carbon sphere -- may well rank with the discovery of the benzene ring -- a carbon ring -- in the 19th century. The benzene ring (C6H6) brought the huge field of aromatic chemistry into being, and with it a enormous number of industrial applications.

But what was this "discovery," and how did it come about?

In a sense, like carbon itself, buckyballs also came to us from outer space. Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Kratschmer were astrophysicists studying interstellar soot. Huffman worked for the University of Arizona in Tucson, Kratschmer for the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. In 1982, these two gentlemen were superheating graphite rods in a low-pressure helium atmosphere, trying to replicate possible soot-making conditions in the atmosphere of red-giant stars. Their experiment was run in a modest bell-jar zapping apparatus about the size and shape of a washing-machine. Among a great deal of black gunk, they actually manufactured miniscule traces of buckminsterfullerene, which behaved oddly in their spectrometer. At the time, however, they didn't realize what they had.

In 1985, buckministerfullerene surfaced again, this time in a high-tech laser-vaporization cluster-beam apparatus. Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, two professors of chemistry at Rice University in Houston, knew that a round carbon molecule was theoretically possible. They even knew that it was likely to be yellow in color. And in August 1985, they made a few nanograms of it, detected it with mass spectrometers, and had the honor of naming it, along with their colleagues Harry Kroto, Jim Heath and Sean O'Brien.

In 1985, however, there wasn't enough buckminsterfullerene around to do much more than theorize about. It was "discovered," and named, and argued about in scientific journals, and was an intriguing intellectual curiosity. But this exotic substance remained