1962 — Boehm monolayers

Evidence: Well-supported (with later historiographic argument about what “first graphene” means)

What Boehm’s group reported

Hanns-Peter Boehm and colleagues work from graphite oxide, reduce it, and report extremely thin carbon films, including flakes identified as monolayer. The tools are the TEM / diffraction lineage of mid-century surface and colloid carbon chemistry — not a Hall bar on SiO₂.

Geim and Novoselov have publicly pointed at this line as an experimental precursor. The usual careful wording is:

• 1962: monolayer carbon from the oxide route, seen and argued as one atom thick.
• 2004: isolation on an insulating substrate plus electronic measurement that made the 2D electron gas / Dirac picture inescapable and launched the citation boom.

Both sentences can be true. Fighting over the word “first” is mostly branding.

The name

Graphene as a systematic name for a single graphite sheet is associated with Boehm and co-authors in the mid-1980s (often cited 1986: graphite + -ene). See [[timeline/1963-2003]].

Why Monday posts go wrong here

• “Nobody saw monolayer carbon before 2004” — false.
• “Boehm built the iPhone of materials” — also false. No devices, no global field, no Dirac-fermion transport paper.
• Oxide-route carbon is chemically dirtier than a cleaved crystal. That distinction still matters for batteries, inks, and anything called “graphene” on an invoice.

Next

[[timeline/1963-2003]] · [[timeline/2004]]

Source: timeline/1962.md