- [Cory] It may not look like it,
but I'm creating one of the strongest
and most versatile materials on Earth, graphene.
You've probably heard buzz about it.
Graphene made big waves back in 2004,
and it's knocked around science news ever since.
- A global race for graphene.
- You know, it's not just limited to one little thing.
- One of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century.
- [Man] Graphene could be the key
to a lot of mind blowing technology.
- But that was almost 15 years ago.
Where are all of the graphene wonders that we were promised?
The bulletproof armor, the graphene circuitry,
the ultra light airplanes, the graphene medicine,
a space elevator?
- [Female Voiceover] So the next time man walks on the moon,
maybe he'll take the elevator to get there.
- Clearly, a lot of the buzz never went anywhere.
But graphene does exist.
Engineers have gone to making one fleck at a time,
to producing it by the barrelful.
- Do you want to try to pick it up?
- Sure.
- [Cory] So the graphene revolution we were promised
may already be in motion.
- You can stretch and pull on 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 up a soccer ball on just one atomic layer,
and that's insane.
- [Cory] Joseph Meany is an analytical chemist,
who coauthored a book about the promise of graphene.
He explained to us that graphene is just carbon,
like coal, or graphite, or diamond.
The difference is in how the carbon atoms
are bonded together,
and in the unique shape the material takes.
- [Joseph] So it's just a single atom sheet,
there's no z dimension to speak of in graphene.
And these atoms of carbon are arranged in interlocking
or tessellated hexagons, kind of like a chicken wire.
The bonds between the carbon atoms
are actually extremely strong.
- Back in 2004, researchers in the UK discovered
that they could produce graphene
with some shockingly simple tools.
A hunk of a particular type if graphite,
and some standard issue tape.
- [Joseph] Yeah, it was just a very large hunk
that you could hold in your hand, and they took the tape
and put it down onto the surface of the graphite,
and just lifted it off.
- From there, they used chemicals to dissolve away the tape,
and they were left with tiny flakes of graphene
with remarkable properties.
It's impossibly light, yet incredibly strong.
It's flexible, and it's a highly efficient conductor
of electricity.
The researchers won a Nobel Prize in 2010,
and today in 2018, literally everything around us
is built or enhanced with graphene.
Okay, not quite.
- [Phillip] Yeah, I think it's very easy for the media
and for the press to seize on any new
scientific or technological development
as something that's going to be be transformative,
you know, scientists come with these amazing new materials
and then everything changes,
and of course it never really happens that way.
- [Cory] Phillip Ball is a reporter who's written a bunch
about the graphene hype machine.
And I asked him to throw some cold water on the story.
- [Phillip] Hello?
- Hi, is this Phillip Ball?
- [Phillip] It is, yes.
- Hi, how are you doing?
This is Cory calling from the Verge,
- [Phillip] Hi, hello, Cory.
Of course with any new technology,
the reality is it generally takes years to develop it.
It would be unreasonable to expect graphene
to transform our lives overnight.
- The uphill battle for any new material
is that it can't just be better than existing technology,
it has to be much better.
Phillip says that's the issue with graphene
replacing silicon in electronics.
- [Phillip] Certainly there are companies
who are exploring its use
as a conductive electronic material.
But of course we already have such materials,
and graphene has really got to have big advantages
over what we have already if it's going to displace
what is already well established, mature, technology.
- But that's not to say that graphene hasn't gone anywhere
in 15 years.
We found some engineers who are making materials
with graphene today, materials that could one day
even end up in space ships.
The company is Vorbeck Materials,
and their president, John Lettow,
showed me how far they've come with graphene mass production
and he gave us a free sample.
Literally it's like floating in the vial.
- And so if you open that up,
you can take out, this is a bag of about 1.5 kilograms
of graphene fits in a 30 gallon container.
So it's very light, sort of very voluminous,
in it's sort of raw state.
- [Cory] Vorbeck is introducing
its manufactured graphene powder
to all sorts of industrial and consumer products,
like RFID tags, clothing, and even rubber.
So you take the graphene, you blend it into rubber,
and the rubber they use, sort of big blenders almost,
that beat the rubber around, mix the graphene into it,
and what you get by mixing the graphene with the rubber
is very high temperature capabilities,
and also very high strength.
- Thinking about an application for this,
you talked about space ships right?
- Right.
- You're going through extremely high temperature
to extremely cold temperature in out er space,
you don't want rubber that would expand and contract
and lose its strength over time.
- Exactly.
- This material won't do that?
- That's exactly right.
- [Cory] And on the electronics front,
Vorbeck has created graphene based inks
that can be printed en mass on standard printing presses.
When printed on water proof fabrics, they can be washed,
heated, ironed, wrinkled, and twisted,
without damaging the circuits.
This is extremely promising for the future
of graphene based wearable electronics,
which John says we should be on the lookout for in 2019.
- What we really hope is that we can walk into a room,
five years from now, and most people in that room
will have an article of clothing
that has graphene wearable electronics in it.
- So there are big things 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.
- [Phillip] It's this sort of long standing notion
of a wonder material.
I think it does go back to the dawn of the plastic age
in the 1920s and 1930s.
You know, you saw all the same kinds of promises
made for them,
that they were going to be these wonder materials
that would do everything.
- I just want to say one word to you, just one word.
- Yes sir?
- Are you listening?
- Yes sir, I am.
- Plastics.
- [Phillip] Plastics, you know,
they clearly had a huge impact
and they do all kinds of useful things,
but they have their limitations too.
I guess it was really a sort of reference
to this sort of longstanding idea of wonder materials
that were you know, going to solve every problem.
- Graphene might not be a wonder 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
whether it's graphene or not.
What we want them to know is that this thing,
this device that you're using, works better,
for longer, than anything else you can get.
And whether it has graphene in it,
whether they advertise it and use that hype
as part of the marketing or not,
is sort of completely irrelevant.
It just is better.
- Hey everyone, thanks for watching.
If you have any ideas for a material
you'd like us to check out, please let us know
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Thanks!