The term ‘Buckyball’ was coined by Sir Harold Kroto who grew up in Lancashire and studied at Sheffield University. Kroto or Krotoschiner (Polish mother and German father) was one of the minds behind the team that discovered the C60 fullerene and actually coined the term Buckyball as an homage to Buckminster Fuller, who’s work he admired and shares structural similarities.
In Oct 2010 Kroto will be participating in the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will be able to enjoy informal conversation with a Nobel Prize winning Scientist over lunch.
The first dome that could be called “geodesic” in every respect was designed just after World War I by Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, for a planetarium to house his new planetarium projector. The dome was patented, constructed by the firm of Dykerhoff and Wydmann on the roof of the Zeiss plant that opened to the public in July 1926.
Some 30 years later, R. Buckminster Fuller named the dome “geodesic” from field experiments with artist Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College in 1948 and 1949. Snelson and Fuller worked together in developing what they termed “tensegrity,” an engineering principle of continuous tension and discontinuous compression that allowed domes to deploy a lightweight lattice of interlocking icosahedrons that could be skinned with a protective cover.
Although Fuller was not the original inventor, he developed the intrinsic mathematics of the dome, thereby allowing popularization of the idea — for which he received a U.S. patent in 1954.
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