In a Rice University lab, a black fiber the diameter of a human hair spools into a beaker of ether. Made up of pure nano­tubes, the strand is the culmination of nearly a decade of experimentation. Chemical engineer Matteo Pasquali and his colleagues have spun nanotubes into fibers several hundred meters long, proving that commercially useful manufacturing techniques can be developed to produce macroscale materials from these cylindrical molecules of pure carbon.

Making carbon nanotubes into fibers was a particular dream of the late Rice professor Richard Smalley, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the spherical carbon molecules called buckyballs. Individual nanotubes have remarkable properties: they're lightweight, they're strong, and they can be electrically conductive. But assembling them into large structures with these properties has been difficult.