“…In any case, after a flurry of work in the 1950s [8][9][10] and 1970s, [11,12] followed by somewhat of a hiatus, the question of carbyne and polyynes emerged again in the 1990s, sparked in part by marvelous acetylenic structures reported by the groups of, for example, John Gladysz, [13,14] Uwe Bunz, [15,16] Yoshito Tobe, [17,18] Yves Rubin, [19] Larry Scott, [20] and, of course, François Diederich, [21][22][23][24] as well as others. [25] In 1997, I started at the University of Alberta with my own research group, and my thoughts returned quickly to polyynes, and how one might form polyynes.…”