This is Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm James Graham.

Today we're finding out about graphene, once hailed as a wonder material that would revolutionise industry.

You may have heard things like 200 times stronger than steel, more conductive than copper, can act as a perfect membrane, transparent, flexible.

So basically very unique properties as a 2D material.

It's 20 years since it was first discovered.

We're speaking to people working with the material.

I want to make space stations.

I want to make world of tallest buildings.

We do have bigger ambitions.

We'll be trying to find out who's winning the global race to commercialize it

and asking whether it's

lived up to all the hype.

I don't know if you remember that they were saying it will be or could be used everywhere.

I mean, this makes no sense, right?

Manchester University in Britain has pioneered Graphene, earning two of the scientists here Nobel

Prizes.

That's the fanfare around the Nobel Prize win back in 2010. It triggered a frenzy of excitement

for graphene. But let's go back to the start.

Now I'm sitting at my kitchen table and I thought I'd try the experiment that led to graphene first being isolated by Professor's Andre Geim and Koste Novosoloff. Graphene's basically a one-atom

thick layer of graphite. So if I put my sticky tape,

that's a great sound, isn't it, on a scribble of pencil, stick that on and peel it off, I get a

smudge, and then I need to double over the tape and stick it over it, peel it off again. And the more I do that, the more I peel off different layers of graphite. Until I get down to the one atom layer and that's graphene. Now the professors realized that this fine layer had immense potential because of its properties, super thin, strong, light, conductive, pliable, and after they won the Nobel Prize in 2010,

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