This past weekend, British chemist Sir Harry Kroto passed away at the age of 79. He is the co-discoverer of buckyballs, a form of carbon that is made up of 60 atoms and shaped like "a hollow soccer ball." The discovery won Kroto and his team the Noble Prize in chemistry. This cover story, written by Edward Edelson and originally published in the August 1991 issue of Popular Science, explores how buckyballs were accidentally discovered and the future of possibilities to those scientists in 1991.

A revolution in chemistry is taking place in a small room in a converted mining building in Tucson, Ariz., where a woman wearing a soiled smock and a face mask is painstakingly scraping soot off a metal container.

Although it's not too exciting to look at, this is the world's first production facility for a newly discovered, exotic material, dubbed "buckyball," that has such extraordinary potential that chemists and physicists around the country are lining up to pay $1,200 a gram for the stuff, roughly one hundred times the price of gold.