Richard E. Smalley

Richard Smalley was married four times. On May 4, 1968, he married Judith Grace Sampieri. They had a son named Chad Richard Smalley, born on June 8, 1969. The marriage broke up in 1978.

From 1980 to 1994, he was married to Mary L. Chapieski.

In 1997, he married JoNell Chauvin, with whom he had a son, Preston Reed Smalley. His third marriage ended in 1998.

Richard Errette Smalley was born on June 6, 1943, in Akron, Ohio into a close-knit family with Midwestern values. His father, Frank Dudley Smalley Jr, was a self-made industrious man, equally dedicated to his family. Starting his career as a carpenter he retired as the CEO of several trade journals.

His mother, Esther Virginia (nee Rhoads), named him after the English king Richard the Lion Hearted; but as she was a good American, she always called him ‘Mr. President’. She was an extraordinary woman, who earned her bachelor’s degree when Richard was in his teens.

Edward was the youngest of his parents’ four children and possibly the most favorite. The three elder siblings were Clayton, Mary Jill and Linda. The family settled in the Kansas City, Missouri when Richard turned three.

At Kansas City, he spent hours collecting single celled organisms from the local pond and watching them under a microscope with his mother. She also taught him about music, painting, sculpture, architecture and mechanical drawing. From his father, he learned to build things and to fix mechanical and electronic equipments.

When the time came, he was admitted to the Southwest High School. The most significant event during this period was the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Although the incident aroused in him an interest in science, he was still an erratic student.

In 1973, even before he actually defended his thesis and received his Ph.D., Smalley joined the University of Chicago as postdoctoral fellow. Here, he worked with Donald H. Levy and Lennard Wharton to develop a supersonic beam laser spectroscopy.

Meanwhile, at Rice University in Houston, Robert F. Curl had made significant progress in laser spectroscopy. Smalley now wanted to collaborate with him and therefore, after the completion of postdoctoral work, he joined Rice in the summer of 1976 as an Assistant Professor.

Here too he set up a laser supersonic cluster beam apparatus, but it was adapted to use pulsed dye lasers in the ultraviolet. With it they could study more ordinary molecules such as benzene. Concurrently, Smalley worked to set up the Rice Quantum Institute, which was officially established in 1979.

In 1982, he was named the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor in Chemistry. Along with teaching he kept on his research work and continued improving his apparatus.

Sometime in the early 1980s, after intense research work, his team found a way to use a pulsed laser, directed into a nozzle, to vaporize any material. Moreover, it could now be used to study the properties of nanometer scale particles, which consist of precise number of atoms.

Smalley is best remembered for his creation of the laser supersonic cluster beam apparatus and subsequent discovery of the third allotropic formation of carbon, called the Buckminsterfullerene or ‘buckyballs’. Until then, graphite and diamond were the only two known allotropes of carbon.

The discovery opened a new field of research called fullerene chemistry and contributed significantly to the development of nanotechnology. Later he also became the leading advocate of this technology. It was partly because of him that the National Nanotechnology Initiative; a United States federal government program, was established in 2003.