, with a quick, agile mind, he was a famously engaging communicator and his lectures at Sussex University were always packed.

In later life he became a fervent evangelist for science, travelling the world to extol the virtues of chemistry to audiences of all ages.

In 1995, with Patrick Reams, a BBC producer, he inaugurated the Vega Science Trust to create science films for television – an attempt to reawaken excitement in scientific discovery and communicate an understanding of scientific concepts and principles – and to document and record the achievements of living British scientists for posterity.

But as time went on, he became increasingly angry about what he saw as the short-sighted approach of government and funding bodies to back pure scientific research, and concerned at the decline in scientific culture in Britain’s schools and universities. In 2004, he sent his honorary degree back to Exeter University in protest at its decision to close its chemistry department.

Later the same year, fed up with bureaucratic paperwork and the difficulties of getting support for “pure” research (only hours before receiving news of his Nobel prize he had been refused a £100,000 grant by the engineering and physical science research council for further research into fullerenes), he accepted an invitation to carry on his work at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

His reluctant departure from these shores prompted much soul-searching among the scientific community, but little action from a government seemingly obsessed with utilitarian, business-oriented science.

Kroto rejoiced in calling himself a “devout atheist”, confessing that he was “bewildered” by people who still believed in God. “However,” he explained, “I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to, and many may not have the strength of character to accept it.”

In 2010 he was one of more than 50 signatories (including Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins) to a letter to The Guardian protesting that Pope Benedict XVI should not be given the “honour” of a state visit.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1990 and won numerous awards including the Longstaff Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1993, the Michael Faraday prize in 2001 and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 2004. He was knighted in 1996.

Harry Kroto married, in 1963, Margaret Hunter, who survives him with their two sons.

Professor Sir Harold Kroto, born October 7 1939, died April 30 2016