Discovery
of Carbon-Milestones
Carbon has been known
since ancient times in the form of soot, charcoal, graphite and diamonds.
Ancient cultures did not realize, of course, that these substances were
different forms of the same element.
In 1772, French
scientist Antoine Lavoisier pooled resources with other chemists
to buy a diamond, which they placed in a closed glass jar. They focused the
Sun’s rays on the diamond with a remarkable giant magnifying glass and saw the
diamond burn and disappear. Lavoisier noted that the overall weight of the jar
was unchanged and that when it burned, the diamond had combined with oxygen to
form carbon dioxide. He concluded that diamond and charcoal were made of the
same element – carbon.
In 1779, Swedish
scientist Carl Scheele showed that graphite burned to form carbon
dioxide and so it must be another form of carbon.
In 1796, English chemist
Smithson Tennant established that diamond is pure carbon
and not a compound of carbon and it burned to form only carbon dioxide. Tennant
also proved that when equal weights of charcoal and diamonds were burned, they
produced the same amount of carbon dioxide.
In 1855, English chemist
Benjamin Brodie produced pure graphite from carbon, proving
graphite is a form of carbon.
Although it had been
previously attempted without success, in 1955 American scientist Francis
Bundy and co-workers at 'General Electric' company finally
demonstrated that graphite could be transformed into diamond at high
temperature and high pressure.
In 1985, Robert Curl, Harry Kroto and Richard Smalley discovered fullerenes, a new form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in soccer-ball shapes. The most recently discovered allotrope of carbon is graphene, which consists of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons. Graphene’s discovery was announced in 2004 by Kostya Novoselov and Andre Geim, who used adhesive tape to detach a single layer of atoms from graphite to produce the new allotrope. If these layers were stacked upon one other, graphite would be the result. Graphene has a thickness of just one atom.
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