Hyped Miracle Material Graphene Is Realizing Its Promise as ‘Pixie Dust’
The super-thin, super-strong stuff is finally making its way into consumer goods. Look for it in tennis rackets, cellphones, Ford Mustangs, and more.
Inov-8 sneakers with graphene soles (left) and Head’s Graphene 360 Extreme series of tennis rackets.
Photographer: Pippa Drummond for Bloomberg Businessweek; Prop stylist: Aja Coon
By now you’ve probably heard of the coming graphene revolution. Perhaps it was in 2004, when a team of scientists at the University of Manchester in England announced they’d isolated a carbon-based supermaterial just one atom thick but more than 160 times stronger than steel. It could pass electrical signals 250 times faster than silicon and conduct heat 10 times more efficiently than copper.
Or maybe you heard about it in 2010, when the same team won a Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material.” Since then, businesses worldwide have salivated over graphene’s technical and commercial possibilities, but barriers—including scale, quality control, and cost—have delayed those promises until now.