“Everything” is such a big word. But check out what technologist George Gilder says about graphene in a recent newsletter I get from him (below).

Pretty fundamental stuff.

It feels a bit like going back in time to just before the discovery of commercially viable electricity.
Raise your hand if you’d invest in copper as soon as you stepped out of the time machine…

🖐️

But here’s the real news:

Anyone who was following graphene in the early 2000s when it was first full of buzz (like I was, briefly) eventually had their bubble completely burst.

(Incidentally, despite Gilder saying it was invented in 2004, I remember talk of graphene as early as around 1999. Also, while writing this I found this 1989 New Scientist article mentioning graphene, which was interesting.)

Gilder:

The excitement of those early days soon boiled over into an orgy of media hype. That helped to raise capital and jump-start start-ups. Soon, however, investors were disappointed to learn graphene could be made only in exiguous [very small] quantities at exorbitant cost. Manufacturers had to choose between such crude methods as peeling off graphite layers with scotch tape or exquisitely exacting methods…that cost millions and produced milligrams.

The hype died, the bubble popped.

Then, just a year ago, Professor [Jim] Tour and one of his Ph.D. students, Duy Xuan Luong discovered a process for making high quality graphene in bulk.

The Tour-Duy process is one of the most exciting developments in the history of technology. …

(For more on this from Gilder himself, you’ll need a subscription to his newsletter at Three Founders Publishing.)

I’m going to be shifting what meager investing attention I have toward this area, I think.

It’s just too interesting not to watch and has the markers of a significant, developing trend.

And the timing sure is right!