1. Introduction

Transformation of known and the creation of new are always intrigued to synthetic chemists. Not long ago, elemental carbon was not even a figurant as starting material. This position promoted fiercely after the family of carbon allotropes enlarged by the welcoming new members to the core family "graphite and diamond." Unlike to graphite and diamond, fullerenes are spherical molecules with solid-state structure and are soluble in various solvents that opened a new era for chemical manipulation of carbon-based materials [1].

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Few discoveries like this are captured the attention of scientist and the general public alike as much as the discovery of these architecturally esthetic molecules. But the popularity of fullerenes in science is not merely due to esthetics. Years of intense research activity showed that C60 is a powerful building block to be used in materials science and medicinal chemistry [2, 3]. What put fullerenes in the heart of nanotechnology today is the association of several extreme properties, such as outstanding mechanical, thermal, electronic, and electrical properties, coupled with chemical robustness, which have spurred a broad range of applications that provides new research possibilities for scientists, particularly in terms of electron-acceptor proficiency, both in the solid state and in solution [4]. An entirely new discipline called as "fullerene chemistry" emerged [5–7].
