When was pure carbon discovered

Making coke became imperative, and beer brewing with coke started in Derbyshire for good. Of course, after the bulk supply of beer was ensured, coke could then also be used to smelt metals, make swords and later guns, and all the other hardware needed for conquering the world. It took a while, however. It took even longer before that caught on - only around pretty much all blast furnaces were run on coke.

Some charcoal fanatics, however, where not convinced even then and kept their smelters on charcoal well into the 20th century. The Chinese did it the wrong way around. They started to make coke already in the 9th century AD but didn't use it for making first beer and then iron.

They somehow got confused and started smelting iron with coke right away. In the 11th century they had a major iron industry running that was based on coke and not just charcoal. That kept them so busy that they never got around to making decent beer. Poor suckers, it was downhill ever since. They could have conquered the world quite easily in the 15th century, long before the Spaniards and Portuguese made their bid, because they had superior hardware and ships, and many other advanced things like live-in concubines.

Fortunately for us , they didn't have the balls beer needed for some conquering. Now look at the British and the Germans.

They focussed on beer for quite a while - and the British eventually did conquer most of the world and they still feel good about that!

We Germans weren't quite that successful but at least we tried. The Americans today have some success, but their conquering-the-world efforts get rather mixed reviews. I blame it on the quality of their beer. Graphite is the stable phase of carbon with a hexagonal lattice. It is not a simple hexagonal close-packed structure but a bit more complicated as shown below. The bonds in the hexagonal plane are very strong just like in diamond, while the bonds between the planes are very weak.

That's why it is very easy to deform graphite in directions parallel to the hexagonal planes and very difficult in directions perpendicular to it. That allows applications that are breathtakingly different: Use poly-crystalline graphite. Whenever you press or pull on it, some areas shift easily and stick to the contact material. This is great for making pencils or lubricants. Use monocrystalline graphite in long fibres oriented in the hexagonal plane. When you pull at the fibres, you are trying to break diamond bonds and that is tough to do.

Now protect your fibres from forces at right angles by encasing them in some epoxy. You have made carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer or plastic CFRP or CRP with a strength-to-weight ratio that exceeds the best steels by far.

The name " graphite " was coined by one Abraham Gottlob Werner in from what else? This already gives a hint that there was some confusion as to the nature of the stuff in pencils. People thought for a long time that natural graphite was some lead mineral. Graphite is quite essential to modern technology. It is not only good for pencils, as a lubricant, or for CFRP; it is an electrical conductor that can take enormous temperatures it doesn't melt but becomes directly gaseous around 3.

That's why it is used in the high-temperature "electro" smelting of difficult elements like silicon. Graphite may be considered as the highest grade of coal above anthracite and therefore is found in small quantities wherever coal is found. It was used pretty much throughout history as "black paint", it seems, e. Personally, I'm not sure if the graphite paint found on old pottery resulted from using "true" graphite or just soot.

After firing the pots, the result could be about the same. Graphite proper came into its own after a huge deposit of extremely pure and soft stuff was discovered in or possibly somewhat earlier in the Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England.

The local yokels used it for marking sheep and probably didn't worry much about what that soft black stuff actually could be. A somewhat more advanced use coming up a bit later was to line the molds for cannon balls with this graphite, resulting in rounder, smoother balls that could be fired farther.

The military guys did wonder about what that useful black stuff could be, and promptly confused it with lead or some of the more common lead ores like galena. That is why graphite was known for a long time as "lead" or " plumbago " based on the Latin "plumbum" for lead.

This error survived to some extent up to the present day. In German, a pencil is still called "Bleistift", literally "lead pen". Archeologists also confused lead and lead ore. Granted that graphite, lead and galena look similar, one could at least distinguish graphite from the two others easily because the difference in specific weight is rather obvious, you might think.

Yes, but to everybody before - roughly - , the notion of chemical elements was unknow. Things that were similar were thought to be about the same. The differences were assigned to the presence or absence of "vital juices", "spirits" or "priciples" of this or that. Graphite in many aspects is far more similar to lead or lead ore then to diamond, or soot. I'm quite sure that even today it would be far easier to persuade most people that graphite is related to lead and not to diamond.

Soot and Carbon Black. Soot is that fine black stuff that remains in the air from burning something, and that the chimney sweep takes out of your chimney on a regular base. You only can avoid it in very "clean" fires. It results from the "incomplete combustion of a hydrocarbon", for example when a candle burns wax.

Put a glass plate over a candle flame and you catch the soot in the air. It is part of what we call "smoke" and accounts for a lot of sick people, especially in countries where open fires are the standard for cooking. Soot consists of rather small below nm particles of carbon plus some dirt.

This particles might agglomerate to some extent, forming chains and God knows what, and at least parts of them consist of amorphous carbon. I'm sure, however, that you will find all other forms of carbon too, if you search long enough. Atomic structure of graphitized carbon black; HRTEM picture The parallel lines are small graphite nano crystals; you look at the hexagonal planes "edge-on". Source: Obscure old Russian text book from A.

Kitaigorodsky; actual source not identified. Soot, made unintentionally by you via burning something, should not be confused with carbon black that is made intentionally by burning something. Carbon black is rather pure carbon that serves as raw material for important carbon-based products. It is, for example, used as pigment in your toner cartridge, and it is what makes care tires black. World production is around 10 Mio.

Make it very hot and it graphitizes as shown above. And don't confuse "carbon black" with Black Carbon - look it up yourself! Ancient man used soot for painting himself, for tattooing, painting caves, whatever. It was not High-Tech and thus is not very interesting to us. Modern man like me and my colleagues used very pure carbon black for a while in experiments designed to make very pure silicon via " electro-smelting of difficult elements ".

That also needed very clean silicon dioxide SiO 2. It didn't really work but that is another story. Working with the stuff makes everything including you quite black, too. I have never done anything quite that dirty again during my career, and that includes convincing my kids that the shortcuts I proposed on major hikes would bring us home pronto, not to mention running a major university faculty as Dean.

History of Putting Things Together. You must admit that anybody not familiar with the basics of chemistry and the periodic table would declare you to be completely nuts if you would propose that all the stuff described above is one and the same basic substance.

Before about , "anybody not familiar" and so on would simply have been everybody minus a handful of fledgling scientists. It was Robert Boyle who suspected in that there were more than just the four classical elements that the ancients had postulated. He endorsed the view of elements as the undecomposable constituents of material bodies and made a distinction between mixtures and compounds.

Nevertheless, he was also an alchemist and a racist and believed in the transmutation of metals - making gold from lead, in other words. Graphene is a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. It's the strongest material known while still being ultralight and flexible. And it conducts electricity better than copper. Mass-producing graphene is a challenge, though researchers in April reported that they could make large amounts using nothing but a kitchen blender.

If scientists can figure out how to make lots of graphene easily, the material could become huge in tech. Imagine flexible, unbreakable gadgets that also happen to be paper-thin.

Carbon has come a long way from charcoal and diamonds, indeed. A carbon nanotube CNT is a minuscule, straw-like structure made of carbon atoms. These tubes are extremely useful in a wide variety of electronic, magnetic and mechanical technologies. The diameters of these tubes are so tiny that they are measured in nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter — about 10, times smaller than a human hair.

Carbon nanotubes are at least times stronger than steel, but only one-sixth as heavy, so they can add strength to almost any material, according to nanoScience Instruments. They are also better than copper at conducting electricity and heat. Nanotechnology is being applied to the quest to turn seawater into drinking water. In a new study, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLNL have developed a carbon nanotube process that can take the salt out of seawater far more efficiently than traditional technologies.

For example, traditional desalination processes pump in seawater under high pressure, sending it through reverse osmosis membranes. These membranes then reject all large particles, including salts, allowing only clean water to pass through. However, these desalination plants are very expensive and can only process about 10 percent of a county's water needs, according to LLNL.

The trio accidentally synthesized these three-dimensional forms of carbon molecules in the laboratory while trying to simulate the high-temperature, high-pressure conditions in which stars form. Scientists hypothesized that fullerenes also exist naturally in the universe.

Becker, who earlier discovered the presence of fullerenes in deposits at the site of the Sudbury impact crater in Ontario, Canada, and her colleagues were able to document naturally occurring fullerenes by exploiting a unique property characteristic of organic molecules. Unlike their pure-carbon cousins, which maintain a solid state, fullerenes can be extracted in an organic solvent. Becker crushed a piece of the Allende meteorite, demineralized the sample with acids, and used the organic solvent to extract fullerenes from the residue.

The scientists found not only the C60 and C70 molecules believed to be most prevalent, but also significant quantities of C to C molecules. This is the first discovery of higher fullerenes in a natural sample.

The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Specific heat capacity is the amount of energy needed to change the temperature of a kilogram of a substance by 1 K. A measure of the stiffness of a substance.

It provides a measure of how difficult it is to extend a material, with a value given by the ratio of tensile strength to tensile strain. A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material.

It is given by the ratio of the shear stress to the shear strain. A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance. It is given by the ratio of the pressure on a body to the fractional decrease in volume. A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. It is defined as the equilibrium pressure exerted by the gas produced above a substance in a closed system. This Site has been carefully prepared for your visit, and we ask you to honour and agree to the following terms and conditions when using this Site.

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Fact box. Glossary Image explanation Murray Robertson is the artist behind the images which make up Visual Elements. Appearance The description of the element in its natural form. Biological role The role of the element in humans, animals and plants. Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially. Uses and properties. Image explanation.

There are a number of pure forms of this element including graphite, diamond, fullerenes and graphene. Diamond is a colourless, transparent, crystalline solid and the hardest known material. Graphite is black and shiny but soft.

The nano-forms, fullerenes and graphene, appear as black or dark brown, soot-like powders. Carbon is unique among the elements in its ability to form strongly bonded chains, sealed off by hydrogen atoms. These hydrocarbons, extracted naturally as fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas , are mostly used as fuels.

A small but important fraction is used as a feedstock for the petrochemical industries producing polymers, fibres, paints, solvents and plastics etc. Impure carbon in the form of charcoal from wood and coke from coal is used in metal smelting. It is particularly important in the iron and steel industries. Graphite is used in pencils, to make brushes in electric motors and in furnace linings. Activated charcoal is used for purification and filtration. It is found in respirators and kitchen extractor hoods.

Carbon fibre is finding many uses as a very strong, yet lightweight, material. It is currently used in tennis rackets, skis, fishing rods, rockets and aeroplanes. Industrial diamonds are used for cutting rocks and drilling. Diamond films are used to protect surfaces such as razor blades. The more recent discovery of carbon nanotubes, other fullerenes and atom-thin sheets of graphene has revolutionised hardware developments in the electronics industry and in nanotechnology generally.

In , as a result of combusting fossil fuels with oxygen, there was ppm. Atmospheric carbon dioxide allows visible light in but prevents some infrared escaping the natural greenhouse effect. This keeps the Earth warm enough to sustain life. However, an enhanced greenhouse effect is underway, due to a human-induced rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is affecting living things as our climate changes. Biological role. Carbon is essential to life.

This is because it is able to form a huge variety of chains of different lengths. It was once thought that the carbon-based molecules of life could only be obtained from living things. However, in , urea was synthesised from inorganic reagents and the branches of organic and inorganic chemistry were united.

Living things get almost all their carbon from carbon dioxide, either from the atmosphere or dissolved in water. Photosynthesis by green plants and photosynthetic plankton uses energy from the sun to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is released to the atmosphere, fresh water and seas, and the hydrogen joins with carbon dioxide to produce carbohydrates.

Some of the carbohydrates are used, along with nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements, to form the other monomer molecules of life.

Living things that do not photosynthesise have to rely on consuming other living things for their source of carbon molecules.