Graphene—How a Laboratory Curiosity Suddenly Became Extremely Interesting

Thanks to its unusual electronic properties graphene has received considerable attention in recent years. It is less known, however, that research in this area goes much further back: At the start of the 1960s H.-P. Boehm et al. reduced graphite oxide with formation of thin films, which today, on account of their content of foreign atoms, would be called “chemically modified graphenes” (figure: electron microscopy image from that time).