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It turned out that the Exxon experiments had also created small numbers of buckyballs, but those researchers had overlooked them in their data.

The strength and stability of buckyballs — in 60-atom form and bigger — has offered dozens of possible uses because of their shape and electron-bonding properties.

He recalls that in the mid-1980s, when scientists first created “buckyball” spheres made of 60 carbon atoms, “there was the same degree of skepticism, despite all the evidence.”

With three bonds, it transforms into sheetlike graphite or graphene, 3D nanotubes, or even soccer ball–shaped buckyballs.

Historically, materials that revolutionized technology, including tungsten light-bulb filaments, penicillin, Teflon and C60 buckyballs, were found through a combination of intuition, trial and error and lucky mishaps.