The discovery that C60 Buckminsterfullerene may be created spontaneously in high yield when carbon vapor condenses indicates that graphene sheet curvature and closure is a common occurrence during carbon nucleation to form extended networks. As a consequence, a net microscopic perspective on graphitelike carbonaceous materials has evolved. This perspective is summarized here because the net observations relate to various types of nonplanar graphitic structures that promise to be useful as viable nanoscale engineering materials.

C60 Buckminsterfullerene was discovered in 1985 among the products of chemical nucleation of carbon in the gas phase. The faint whisper, embedded in the helium wind that blew a laser-initiated carbon plasma into a mass spectrometer, was interpreted as the possible signature of the elegant soccer-ball-shaped molecule. That noticed signal, which indicated that a pure 60-carbon-atom molecule might be very stable, was quite unexpected and thus a truly serendipitous discovery. The original aim of the experiments was to simulate the conditions in a red giant carbon star and particularly to probe an earlier proposal that long carbon-chain molecules might have originated in such celestial objects and might have been subsequently ejected into interstellar space. The carbon chains themselves had been discovered to be abundant in certain regions of the interstellar medium by a radioastronomy search program in the late 1970s. The molecular rotational frequencies, which formed the basis for the radio search, resulted from a spectroscopic study of cyanopolyynes that had been synthesized in the laboratory.