Growing crystals tiny and large

Light bulb momentGraphene’s origin story is one for the annals of serendipitous discovery. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov used humble sticky tape to peel off the atom-thick carbon wonder material with a chicken-wire-like crystal structure. This 2004 discovery led to a Nobel Prize in Physics for the University of Manchester duo. But another genius probably beat the prizewinners to this discovery 125 years earlier. Thomas Edison may have unwittingly created graphene when he flicked on his original carbon filament bulb in 1879, according to researchers at Rice University (ACS Nano 2026, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5c12759).Lucas Eddy, a former PhD student in the laboratory of chemist James Tour, was seeking a way to mass-produce graphene. He was building on a 2020 finding in Tour’s lab that heating carbonaceous materials to 3000 K for under a second by passing a voltage through them rearranges the carbon atoms to form graphene. The Tour lab calls the method Flash Joule Heating. Eddy had a flash of inspiration as he pondered “the easiest system that puts a voltage through something,” Tour tells Newscripts. “Turns out it’s a classical light bulb. You put a voltage across the filament.”Before the modern tungsten-filament bulb took off, Edison based his bulbs on carbon filaments, and he had tested those made of cotton, cardboard, and finally bamboo. Eddy found a store in New York City that sold artisan replicas of vintage Edison-style bulbs, down to the Japanese bamboo filament. “Sure enough, he put it in a 110 V socket for 20 s,