Graphite: Carbon the Gray

Abstract

The gray color graphite is an allotrope of carbon, known since antiquity and has been named from the Greek verb graphein. The name was given by Abraham Gottlob, in the year 1789. The old European name is plumbago, meaning black lead. The name lead (black lead) used to mean that graphite is being used in lead pencils and should not be mixed up with the metal lead (Pb, as we can see in the periodic table of the elements). These two are completely different materials, because lead (Pb) is a metal whereas graphite is a semimetal [1--3]. Indeed, the term graphite designates mineral planar sheets of carbon atoms, with each atom bound to three neighbors in a noncompact, honeycomb structure, stacked regularly, with three-dimensional order [4].