Fullerenes. Discovery and Design

Rather strangely, it was somehow overlooked at the time that a very similar design had also been suggested by the famous American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who patented in 1951 an original framework for building 

D Arcy Thompson. Copyright (1992) Cambridge University Press) 

Until recently, these ideas seemed to be too crazy to be sold to any truly serious scientist. These speculations passed away almost unnoticed with other equally cute but hardly practical suggestions of Daedalus . So it came later as a real surprise that, at least in this particular fantasy, the author had actually elaborated an original design of an unprecedented molecular shape and, moreover, had made the correct guess about the possibility of using graphite as a starting material for its construction  

It became obvious that a linear carbyne structure could not be accepted as a viable explanation for the observed stability of such a huge molecule. An 

Reprinted (abstracted/excerpted) with permission from Nature, 1985,318 162. 

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