Evidence: Well-supported historical consensus
Crystallography
Early 20th-century X-ray work settles graphite as stacked honeycomb sheets of carbon — a 3D crystal built from 2D units. That picture is what later lets Wallace treat one sheet as a Hamiltonian (1947).
Oxide line continues
Brodie-style oxidation does not freeze in 1859. Papers and “graphite oxide paper” products through the 1910s keep the chemical route alive. This is still lamellar oxide, not a gated monolayer device.
Industry, not Dirac
Graphite is an industrial mineral: electrodes, refractories, brushes, lubrication, and (soon) nuclear work. Strategic demand in both world wars is about bulk carbon, not 2D physics.
What does not exist yet
- A named laboratory material “graphene” in the 1986 systematic sense.
- A transport measurement of a free flake on SiO₂.
- A company whose business model is monolayer film.
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pre-chemistry ← previous craft history · 1947 → Wallace