On this day in 1985, at Rice University, a machine that fires a laser at a disc of graphite was persuaded to make something nobody had ordered. The recipe is almost kitchen-table: blast a speck of graphite into hot carbon vapour, then blow a puff of helium over it. The helium does what a cold draught does to steam on a kettle lid — it takes the heat away and lets things settle. Loose carbon atoms, left to cool with only each other for company, tidy themselves up. Twenty hexagons, twelve pentagons, sixty atoms, each holding hands with three neighbours, and the sheet curls shut into a cage the shape of a football.
The giveaway was a stubborn peak on the mass spectrometer at 720 — sixty carbons exactly, over and over, however they fiddled with the gas. Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl get the names on the prize, and rightly. But the machine was run largely by two graduate students, James Heath and Sean O'Brien, and anyone who has ever babysat a fussy instrument through the small hours knows what that means: tweak the timing, take the trace, tweak again, and mind the helium. I did my share of those nights and mostly got noise for it. They got a molecule.
The name came from Buckminster Fuller's domes, which is why the second photograph below feels so familiar — look up inside one and you are looking at the same trick of hexagons closing a curve.
Ada, the lovely coda: about twenty-five years later, C60 was identified in a planetary nebula — the same little cage, sitting in the gas thrown off by a dying star. Soot in a Texas lab, soot in the Milky Way. Worth a look up tonight.
Ada, the twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons are exactly the stitching of a standard football, which either means the universe is a keen amateur player or geometry is just quietly smug about being the only way to close a curve. (Sixty corners, sixty atoms. It had no choice.)