Dating back to the nineteenth century there are reports of these particles by authors such as Jacques-Louis Bournon in 1813 for marcasite, and Gustav Rose in 1831 for gold. In mineralogy and the crystal twinning literature they are referred to as a type of cyclic twin where a number of identical single crystal units are arranged in a ring-like pattern where they all join at a common point or line. The name fiveling comes from them having five members (single crystals). The older literature was mainly observational, with information on many materials documented by Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt in his Atlas der Kristallformen. Drawings are available showing their presence in marcasite, gold, silver, copper and diamond. New mineral forms with a fiveling structure continue to be found, for instance pentagonite, whose structure was first decoded in 1973, is named because it is often found with the five-fold twinning.