Graphene - The new wonder material:

As its name indicates, graphene is extracted from graphite, the material used in pencils. Like graphite, graphene is entirely composed of carbon atoms. For a thickness of 1mm graphite contains some 3 million layers of graphene. The carbons are perfectly distributed in a hexagonal honeycomb formation only in 0.3 nanometers thickness.

Graphene conducts electricity better than copper. It is 200 times stronger than steel but six times lighter. It is almost perfectly transparent to light.

J. J. Berzelius (1807) named the compounds that derived from living organism as organic compounds and those from non-living materials as inorganic compounds. He thought that organic compounds would be prepared in the living bodies through vital force, the essence of life. As this force is absent outside the living bodies, it was thought that the so called organic compounds could not be synthesized in the laboratories.

Surprisingly F. Wohler (1828) produced an organic compound Urea in the laboratory by heating an inorganic salt ammonium cyanate.

It inspired many other chemists and they were successful to prepare the so called organic compounds, methane, acetic acid etc., in the laboratory. This gave a death blow to the idea that organic compounds are derived from living organism. Chemists thought about a new definition for organic