Why graphene hasn’t taken over the world...yet

- It may not seem like it, but I am creating one of the strongest and most versatile materials on Earth,

graphene

. You've probably heard rumors about it. Graphene made a big splash in 2004 and has been in the science news ever since. - A global race for

graphene

. - You know, it's not limited to just one small thing. - One of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. - Graphene could be the key to many amazing technologies. - But that was almost 15 years ago. Where are all the graphene wonders we were promised? Bulletproof armor, graphene circuits, ultralight aircraft, graphene medicine, a space elevator? -So, the next time man walks on the moon, maybe he'll take the elevator to get there. - Clearly, many of the rumors never went anywhere.

But graphene exists. Engineers have started manufacturing one pot at a time, producing it in barrels. - Do you want to try to pick it up? - Sure. - So, it is possible that the graphene revolution that we were promised is already underway. - You can stretch it and pull it, and in fact, a good way to visualize it is that if you had a big enough sheet of pure graphene, you could hold a soccer ball in a single atomic layer, and that's crazy. - Joseph Meany is an analytical chemist and co-author of a book on the promise of graphene.

He explained to us that graphene is just carbon, like carbon, graphite or diamond. The difference is in how the carbon atoms are joined together and the unique shape the material takes. - So it's just a single atom sheet, there is no z dimension to speak of in graphene. And these carbon atoms are arranged in interlocking or tessellation hexagons, sort of like chicken wire. The bonds between carbon atoms are actually extremely strong. - In 2004, researchers in the United Kingdom discovered that they could produce graphene with some surprisingly simple tools. A piece of a particular type, if graphite, and some standard tape. - Yeah, it was just a really big piece that you could hold in your hand, and they took the tape, put it on the surface of the graphite, and just took it off. - From there, they used chemicals to dissolve the tape and obtained tiny flakes of graphene with remarkable properties.

It is incredibly light, but incredibly strong. It is flexible and is a very efficient conductor of electricity. The researchers won the Nobel Prize in 2010 and today, in 2018, literally everything around us is built or enhanced with graphene. Okay, not entirely. - Yes, I think it is very easy for the media and the press to take advantage of any new scientific or technological development as something that is going to be transformative, you know, scientists come with these amazing new materials and then everything changes, and of course. Of course, it never really happens that way. - Phillip Ball is a journalist who has written extensively about the graphene machine.

And I asked him to pour some cold water on the story. - Hello? - Hello, is this Phillip Ball? - That is if. - Hello how are you? This is Cory calling from Verge. - Hello, hello, Cory. Of course, with any new technology, the reality is that it usually takes years to develop. It would be unreasonable to expect graphene to transform our lives overnight. - The uphill battle for any new material is that it can't simply be better than existing technology, it has to be much better. Phillip says that's the problem with graphene replacing silicon in electronics. - Surely there are companies that are exploring its use as conductive electronic material.

But of course, we already have those materials, and graphene really has to have big advantages over what we already have if it is to displace what is already a mature and well-established technology. - But that doesn't mean that graphene

hasn

't disappeared in 15 years. We found some engineers who today are making materials with graphene, materials that could one day even end up in spaceships. The company is Vorbeck Materials and their president, John Lettow, showed me how far they have come with mass production of graphene and gave us a free sample. It's literally like floating in the vial. - And if you open that up, you can take it out, this is a bag of about 1.5 kilograms of graphene that fits in a 30-gallon container.

So it is very light, very bulky, in its raw state. - Vorbeck is introducing its manufactured graphene powder into all types of industrial and consumer products, such as RFID tags, clothing and even rubber. So you take the graphene, you mix it with rubber, and the rubber they use, almost kind of big blenders, that beat the rubber, mix the graphene with it, and what you get when you mix the graphene with the rubber is very high. Temperature capabilities and also very high resistance. - Thinking of an application for this, you talked about spaceships, right? - Good. - You are going from extremely high temperatures to extremely cold temperatures in outer space, you don't want rubber that expands, contracts and loses its strength over time. - Exactly. - Isn't this material good for that? - That's exactly right. - And in the electronics space, Vorbeck has created graphene-based inks that can be mass printed on standard printing presses.

When printed on waterproof fabrics, they can be washed, heated, ironed, wrinkled and twisted without damaging the circuitry. This is extremely promising for the future of graphene-based wearable electronics, something John says we should keep an eye on in 2019. - What we're really hoping for is that we can walk into a room, within five years, and that most of the people in it The room will have a piece of clothing containing graphene wearable electronic devices. - So great things are happening with graphene, we just have to be patient and we can't believe everything we read about it. And for what it's worth, we've been here before. - It's a kind of long-standing notion of a wonderful material.

I think it goes back to the dawn of the plastic era in the 1920s and 1930s. You know, you saw the same kind of promises made for them, that they were going to be these wonderful materials that would do everything. - I just want to tell you one word, just one word. - Yes sir? - You are listening? - Yes sir, I am. - Plastics. - Plastics, you know, clearly had a huge impact and do all kinds of useful things, but they also have their limitations. I guess it was actually kind of a reference to this kind of long-standing idea of ​​wonder materials that, you know, would solve all problems. - Graphene may not be a wonderful material, any more than plastic is, but the way John sees it, if graphene works well on its own merits, the hype won't matter at all. - We really don't want our customers to care if it's graphene or not.

What we want you to know is that this, this device that you are using, works better and longer than anything else you can get. And if it contains graphene, whether they advertise it and use that advertising as part of the marketing or not is completely irrelevant. It's just better. - Hello everyone, thanks for watching. If you have any ideas for a material you'd like us to review, let us know in the comments below and don't forget to subscribe to our new Verge Science YouTube channel, where we post a video every week. . Thank you!