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.
Nope. Discovey implies awarness. Incidentally creating something without awareness of what was created is NOT a discovery, sorry.
If you´re ready to take this stand, then Romans were MASTERING nanotech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_Cup
You’ve been had by an older form of “clickbait”, known as a “hot take”.
The article has got an intentional distortion – created vs. discovered – and a socially controversial element with the debate about whether Edison actually invented many or any of what is claimed. The actual article is short, hastily written and doesn’t bring any new insight or point of view on the matter.
A “hot take” is described to be, “referring to the tactic of hosts picking a topic from the sports zeitgeist, often one that has no business being discussed because the answer is unknowable, making ‘loud, fact-free declarations’ about the topic, eliciting angry listeners to call in and providing show content.”
In other words, it’s meaningless filler that is supposed to annoy you, so it looks like something and makes you click on and spend time on the site, driving up the metrics.
Or, following the principle of “the content trains the audience”; maybe HaD is actually trying to shape its readership more towards the sort of amateur hacker slash tabloid reading consumer who is impressed by the fact that you can connect an LED to a battery and it lights up. What do you think? Post comments below.
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.
“Of course, there is no way to know what really happened with Edison’s long-ago experiment. Even if the original light bulb Edison used was available to analyze, any graphene produced likely would have turned to graphite during its first 13-hour test.”
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.
The point about graphene is not related to the bulbs darkening with soot. If you read the source article, they point out that graphene is created when you flash heat the filament, and gets converted into graphite when you keep heating it for longer. The graphene or graphite would be in the filament.
So Edison arguably couldn’t have discovered graphene unless he knew to only run his bulb for 20 seconds and then take it apart to look under a microscope, and understand enough about atomic chemistry to recognize what might be going on. That’s not what he, or his assistants, were doing.
In fact, they were trying to create graphite, in their words to “metallize” the filament, because plain carbon has a negative temperature coefficient of resistance, meaning the lamp starts to draw more current the hotter it gets and it burns out with a pop. If enough of the carbon is converted into graphite, they can dial in a positive temperature coefficient and get a bulb that doesn’t require a separate ballast circuit to control the power. If I recall it correctly, they solved this issue by adding some petroleum vapors inside the bulb, which would get deposited onto the filament and get converted into graphite when the bulb was first turned on.
These things happen. Galileo’s notebooks show that he observed Neptune and realised it wasn’t a star, but he didn’t really “discover” it because he didn’t identify it as a planet. It was just gone the next time he looked.
Wow, pretty far fetched.
How about the billions of people using wood fires under oxygen starved conditions? Pretty sure the wood gas pyrolized and left “graphenic” redisue more than once.
You mean we could examine all those billions of high vacuum sealed glass examples they left and check for evidence?
He missed the boat on triodes too