And there the situation languished. But in 1988, Huffman and Kratschmer, the astrophysicists, suddenly caught on: this "C60" from the chemists in Houston, was probably the very same stuff they'd made by a different process, back in 1982. Harry Kroto, who had moved to the University of Sussex in the meantime, replicated their results in his own machine in England, and was soon producing enough buckminsterfullerene to actually weigh on a scale, and measure, and purify!

The Huffman/Kratschmer process made buckminsterfullerene by whole milligrams. Wow! Now the entire arsenal of modern chemistry could be brought to bear: X-ray diffraction, crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, chromatography. And results came swiftly, and were published. Not only were buckyballs real, they were weird and wonderful.

In 1990, the Rice team discovered a yet simpler method to make buckyballs, the so-called "fullerene factory." In a thin helium atmosphere inside a metal tank, a graphite rod is placed near a graphite disk. Enough simple, brute electrical power is blasted through the graphite to generate an electrical arc between the disk and the tip of the rod. When the end of the rod boils off, you just crank the stub a little closer and turn up the juice. The resultant exotic soot, which collects on the metal walls of the chamber, is up to 45 percent buckyballs.

In 1990, the buckyball field flung open its stadium doors for anybody with a few gas-valves and enough credit for a big electric bill. These buckyball "factories" sprang up all over the world in 1990 and '91. The "discovery" of buckminsterfullerene was not the big kick-off in this particular endeavour. What really counted was the budget, the simplicity of manufacturing. It wasn't the intellectual breakthrough that made buckyballs a sport -- it was the cheap ticket in through the gates. With cheap and easy buckyballs available, the