 At a meeting of the Materials Research Society in 1992, Dr. T. Ebbesen (NEC) described to a spellbound audience his discovery and characterization of carbon nanotubes.This event sent those in attendance and others downwind of his presentation into their laboratories to reproduce and push those discoveries forward.Using the same or similar tools as those used by Huffman and Kratschmer, hundreds of researchers further developed the field of nanotube-based nanotechnology.