Sir Harold W. Kroto

In 1963, while working for his PhD at the University of Sheffield, Harold Kroto married Margaret Henrietta Hunter, also a student of the same university. The couple had two sons; Stephen and David.

He was also a lover of film, theatre, music and art. He had produced and published many art work and graphic designs, for which he had also earned many prizes and awards.

He was an atheist and a patron of British Humanist Association, a charitable organization that represents "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs".

Harold Walter Kroto was born as Harold Walter Krotoschiner on 7 October 1939 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England. His father, Heinz Krotoschiner, was Jewish refugee from Berlin; but their family came from Krotoschin (now Krotoszyn) in Poland. The title Krotoschiner was derived from the town’s name.

Harold’s parents, Heinz and Edith Krotoschiner, ran a small business in Berlin. In 1937, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, Heinz Krotoschiner escaped to England. Edith followed her husband.

Subsequently, they set up a small business in London. As the Second World War broke out, Heinz was interred on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and Edith was evacuated to Wisbech, where Harold was born. In 1940, he and his mother were shifted to Bolton, Lancashire.

At the end of the war, the family settled down in Bolton. There they set up their home in the poor quarter of the town. Later, with the help of friends they opened a small balloon manufacturing factory.

In time, Harrold was enrolled at Bolton School, where his surname created a little problem and made him feel like an alien from another planet. It was a big relief when in 1955 his father changed their surname to Kroto.

In 1964, Harold Kroto began his career as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada. Here he worked with Don Ramsay on flash photolysis/spectroscopy and discovered a singlet-singlet electronic transition of the NCN radical. Later in 1965, he worked on the rotational spectrum of NCN3 with Cec Costain.

In 1966, he received another postdoctoral position at the Bell Laboratory in New York, U.S.A. Here he worked with Yoh Han Pao on liquid phase interactions by laser Raman spectroscopy.

In 1967, he returned to England and joined the faculty of School of Chemistry & Molecular Sciences (MOLS) at University of Sussex as a tutorial fellow. Fortunately, he was made a permanent lecturer within a short time.

By 1970, Kroto completed his work in the electronic spectroscopy of gas phase free radicals and rotational microwave spectroscopy. He also built He-Ne and argon ion lasers to study intermolecular interactions in liquids and with it he carried out theoretical calculations.

In 1974, after a lot of haggling, Kroto finally got his own spectrometer. Previously, the team had to make monthly visit to Reading for that. Now with their own spectrometer in Sussex they started studying carbon chain species HC5N. The work was the starting point of his discovery of C60 more than ten years later.

Kroto is best remembered for his discovery of buckminsterfullerene, a work he undertook with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. They vaporized graphite in an atmosphere of helium. This generated cluster of carbon molecules, most of which contained 60 atoms. They next began to study these C60 molecules. Finally, they found that the atoms are bonded together in a symmetrical hollow structure, resembling a sphere. Kroto, who had been interested in graphic art, named it buckminsterfullerene after American architect R. Buckminster Fuller, because the molecules reminded him of the geodesic dome designed by Fuller.