The Wikipedia article on carbon nanotubes states plainly that their discoverers true identity is a subject of some controversy. L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich published clear images of 50 nanometre diameter hollow carbon tubes in the Journal of Physical Chemistry of Russia in 1952, but the work went largely unnoticed in the West because it was published in Russian during the Cold War, when Soviet scientific journals were hard for Western researchers to access. Sumio Iijima of NEC reported similar tube structures in 1991 in a widely read Western journal, and most academic and popular literature since has credited him with the discovery, even though a later editorial by Monthioux and Kuznetsov argued Radushkevich and Lukyanovich should be credited instead for the earlier finding that carbon filaments could be hollow at nanometre scale.
What would resolve this A settled history-of-science judgment, backed by a close reading of the 1952 Russian paper against the 1991 Iijima paper, on whether Radushkevich and Lukyanovich actually observed and reported the same structure now called a carbon nanotube, or a related but distinct filament; absent that, the field has settled on Iijima by convention rather than by a resolved priority claim.
OpenHistory of science and materials science historiographyCarbon Nanotube (Wikipedia)