Letters to the Editor
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Early Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene Narrowly Missed To the Editor:
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Professors Curl, Smalley, and Kroto for their 1985 discovery of Buckminsterfullerene and other fullerenes prompts me to comment upon how narrowly this discovery was missed by another Nobel Laureate, Henry Moissan, during trie 1890s. Like many of the present fullerene researchers, Moissan was interested in the polymerization of carbon at high temperature to form soots, graphite, diamond, etc. His equipment included both the electric furnaces for which he is well-known and cold plate/flame soot deposition devices. The presence of fullerenes in soot from a limited-oxygen acetylene flame was established by Gerhardt et al. in 1987 (Chemical Physics Letters 117 (4) June 19,
1987, pp. 306-310, "Polyhedral Carbon Ions in Hydrocarbon Flames"). The solubility of CM in benzene and the use of this solvent to extract fullerenes from soot was revealed by Kratschmer et al. in 1990 (Nature, 347, Sept. 27,1990, pp. 354-358, "Solid Cm'- A New Form of Carbon"). In his book, The Electric Furnace
(English edition published in 1904 by Edward Arnold, London), Moissan describes (on page 40) the deposition of soot from an acetylene flame upon a chilled copper surface. Moissan found the soot to contain a small amount of volatile carbon compounds. The sample he describes was purified by extraction with benzene, alcohol, and ether. The extract with benzene almost certainly contained Buckminsterfullerene and is described as containing carbon-based compounds. It is a pity that the color of the extract is not given by Moissan as this would go far to confirm whether he, unknowingly or not, extracted Cm from the sample of soot. The failure of Moissan to detect and characterize the fullerenes is obviously a failure of theoretical insight at that early date. However, this researcher, using preparatory techniques very similar to today's, came very close to extracting Cw, if he did not, in fact, accomplish this without recognizing the significance of his extracts other than as a route to purify the remaining carbon soot. Brian Melody Affiliation withheld at author's request
Materials Chemistry: Subarea or Semantics? To the Editor: With all due respect to its author, was the topic of the "Materials Matters" column in the December 1996 issue of MRS Bulletin entitled, "What is Materials Chemistry?" really sufficiently substantive to merit two pages in your publication? At best, it seemed to play with the semantics and nomenclature of the fields involved while jumping on the "add 'materials' to my name" bandwagon of a few years ago. At worst, it does a mild disservice to the materials field and to chemistry by trying (I think unsuccessfully) to erect didactic divisions between fields and subfields that are supposed to strongly overlap and cooperate. To assign the micro world to chemistry and the macro world to materials science with physics relegated to property measurement is a bit simplistic. And metallurgy (of both the micro and ma
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