Carbon nanotube
Nature publishes Sumio Iijima’s landmark multiwalled carbon-nanotube paper
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The three pages that launched nanotube science never used the word “nanotube” in the title — and clear images of carbon tubes had already appeared in a Russian journal four decades earlier.
“Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon,” pages 56–58
Nature issued Sumio Iijima's paper under that title in volume 354, issue 6348, on 7 November 1991.
Iijima, a microscopist at NEC's Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan, reported needle-like carbon tubes produced by arc-discharge evaporation and growing at the negative end of the electrode.
Electron microscopy and electron diffraction showed that each needle contained coaxial graphitic tubes with helically arranged carbon hexagons — the structures now called multiwalled carbon nanotubes.
Two to fifty tubes nested in one needle
The needles measured a few to a few tens of nanometres across, and each held between two and about 50 graphitic walls.
Iijima had gone looking in the hard cylindrical deposit on the negative graphite electrode because the recent production of fullerenes by arc evaporation made that residue worth putting under a transmission electron microscope.
What the paper delivered was a detailed structural account of highly ordered nested graphitic tubes, tied directly to the new fullerene research program.
Why “the first report” is disputed
The publication date and contents are solid; the label is not. Peer-reviewed histories document carbon tubes imaged in 1952 by Radushkevich and Lukyanovich at roughly 50 nm diameter, hollow nanoscale carbon fibers in 1976, and further tubular-carbon work before 1991.
On that reading, Iijima's distinctive contribution was the unusually detailed structural identification and the enormous research response it drew, not an uncontested first sighting.
The 1991 structures were multiwalled. Single-walled nanotubes were reported independently in 1993 by groups at NEC and IBM.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 4 sources not yet audited Date disputed
How this was checked
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Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The publication date and contents are solid. What is disputed is the “first report” label: peer-reviewed histories document carbon tubes in 1952, hollow nanoscale carbon fibers in 1976 and additional tubular-carbon work before 1991.
- Iijima’s distinctive contribution was unusually detailed structural identification and the enormous research response, not an uncontested first sighting of any carbon nanotube.