Carbon fiber, as they named it, was made by spinning graphite into a fiber. By rolling sheets of this material up, with the fibers running lengthwise, they could take advantage of the huge strength and stiffness within the sheets. The weakness, as with pure graphite, still lay in the material’s structural dependence on van der Waals forces, but this was overcome by encasing the fibers in an epoxy glue. A new material was born: carbon fiber composite.
