Has Graphene found some lead for its pencil?

Concrete and batteries?

Photo by Ramakant Sharda on Unsplash

Lead pencils, the ones we used to find in school with HB embossed on the side in a typical classroom, or 2B, 3B and so on, if you did an art class, defined a hardness scale. The softer the lead, the bigger the B and the darker the marks made.

There never was any lead in a pencil. They’re made from graphite and clay, with the softer ones containing more graphite.

What’s graphene then?

It’s a very thin layer of graphite, one of two naturally occurring carbon minerals (crystal structures) found on earth, the other much rarer one being diamond. And yes, if you squeeze graphite to about 200,000 times atmospheric pressure you can turn it into a diamond. That’s how lab grown, synthetic diamonds are manufactured.

Graphene was isolated in 2004, by Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov at The University of Manchester. They used to hold Friday night experiment nights, where they played around, trying stuff for fun, which was not part of their day jobs. Probably quite popular with any anorak-loving students.

On one occasion, they removed some flakes from a lump of graphite using Scotch sticky tape. They immediately noticed…