Monday, April 23, 2018

GENESIS

You called me in to your office some time in 1991, I think it was Fall. You explained that you wanted me to work on 3-,4-connected networks and you gave me the book by Wells "Three Dimensional Nets & Polyhedra" fatefully at that time. By 1992 I was trying to build things with Framework Molecular Modeling kits..........first I tried phenacite because carbon nitride was very popular then.........but as hard as I tried I could not figure out how to build that lattice........I have never figured it out to this day. Then, by mid 1992, as I moved to Moravia, I remembered you had told me that diamond was built from cyclohexane and I knew that graphene was built from benzene........so some time in 1992 I thought about building a model from cyclohexadiene building blocks. I think I first built the glitter model in Fall, 1992 after I had moved in to the York House in Moravia. I think I first built the model sitting at my desk in your research offices area. Tom Ward was there and he "painted" my early model with correction fluid. Later in 1992 I showed you the model in a group meeting and explained that it is related to the mineral Cooperite. You had several lattice models of mineral structures (including Cooperite) and other models in the research office space and that is how I figured that out. At about the same time, in late 1992 and early 1993, I figured out and built the isoglitter Framework Molecular Model........and I brought the 2 models down to the geology building. I then worked out the coordinates and made drawings of the structures and their substructures and the unit cells.........I was working in Moravia then and in your research space and in the geology building. This all happened in the early months of 1993. By about April, 1993 I drafted the first "Disclosure Document" on glitter and isoglitter.........there followed about 2 other "Disclosure Documents" mailed to the USPTO in the Summer, 1993........I mailed you a copy of one of these "Disclosure Documents" in the Summer, 1993 to where you were visiting in Brazil. You sent me back a letter through Cornell campus mail that you liked what I wrote about in the document and that you wanted me to give a talk about it in the group and we would move to write a paper on it........So when you came back from Brazil I gave a talk in group meeting and explained about the "Cooperite-like" network and the significance of spiroconjugation in the net. But you never followed up about isoglitter at that time. Then by mid-1993 the trouble started to happen and there was a break during Fall, 1993. In Spring, 1994 we started to write the glitter paper..........you forgot about isoglitter at this time. Then we completed the paper together and sent it off to JACS and after some minor revisions it was accepted and published in 1994. Years later in 2012 I published the "isoglitter" model in JOMC..........18 years after I discovered this network. As I later found out from the RCSR the isoglitter lattice is related to the mineral "Moganite" like the glitter lattice is related to the mineral "Cooperite". I believe there are a number of MOF's that have the isoglitter arrangement and there are of course a number of MOF's with the glitter arrangement. The RCSR net symbols are "jeb" and "tfi" respectively.