Discovery of carbon

Carbon has been known since prehistory in the form of soot, charcoal, graphite and diamond, so its discovery is a matter of recognition rather than isolation. In 1789 the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier listed carbon as an element in his Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, the book that laid the foundations of modern chemical nomenclature. Earlier experiments by Lavoisier and later work by the English chemist Smithson Tennant in 1797 showed that diamond, burned in oxygen, yields only carbon dioxide and so is a pure form of carbon like graphite. The name comes from the Latin carbo, meaning coal. Carbon forms the chemical backbone of all known life, and further forms such as fullerenes and graphene were found in 1985 and 2004.

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