Up for auction "Nobel Prize in Chemistry" Robert Curl Signed 3X4 Color Photo. This item is certified authentic by Todd Mueller and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-4133E
Robert
Floyd Curl Jr. (born
August 23, 1933) is a University Professor Emeritus,
Pitzer–Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus, and Professor of
Chemistry Emeritus at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1996 for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene,
along with Richard Smalley (also
of Rice University) and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex. Born
in Alice, Texas, United
States, Curl was the son of a Methodist minister. Due to his
father's missionary work, his family moved several times within southern and
southwestern Texas, and the elder Curl was involved in starting the San Antonio
Medical Center's Methodist Hospital. Curl attributes his interest in
chemistry to a chemistry set he
received as a nine-year-old, recalling that he ruined the finish on his
mother's porcelain stove when nitric acid boiled over onto it. He is a graduate
of Thomas
Jefferson High School in San Antonio, Texas. His high school offered only one year of
chemistry instruction, but in his senior year his chemistry teacher gave him
special projects to work on. Curl received a bachelor of science from Rice Institute (now Rice University) in 1954. He was attracted to the reputation of both the
school's academics and football team, and the fact that at the time it charged
no tuition. He earned his doctorate in chemistry from the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1957. At Berkeley, he worked in the laboratory
of Kenneth Pitzer, then dean
of the College of Chemistry, with whom he would become a lifelong collaborator.
Curl's graduate research involved performing infrared spectroscopy to
determine the bond angle of disiloxane. Curl was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University with E. B. Wilson, where he
used microwave spectroscopy to
study the bond rotation barriers of
molecules. After that, he joined the faculty of Rice University in 1958. He inherited the equipment and graduate
students of George Bird,
a professor who was leaving for a job at Polaroid. Curl's
early research involved the microwave spectroscopy of chlorine dioxide. His research program included both experiment
and theory, mainly focused on detection and analysis of free radicals using microwave spectroscopy and tunable
lasers. He used these observations to develop the theory of their fine structure and hyperfine structure, as
well as information about their structure and the kinetics of their reactions.
Curl's research at Rice involved
the fields of infrared and microwave spectroscopy. Curl's research
inspired Richard Smalley to come to Rice in 1976 with the intention of
collaborating with Curl. In 1985, Curl was contacted by Harold Kroto, who
wanted to use a laser beam apparatus built by Smalley to simulate and study the
formation of carbon chains in red giant stars. Smalley and Curl had previously used
this apparatus to study semiconductors such as silicon and germanium. They were initially reluctant to interrupt
their experiments on these semiconductor materials to use their apparatus for
Kroto's experiments on carbon, but eventually gave in. They
indeed found the long carbon chains they were looking for, but also found an
unexpected product that had 60 carbon atoms. Over the course of 11 days,
the team studied and determined its structure and named it buckminsterfullerene after
noting its similarity to the geodesic domes for which the architect Buckminster Fuller was
known. This discovery was based solely on the single prominent peak on
the mass spectrograph, implying
a chemically inert substance that was geometrically closed with no dangling bonds. Curl was responsible for determining the
optimal conditions of the carbon vapor in the apparatus, and examining the
spectrograph. Curl noted that James R. Heath and Sean C.
O'Brien deserve equal recognition in the work to Smalley and
Kroto. The existence of this type of molecule had earlier been theorized
by others, but Curl and his colleagues were at the time unaware of this. Later experiments
confirmed their proposed structure, and the team moved on to synthesize endohedral fullerenes that
had a metal atom inside the hollow carbon shell. The fullerenes, a class of molecules of which buckminsterfullerene
was the first member discovered, are now considered to have potential
applications in nanomaterials and molecular scale
electronics. Robert Curl's 1985 paper entitled "C60:
Buckminsterfullerine", published with colleagues H. Kroto, J. R. Heath, S.
C. O’Brien, and R. E. Smalley, was honored by a Citation for Chemical
Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American
Chemical Society, presented to Rice University in 2015. The discovery of fullerenes was recognized in
2010 by the designation of a National
Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society at
the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice
University in Houston, Texas. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1996,
Curl took a quieter path than Smalley, who became an outspoken advocate of
nanotechnology, and Kroto, who used his fame to further his interest in science
education, saying, "After winning a Nobel, you can either become a
scientific pontificator, or you can have some idea for a new science project
and you can use your newfound notoriety to get the resources to do it. Or you
can say, 'Well, I enjoy what I was doing, and I want to keep doing that.'"