Twenty years ago this October, two physicists at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, published a groundbreaking paper on the "electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films." Their work described the extraordinary electronic properties of graphene, a crystalline form of carbon equivalent to a single layer of graphite, just one atom thick.

Around that time, I started my doctorate at the University of Surrey. Our team specialized in the electronic properties of carbon. Carbon nanotubes were the latest craze, which I was happily following. One day, my professor encouraged a group of us to travel to London to attend a talk by a well-known science communicator from the University of Manchester. This was Andre Geim.

We were not disappointed. He was inspiring for us fresh-faced Ph.D. students, incorporating talk of wacky Friday afternoon experiments with levitating frogs, before getting on to atomically thin carbon. All the same, we were skeptical about this carbon concept. We couldn't quite believe that a material effectively obtained from pencil lead with sticky tape was really what it claimed to be. But we were wrong.

The work was quickly copied and reproduced by scientists across the globe. New methods for making this material were devised. Incredible claims about its properties made it sound like something out of a Stan Lee comic. Stronger than steel, highly flexible, super-slippery and impermeable to gases. A better electronic conductor than copper and a better thermal conductor than diamond, as well as practically invisible and displaying a host of exotic quantum properties.

Graphene was hailed as a revolutionary material, promising ultra-fast electronics, supercomputers and super-strong materials. More fantastical claims have included space elevators, solar sails, artificial retinas, even invisibility cloaks.

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