It was the kind of discovery that only happens in chemistry once every few decades-if you're very lucky. In 1985, Richard E. Smalley and several collaborators at Rice University made a form of carbon never seen before. The arrangement of carbon atoms in each molecule resembled a tiny geodesic dome, so the researchers called the material "buckminsterfullerene" after the architect who had popularized the shape. With its neatly structured network of atoms, the "buckyball" quickly became the poster molecule for nanotechnology. Then in the early 1990s, researchers made another startling discovery: you could also make hollow tubes out of the same carbon structure. Carbon nanotubes had many times the strength of steel, the electrical conductivity of copper, and were the diameter of a DNA molecule. They were, in short, perfect materials for building and wiring the nano world.

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