Two allotropes of carbon: graphite (left) and diamond (right)
5 May 2023
Carbon, atomic number six and symbol C, is, at least for life on earth, the most important of the elements. It has been known since antiquity in the forms of soot, charcoal, and graphite, although its status as an element, as well as our current names for it like carbon and graphite, date only to the late eighteenth century.
In 1772 Antoine Lavoisier was the first to recognize that charcoal, graphite, and diamond were the same substance. And the name carbon was coined by Louis-Bernard Guyton, Baron de Morveau in 1787 in a treatise on chemical nomenclature:
Quand on a vu former l'air fixe par la combinaiſon directe du charbon & de l'air vital, à l'aide de la combustion, le nom de cet acide gazeux n'est plus arbitraire, il se dérivé nécessairement de son radical, qui est la pure matière charbonneuse; c'est donc l'acide carbonique, ses composés avec bases font des carbonates; &, pour mettre encore plus de précision dans la dénomination de ce radical, en le distinguant du charbon dans l'acception vulgaire, en l'isolant, par la pensée, de la petite portion de matière étrangère qu'il recèle ordinairement, & qui constitue la cendre, nous lui adaptons l'expression modifiée de carboné, qui indiquera le principe pur, essentiel charbon, & qui aura l'avantage de le spécifier par un seul mot, de manière à prévenir toute équivoque.
(When we have seen the formation of fixed air [i.e., carbonic dioxide] by the direct combination of carbon and vital air [i.e., oxygen], with the aid of combustion, the name of this gaseous acid is no longer arbitrary, it is necessarily derived from its radical, which is pure carbonaceous matter; it is therefore carbonic acid, its compounds with bases form carbonates; &, to put even more precision in the denomination of this radical, by distinguishing it from coal in the vulgar sense, by isolating it, theoretically, from the small portion of foreign matter that it usually conceals, & which constitutes the ash, we adapt to it the modified term of carbon, which will indicate the pure principle, the essence of coal, and which will have the advantage of specifying it by a single word, so as to prevent any ambiguity.)
Morveau’s work was translated into English the following year.
Carbon appears naturally in two forms or allotropes, diamond and graphite. Both forms have been known since antiquity, but the English names are more recent, with diamond dating to the mid fourteenth century and graphite to the late eighteenth century.
Our present-day word diamond is from the Middle English diamaunt. That is borrowed from the Old French, which in turn comes from the medieval Latin diamas and medieval Greek διαμάντε (diamante). The classical Latin word is adamas, which also gives us adamant. The addition of the dia- prefix was probably to distinguish the gem from the more common magnetic lodestone, which in medieval Latin was also referred to as adamas.
Graphite, on the other hand, is borrowed from the German graphit, which dates to 1789 in that language. The modern name is based on the Greek γράϕειν (graphine, to write) because of its use in pencils. Graphite appears in English by 1796. Older names for graphite include black lead and plumbago, which is literally “black lead” in Latin, both dating to the sixteenth century.
A new allotrope of carbon was artificially created in the 1980s. Dubbed buckminsterfullerene, the first of this type consisted of sixty carbon atoms joined together as a truncated regular icosahedron of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons, forming a symmetrical spheroidal structure suggestive of the geodesic dome or a soccer ball. It was so named in honor of architect Buckminster Fuller, a popularizer of the use of geodesic domes in architecture. The creation of buckminsterfullerenes was announced in the journal Nature on 14 November 1985:
Thus a search was made for some other plausible structure which would satisfy all sp2 valences. Only a spheroidal structure appears likely to satisfy this criterion, and thus Buckminster Fuller’s studies were consulted. An unusually beautiful (and probably unique) choice is the truncated icosahedron depicted in Fig. 1 [i.e., a photo of a soccer ball].
[…]
We are disturbed at the number of letters and syllables in the rather fanciful but highly appropriate name we have chosen in the title to refer to this C60 species. For such a unique and centrally important molecular structure, a more concise name would be useful. A number of alternatives come to mind (for example, ballene, spherene, soccerene, carbosoccer), but we prefer to let this issue of nomenclature be settled by consensus.
Buckminsterfullerene is a mouthful indeed, and Harry Kroto, one of its creators, commented in 1987 on the naming and coined the shorter fullerene to designate the class of allotrope of which buckminsterfullerene is just one:
It was called buckminsterfullerene because the geodesic ideas associated with the constructs of Buckminster Fuller had been instrumental in arriving at a plausible structure. It is convenient to retain this name for C60 and use the name fullerene generically for the class of all carbon cages composed of twelve 5-membered and an unrestricted number of 6-membered rings consistent with the constructs discussed in the original patents.
But even earlier, Kroto and his associates had more playfully dubbed them buckyballs. That name is attested in an Associated Press piece of 24 December 1985 on the discovery:
Several Rice University scientists noticed two months ago that their laser machine was producing unusual spherical carbon molecules they had never seen before.
The researchers quite by accident had found carbon 60, which they nicknamed “Buckyballs,” a discovery that has taken the international scientific community by storm.
[…]
The spheres were named buckminsterfullerene for the late architect Buckminster Fuller.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. diamand, n.
Associated Press. “Scientists Find Odd Molecule.” El Paso Times (Texas), 24 December 1985, 8-A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. diamandus, diamans, diamas, n., adamas, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Kirwan, Richard. Elements of Mineralogy, vol. 2 of 2, second edition. London: P. Elmsly, 1796, 58. Archive.org.
Kroto, H.W., et al. “C60: Buckminsterfullerene.” Nature, 318.6042, 14 November 1985, 162–63.
Kroto, H.W. “The stability of the Fullerenes Cn, with n = 24, 28, 32, 36, 50, 60 and 70.” Nature, 329.6139. 8 October 1987, 529–30 at 529.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. diamaunt, n.
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, November 2022.
De Morveau, Louis-Bernard Guyton. “Mémoire sur le Développement des Principes de la Nomenclature Méthodique.” In Methode de Nomenclature Chimique. Paris: Chuchet, 1787, 44–45. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. fullerene, n.; September 2011, s.v. black lead, n.; December 2008, s.v. carbon, n.; September 2006, s.v. plumbago, n.; 1997, s.v. buckminsterfullerene, n., buckyball, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. graphite, n.
Photo credit: Robert M. Lavinsky, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.