Thomas Edison is well known for his inventions (even if you don’t agree he invented all of them). However, he also occasionally invented things he didn’t understand, so they had to be reinvented again later. The latest example comes from researchers at Rice University. While building a replica light bulb, they found that Thomas Edison may have accidentally created graphene while testing the original article.
Today, we know that applying a voltage to a carbon-based resistor and heating it up to over 2,000 °C can create turbostratic graphene. Edison used a carbon-based filament and could heat it to over 2,000 °C.
This reminds us of how, in the 1880s, Edison observed current flowing in one direction through a test light bulb that included a plate. However, he thought it was just a curiosity. It would be up to Fleming, in 1904, to figure it out and understand what could be done with it.
Naturally, Edison wouldn’t have known to look for graphene, how to look for it, or what to do with it if he found it. But it does boggle the mind to think about graphene appearing many decades earlier. Or maybe it would still be looking for a killer use. Certainly, as the Rice researchers note, this is one of the easier ways to make graphene.
Yeah OK, if you go and interpret things this way then Homo erectus invented nuclear fusion and fourier transformation too.
only the ones living in what is now the USA of course.
Kind of agree there, title of article is “Rice researchers replicating Edison’s 1879 light bulb experiments show graphene may have been unintentional by-product”.
Definition of “discover” is “find unexpectedly or during a search”, so if Edison didn’t find graphene, by definition he didn’t discover it. What he may have done is unintentionally and unknowingly created graphene without being aware of it.
It’s worth remarking that the whole reason Edison added a charged plate to a light bulb in the first place was that he was trying to develop a method of preventing carbon, expressed from the filament, from plating onto interior surface of the bulb and darkening it. In doing so, he created the thermionic diode by accident.
“discovering” or “inventing” something generally requires that you know it was ever there at all. edison didn’t know he had anything other than regular ash.
independent from this, he also wasn’t the first person to recognize it’s occurrence. lots of other people before him would have noticed the black sooty substance that he sought to eliminate. anyone who bought one of his lightbulbs, for example.