Simon Rees reports that at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris a wondrous new metal wowed the crowds ... aluminum. The enthusiasm surrounding it belied the decades of research taken to reach that point, with the big breakthrough occurring when Henri-Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville started producing the material on a commercial scale. However, aluminum proved phenomenally expensive. French Emperor Napoleon III is said to have honored special dinner guests by providing them with aluminium cutlery. Everyone else had to make do with gold or silver. The price only fell with the development of the Hall-Heroult process and cheaper energy later in the century. Aluminum had been struggling to win market share until that point. There is nothing harder than to make people use a new metal, Sainte-Claire Deville once rued. Some of aluminum early difficulties might be familiar for those working with graphene. Many thousands of hours have been spent studying the material over the past decade, with an avalanche of related patents testimony to this.
There is also debate about how scaled-up production, making the material affordable and finding the right first-entry markets, are similar conundrums aluminum faced all those years ago. The graphene recent history only stretches back to 2004 when Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov famously used Scotch tape to lift graphite from a sample. They then repeatedly folded and unfolded the tape to isolate the graphene. It comprises just one element, carbon, and has superb strength. It is more than 200 times stronger than steel by weight. Graphene is transparent, with a hexagonal, honeycomb-like formation at a layer just one atom thick. It is also light-weight, stretchable and flexible. In addition, it is a semi-metal and can take on magnetic qualities. It is impermeable and is the best thermal and electrical conductor yet known. Cambridge University and others have been working on copper wiring that utilizes graphene. Good read...
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