In preparation for one of the storms (we've had so many recently I've lost count), I went to buy a few batteries as backups for my flashlights. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. There were no "C" or "D" cells to be found anywhere. Fortunately, we never lost power and I never had to find out whether or not I had enough energy.
Batteries light up our world in so many ways. Without the invention of the lithium-ion battery, it is doubtful that the smartphone revolution would ever have occurred. It's difficult to imagine how
it could have happened if you had to cart around monstrosities more like the phones on the left side of this picture. Many of them relied on lesser technologies like zinc-carbon or nickel-cadmium.
You may not know who invented this amazing lithium battery technology. Truthfully, I didn't know it either until I read this article.
Our lives would be very different without the work of one man.
Unlike the transistor, the lithium-ion battery has not won a Nobel Prize. But many people think it should. The lithium-ion battery gave the transistor reach. Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. There would be no Apple. No Samsung. No Tesla.
In 1980, Goodenough, a whip-smart physicist then aged 57, invented lithium-ion’s nervous system. His brainchild was the cobalt-oxide cathode, the single most important component of every lithium-ion battery. From Mogadishu to Pago Pago, from Antarctica to Greenland, and all lands in between, Goodenough’s cathode is contained in almost every portable electronic device ever sold. Others have tried to improve on the cobalt-oxide cathode, but all have failed.
Goodenough does not feel that his work is complete. He is now 92, but still works everyday in his lab in Austin, TX. If he succeeds, he could revolutionize our world yet again.
But Goodenough seems most passionate about ending his career with a last, big invention. He is trying, of course, to make a super-battery, one that will make electric cars truly competitive with combustion, and also economically store wind and solar power.
But the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. That would instantly catapult electric cars into a new head-to-head race with combustion. Over the years, numerous scientists have tried and failed—it was lithium metal, for instance, that kept setting Stan Whittingham’s lab on fire at Exxon in the 1970s.
It's a difficult problem, but I am glad that someone is working on it. For all our sake, I hope someone succeeds.
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