Edison may have unknowingly created graphene with his 1879 light bulb
According to new research from Rice University, while Edison’s goal was simply to create a longer-lasting electric lamp, the extreme conditions created inside Edison’s carbon filament bulbs in those early light bulbs may have inadvertently produced the same conditions needed to create graphene. The study by James Tour and his former graduate student Lucas Eddy, who was the lead researcher, shows that when the authors recreated Edison’s original incandescent light bulb, they also discovered that the same electrical heating caused by the filament could convert the carbon filament into turbostratic graphene, the name for a type of graphene with loosely stacked atomic layers. Graphene is a single layer of carbon arranged in a two-dimensional honeycomb shape. It is incredibly strong, highly conductive, and transparent. While P.R. Wallace, a physicist in the 1940s, had proposed the theoretical existence of graphene, it was not until the early 2000s that graphene was isolated and characterized by Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene. Edison’s Filaments And Extreme …
