It was first intentionally prepared in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University.

Kroto, Curl and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in the discovery of cage-like fullerenes.

In the early 1970s, the chemistry of unsaturated carbon configurations was studied by a group at the University of Sussex, led by Harry Kroto and David Walton.

In the 1980s a technique was developed by Richard Smalley and Bob Curl at Rice University, Texas to isolate these substances.

The discovery of buckyballs was serendipitous, as the scientists were aiming to produce carbon plasmas to replicate and characterize unidentified interstellar matter.

In this technique, carbon soot is produced from two high-purity graphite electrodes by igniting an arc discharge between them in an inert atmosphere (helium gas).

[11] Solid C70 crystallizes in monoclinic, hexagonal, rhombohedral, and face-centered cubic (fcc) polymorphs at room temperature.

[2][12] All phases of C70 form brownish crystals with a bandgap of 1.77 eV;[2] they are n-type semiconductors where conductivity is attributed to oxygen diffusion into the solid from atmosphere.