{"id":396493,"date":"2026-01-29T07:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T07:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/396493\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T07:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T07:48:08","slug":"did-edison-make-a-wonder-material-125-years-before-its-official-creation-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/396493\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Edison Make a ‘Wonder Material’ 125 Years Before Its Official Creation? : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inventor Thomas Edison<\/a> is known for being ahead of his time, and a new study could add another notch to his overachieving belt.<\/p>\n

Researchers at Rice University suggest Edison may have inadvertently created graphene<\/a> in 1879 \u2013 a “wonder material” that wasn’t officially made until 125 years later<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Being a sheet of carbon just a single atom thick, graphene<\/a> is deceptively simple. But it’s super strong<\/a>, lightweight, and flexible, and it boasts properties that can make it a superconductor<\/a> and a playground for exotic quantum states<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Graphene was first theorized<\/a> in 1947 by Canadian physicist Philip Wallace, and successfully isolated in 2004 by physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. The breakthrough won the pair the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But according to the new research, they might have been beaten to the punch by Edison \u2013 though he wouldn’t have noticed.<\/p>\n

Related: Hidden Detail in Crotch Solves a 500-Year-Old Leonardo Da Vinci Mystery<\/a><\/p>\n

Ironically, the discovery that Edison may have made graphene accidentally also emerged by accident. One of the main ways to produce graphene is a process called flash Joule heating<\/a> \u2013 basically, zapping a resistive carbon-based material to heat it to over 2,000 \u00b0C (3,632 \u00b0F).<\/p>\n

“I was trying to figure out the smallest, easiest piece of equipment you could use for flash Joule heating, and I remembered that early light bulbs often used carbon-based filaments,” says<\/a> Lucas Eddy, materials scientist at Rice University.<\/p>\n

To test whether Edison may have unwittingly created graphene during early testing of his stable light bulbs, the Rice team sourced similar-styled bulbs, complete with carbon-rich bamboo filaments.<\/p>\n

These bulbs were hooked up to a 110-volt DC power source and switched on for 20 seconds at a time, before the filaments were examined closely.<\/p>\n

\"DidThe carbon-based filament before (A) and after (B) being switched on for 20 seconds. A comparison of unused and used filaments can be seen in (C). (Eddy et al., ACS Nano 2026)<\/p>\n

Under a microscope, the team could see that the filament had changed color, from gray to silver. Spectroscopy confirmed that parts of the filament had transformed into graphene.<\/p>\n

That graphene would have been short-lived though: Unless it was scraped off the filament after short bursts of use, the material would have been converted into boring old graphite with continued use of the bulb.<\/p>\n

\"Audition<\/a><\/p>\n

Even if Edison had realized what he’d made, graphene probably wouldn’t have been much use to him at that point in history. But it does raise some interesting questions.<\/p>\n

Related: Scientists Discover New Class of Quantum States in Graphene<\/a><\/p>\n

“Finding that he could have produced graphene inspires curiosity about what other information lies buried in historical experiments,” says<\/a> James Tour, chemist at Rice University.<\/p>\n

“What questions would our scientific forefathers ask if they could join us in the lab today? What questions can we answer when we revisit their work through a modern lens?”<\/p>\n

The research was published in the journal ACS Nano<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inventor Thomas Edison is known for being ahead of his time, and a new study could add another…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[249,2302,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-396493","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-msft-content","9":"tag-physics","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}