Abstract

Carbon nanotubes play a large part in manuscript topics submitted to CARBON and, of course, to many other journals in almost every field of research and technology. Many of them start with referring to " the discovery of carbon nanotubes by Iijima in 1991…". Such a recurrent sentence makes a statement which is misleading, often wrong, and neglectful of the scientists who preceded this citation on the path to understanding carbon materials. A former Editor of CARBON, H.P. Boehm, raised this question some years ago [1], however it has unfortunately received little attention. Fifteen years after carbon nanotubes suddenly supplanted fullerenes as the hottest research topic of the Twentieth Century, we consider it time to provide a clear picture of who should really be given the credit for the discovery of carbon nanotubes. We have here a double goal: inform young scientists who believe that the nanotube story started in the nineties, and thus (hopefully) make the work of the Editors easier.