Roger Bacon, a physicist at Union Carbide's Parma Technical Center (Cleveland, Ohio), accidentally discovers in 1958, while trying to determine carbon's triple point using an electric-arc furnace, the formation of flexible, near-perfect graphite filaments — up to 5 microns in diameter and 3 cm long — growing in vapor phase on the negative electrode. These "graphite whiskers" exhibit extraordinary tensile strength and stiffness for their weight, and constitute the documented starting point of the modern high-performance carbon fiber industry. Bacon himself estimated at the time a production cost of ten million dollars per pound, a figure illustrating how experimental and artisanal the initial process was. Unlike the carbon filaments used decades earlier in incandescent light bulbs (Joseph Swan, 1860; Thomas Edison, 1879) — which are carbonized threads for lighting, with no structural function or comparable mechanical properties — Bacon's finding is the genuine origin of carbon fiber as a structural reinforcement material, with no direct technological relation to those early lighting filaments.