The long history that starts from graphite and reaches modern graphene

Abraham Gottlob Werner was born in Wehrau, Prussia, present-day Poland, on September 15, 1749 in a family that was employed in the mining industry, in fact his father worked in a foundry in the same country.

Werner followed in his family footsteps during his studies and enrolled at the Freiberg Mining Academy, and then obtained a specialization in Paleontology at the University of Leipzig in 1771 .

His interest in rocks manifested so early that in 1774 he published a descriptive manual of mineralogy, which was considered the first modern manual on the subject.

In 1775 he was appointed inspector and professor of Mineralogy Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, later becoming a member of some European scientific institutions.

His interest in graphite was immediately marked and he studied its formation, birth and conservation of deposits in Europe.

He discovered that graphite was made up of plant remains and carbon which, due to the pressure of the sediments (lower than that which gives rise to diamonds) and the temperature between 1500 and 3000 degrees centigrade became, after a long process, graphite.

Today we know that the main deposits of graphite are found in Madagascar, in Russia, in Sri Lanka, Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Slovakia and the USA.

Werner was always accompanied in his life by poor health and died in Dresden on June 30, 1817.

Graphite is used to make pencils, as a refractory material, as a lubricant, as a dye, in brushes for rotating electric machines, in many electrical applications and in the atomic energy industry.

The manipulation of graphite has recently led to the discovery of the use of graphene, which is made up of two-dimensional sheets of graphite, sensing the many qualities contained in this product.

Graphene is not only a material completely transparent to light (97.7%), but also the thinnest material in the world that we know and, despite its thin, it can be stretched up to 20% of its length, maintaining a theoretical breaking load of 130 GPa.

According to its discoverers, winners of the Nobel Prize in 2010, a single sheet of graphene (therefore a sheet 1 atom high) 1 square meter wide would be capable of supporting the weight of a 4 kg cat, weigh 0.7 mg and be virtually invisible.

Another interesting aspect is that graphene is capable of storing hydrogen: if deformed, it forms "crests", with hydrogen tending to accumulate on the tips of such crests.

To release the gas it is necessary to eliminate the deformation of the graphene, so that the hydrogen is expelled from the crests. These results are the result of the long work carried out by the Adanascelo team on the island of Hokkaido, Japan.

But the experimental use of graphene has spread to many sectors, from construction, to sports, to lighting systems, to desalination plants, with the aim to apply the technical advantages of the product to replace other less performing materials.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.