At a glance, diamond and plumbago are totally different. Diamond is a valuable gem reserved for fancy jewellery. Plumbago is found in common pencil lead. Yet diamond and plumbago are made of the similar stuff: carbon atoms. The change is how those atoms are arranged. The sheets of carbon atoms in plumbago peel apart easily. That’s why plumbago rubs easily off the tip of a write and onto daily. In diamond, carbon particles are locked together in a mineral lattice. That rigid design, which is the similar in all directions, stretches diamond its strength and toughness.
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