I seem to remember reading an article years ago in which one of the discoverers of buckyballs claimed that the structure of buckminsterfullerenes was originally worked out on the back of a napkin at Goode Company BBQ, a smokehouse near the Rice University campus. However, I can’t find any cite online for this fact. Does anybody else remember reading something similar?
As my aunt was doing her PhD research on buckyballs and buckytubes in 1991 or 1992 and Google was founded in 1998, I’m dubious.
What’s Google’s founding date got to do with anything? The OP was asking about “Goode”, not “Google”.
My misread.
The structure of the basic buckyball (C60) was predicted in the 1960s in Japan, then probably independently proposed again in the US in 1970. These proposed structures predate the production of buckyball in 1985 by Rice. It’s feasible that the connection between the structure and the produced molecule were made at the BBQ near Rice, but the structure was proposed before systematic production started. (Fullerenes can occur naturally, but I don’t think that plays into the discussion.)