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> That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with gr

> That said, as an ignorant person regarding graphene, it seems graphene never "took off" as mass-produced material so I wonder what actual applications with graphene can be seen in the wild, regularly produced and commercialized or embedded into some market product? It's a chicken and egg problem. No one has really bothered to put graphene into a mass manufactured product because of supply issues and no one's got the resources to accelerate work on the supply issue because there's no demand. Actually using high quality graphene to e.g. improve the performance of a capacitor or a battery cathode/anode by a few percent is really easy once you are sure that any money invested in doing it at scale won't go to waste because of supply issues. Aluminum when through the same exact process in the 1800s so it's a natural consequence of the intersection of economics and science. I've got an old Scientific American from right after the Civil War with pages of people talking about this new wonder material aluminum and how it will change the world of metallurgy forever (and how useless the "machine guns" were during the war and the repeated discovery of heat treating asphalt and a bunch of other cool stuff). It wasn't until the Bayer and Hall–Héroult processes were invented in 1886-8 that aluminum became cheap enough to use in every day things. It took something like 60 years from first pure piece of aluminum for mass manufacturing to become practical but only 30 years before it changed the face of transportation and war.

8note 6y ago
Really this sounds like a problem of missing government intervention. The government could treat graphene like corn until all the industries have built up around it
- vinniejames 6y ago
  The problem is that there isn't a graphene farmers lobby group
- missedthecue 6y ago
  How about instead of building and shuttering a billion dollar chat app every 2 years google puts some resources into it in the interest of diversification. All these tech companies are gonna need ever more batteries and Google would be well ahead if they can make the best ones.
  - anoncareer0212 6y ago
    Because rebranding a chat app as it evolves instead of calling it '2.0' doesn't imply you have spare resources to check notes utterly revolutionize battery technology out of nowhere. Google's CFO's strategy has been to incubate those ideas and either sell them to industry or spin them off with independent investment after the, say, first $10 billion in costs.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to be going for it.
      - creato 6y ago
        Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point. Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.
  - PedroBatista 6y ago
    And that’s how Google wins these days, we turn to them to solve all our problems like a child praying to God every night before bed.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  The National Graphene Institute has £61m of government funding: https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/about/ngi/ https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/about/ngi/
  - rpastuszak 6y ago
    WhatsApp was acquired for $16-19b IIRC. (Or: "FB bought our contact books for $16-19b.") I'm not saying that we could solve all of our problems by investing this amount of $$ in graphene, or that "FB sucks, duh", but it's hard to argue that we can maintain this ridiculous waste of resources and human brain power for longer.
voldacar 6y ago
What issue of Scientific American exactly? I would love to read that
- akiselev 6y ago
  I have a bound copy of Volume 16 [1] which as far as I can tell was just assembled from the unsold issue at the end of each year. Unfortunately they require a subscription to view the online archive and it feels very different when you've got an extant physical copy. IIRC the machine gun story was page 1 and the first letter about aluminum was page 2 or 3 of issue 1. There was also a really interesting exchange between some laymen and a scientist about the nature of meteor but that was half way through the year. Both had some really crazy theories. Most of the interesting stuff like that is hidden throughout. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1867/01-05/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1867/01-05/
bch 6y ago
Aluminum as we know it now was rare enough it was more valuable than gold.
agumonkey 6y ago
Would be fun to list evolution of resources from birth/high-cost to mainstream/near-free. And find inflections point.

8note 6y ago

Really this sounds like a problem of missing government intervention. The government could treat graphene like corn until all the industries have built up around it

vinniejames 6y ago
The problem is that there isn't a graphene farmers lobby group
missedthecue 6y ago
How about instead of building and shuttering a billion dollar chat app every 2 years google puts some resources into it in the interest of diversification. All these tech companies are gonna need ever more batteries and Google would be well ahead if they can make the best ones.
- anoncareer0212 6y ago
  Because rebranding a chat app as it evolves instead of calling it '2.0' doesn't imply you have spare resources to check notes utterly revolutionize battery technology out of nowhere. Google's CFO's strategy has been to incubate those ideas and either sell them to industry or spin them off with independent investment after the, say, first $10 billion in costs.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to be going for it.
    - creato 6y ago
      Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point. Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  And that’s how Google wins these days, we turn to them to solve all our problems like a child praying to God every night before bed.
robin_reala 6y ago
The National Graphene Institute has £61m of government funding: https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/about/ngi/ https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/about/ngi/
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  WhatsApp was acquired for $16-19b IIRC. (Or: "FB bought our contact books for $16-19b.") I'm not saying that we could solve all of our problems by investing this amount of $$ in graphene, or that "FB sucks, duh", but it's hard to argue that we can maintain this ridiculous waste of resources and human brain power for longer.

voldacar 6y ago

What issue of Scientific American exactly? I would love to read that

akiselev 6y ago
I have a bound copy of Volume 16 [1] which as far as I can tell was just assembled from the unsold issue at the end of each year. Unfortunately they require a subscription to view the online archive and it feels very different when you've got an extant physical copy. IIRC the machine gun story was page 1 and the first letter about aluminum was page 2 or 3 of issue 1. There was also a really interesting exchange between some laymen and a scientist about the nature of meteor but that was half way through the year. Both had some really crazy theories. Most of the interesting stuff like that is hidden throughout. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1867/01-05/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1867/01-05/

bch 6y ago

Aluminum as we know it now was rare enough it was more valuable than gold.

agumonkey 6y ago

Would be fun to list evolution of resources from birth/high-cost to mainstream/near-free. And find inflections point.