Carbon was discovered long ago. The common natural forms of carbon are diamond, carbon and graphite.

Countless carbon compounds are indispensable substances in our daily life. Products range from nylon and gasoline, perfume and plastics to shoe polish, DDT and explosives.

A brief history of carbon discovery;

Carbon can be said to be one of the earliest elements that human beings came into contact with and used. Since human beings appeared on the earth, they have been in contact with carbon. Because lightning burning wood will leave charcoal, after animals are burned to death, bone carbon will remain. After human beings learned to make a fire, carbon has become a permanent "partner" of human beings, so carbon has been called an element in ancient times.

It is impossible to find out the exact date when carbon was discovered. Carbon played an important role in the development of ancient phlogiston theory. According to this theory, carbon did not exist in the form of elements at that time, but was a pure phlogiston. When studying the combustion of coal and other chemicals, lavoisier first pointed out that carbon is an element, which can be seen from the table of elements compiled by 1789.

There are many allotropes of carbon in nature ── diamond, graphite, graphene, carbon nanotubes, carbon 60 and hexagonal meteorite diamond (blue silk diamond). Diamonds and graphite have long been known. Lavoisier did the experiment of burning diamond and graphite, and determined that these two substances burned to produce CO2, so he came to the conclusion that diamond and graphite contained the same "basis", called carbon.

Lavoisier first thought that carbon was an element. Carbon 60 was discovered in 1985 by Harry Kraut, a chemist at Rice University in Houston, USA. It is a spherical stable carbon molecule composed of 60 carbon atoms, and it is the third allotrope of carbon, second only to diamond and graphite.

The Latin name of Carbon comes from the word carbon, which means "coal". It first appeared in the book Chemical Nomenclature edited by lavoisier and others in 1787. The English name of Carbon is carbon.