From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   John B. Goodenough, 100, Dies; Nobel-Winning Creator of the Lithium-Ion Battery   
   By Robert D. McFadden, June 26, 2023   
   Until the announcement of his selection as a Nobel laureate, Dr. Goodenough   
   was relatively unknown beyond scientific and academic circles and the   
   commercial titans who exploited his work. He achieved his laboratory   
   breakthrough in 1980 at the University    
   of Oxford, where he created a battery that has populated the planet with   
   smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, lifesaving medical devices like   
   cardiac defibrillators, and clean, quiet plug-in vehicles, including many   
   Teslas, that can be driven on    
   long trips, lessen the impact of climate change and might someday replace   
   gasoline-powered cars and trucks.   
      
   Like most modern tech advances, the powerful, lightweight, rechargeable   
   lithium-ion battery is a product of incremental insights by scientists, lab   
   technicians and commercial interests over decades. But for those familiar with   
   the battery’s story, Dr.    
   Goodenough’s contribution is regarded as the crucial link in its   
   development, a linchpin of chemistry, physics and engineering on a molecular   
   scale.   
      
   In 2019, when he was 97 and still active in research at the Univ. of Texas,   
   Dr. Goodenough became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history when the Royal   
   Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that he would share the $900,000 award   
   with two others who    
   made major contributions to the battery’s development: M. Stanley   
   Whittingham, a professor at Binghamton University, State University of New   
   York, and Akira Yoshino, an honorary fellow for the Asahi Kasei Corporation in   
   Tokyo and a professor at Meijo    
   University in Nagoya, Japan.   
      
   Dr. Goodenough received no royalties for his work on the battery, only his   
   salary for six decades as a scientist and professor at the Massachusetts   
   Institute of Technology, Oxford and the University of Texas. Caring little for   
   money, he signed away most    
   of his rights. He shared patents with colleagues and donated stipends that   
   came with his awards to research and scholarships.   
      
   A congenial presence since 1986 on the Austin campus, where he amazed   
   colleagues by remaining active and inventive well into his 90s, he had been   
   working in recent years on a superbattery that he said might someday store and   
   transport wind, solar and    
   nuclear energy, transforming the national electric grid and perhaps   
   revolutionizing the place of electric cars in middle-class life, with   
   unlimited travel ranges and the ease of recharging in minutes.   
      
   A devoted Episcopalian, Dr. Goodenough kept a tapestry of the Last Supper on   
   the wall of his laboratory. Its depiction of the Apostles in fervent   
   conversation, like scientists disputing a theory, reminded him, he said, of a   
   divine power that had opened    
   doors for him in a life that had begun with little promise.   
      
   He was, he said in a memoir, “Witness to Grace” (2008), the unwanted child   
   of an agnostic Yale University professor of religion and a mother with whom he   
   never bonded. Friendless except for three siblings, a family dog and a maid,   
   he grew up lonely    
   and dyslexic in an emotionally distant household. He was sent to a private   
   boarding school at 12 and rarely heard from his parents.   
      
   With patience, counseling and intense struggles for self-improvement, he   
   overcame his reading disabilities. He studied Latin and Greek at Groton and   
   mastered mathematics at Yale, meteorology in the Army Air Forces during World   
   War II, and physics under    
   Clarence Zener, Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago,   
   where he earned a doctorate in 1952.   
      
   At M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 50s and 60s, he was a member of teams   
   that helped lay the groundwork for random access memory (RAM) in computers and   
   developed plans for the nation’s first air defense system. In 1976, as   
   federal funding for his    
   M.I.T. work ended, he moved to Oxford to teach and manage a chemistry lab,   
   where he began his research on batteries.   
      
   Essentially, a battery is a device that makes electrically charged atoms,   
   known as ions, move from one side to another, creating an electrical current   
   that powers anything hooked up to the battery. The two sides, called   
   electrodes, hold charges — a    
   negative one called an anode, and a positive one called a cathode. The medium   
   between them, through which the ions travel, is an electrolyte.   
      
   When a battery releases energy, positively charged ions shuttle from the anode   
   to the cathode, creating a current. A rechargeable battery is plugged into a   
   socket to draw electricity, forcing the ions to shuttle back to the anode,   
   where they are stored    
   until needed again. Materials used for the anode, cathode and electrolyte   
   determine the quantity and speed of the ions, and thus the battery’s power.   
      
   The modern world has long sought batteries that are safe, reliable,   
   inexpensive and powerful. The first true battery was invented in 1800 by   
   Alessandro Volta, who stacked disks of copper and zinc and linked them with a   
   cloth soaked in salty water. With    
   wires connected to discs on both ends, the battery produced a stable current.   
   Early car batteries were mostly lead-acid and bulky, capable of running   
   ignitions and accessories, like lights, but until recent years not powerful   
   enough to drive engines.    
   Consumer electronics used zinc-carbon or nickel-cadmium batteries.   
      
   Just as Dr. Goodenough arrived at Oxford, Exxon patented a design by Dr.   
   Whittingham, a British chemist employed by the company, for the first   
   rechargeable battery using lithium for its negative electrode, and titanium   
   disulfide, not previously used in    
   batteries, for its positive electrode. It seemed a breakthrough because ions   
   of lithium, the lightest metal, produced high voltage and worked at room   
   temperature. The Whittingham battery was an advancement, but it proved   
   impractical. If overcharged or    
   repeatedly recharged, it caught fire or exploded.   
      
   Seeking to improve on the design, Dr. Goodenough also used lithium ions. But   
   his insight, gleaned from experiments with two postdoctoral assistants, was to   
   craft the cathode with layers of lithium and cobalt oxide, which created   
   pockets for the lithium    
   ions. The arrangement also produced a higher voltage and made the battery far   
   less volatile. He succeeded after four years.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)