Alfred Nobel stipulated that his annual prizes be awarded to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Few scientific advances have had a greater impact on our lives than that made by the American materials chemist John Goodenough, a chemistry Nobel laureate in 2019 for his role in inventing the rechargeable lithium battery.
If you are reading this on a handheld device, it will almost certainly have a lithium battery inside. These power packs have been instrumental to the advent of electric cars, and their ability to store power such as that generated by ephemeral renewable sources could aid the transition away from a fossil-fuel energy economy.
For year after year Goodenough, who has died aged 100, featured in the list of Nobel predictions. Only his remarkable longevity saved the Swedish committee from an embarrassing injustice – he is the oldest person to have been awarded a Nobel. He seemed phlegmatic about being repeatedly overlooked, even though he did not enjoy any financial reward for his breakthrough either: in the 1980s he was not encouraged to take out a patent on the battery breakthrough he made at Oxford University. He was glad enough still to be able to do research, which he sustained almost until the very end of his life.
He left Oxford in 1986 for the University of Texas at Austin to escape compulsory retirement at 65, convinced – rightly – that he had a lot more still to offer. “Why would anyone retire and simply wait to die?” he asked. His vitality and enjoyment in the lab well into his 90s, punctuated by his loud and high-pitched laugh, was a constant cause of amazement.
One would hardly have guessed from that demeanour how unhappy his childhood had been, as the second of three children of extremely distant parents in what he called “a disaster” of a marriage. He was born in the city of Jena, Germany, to Helen (nee Lewis) and Erwin Goodenough.
They were both Americans who were living in Oxford – Erwin was studying for a DPhil at the university and, according to his son, “enjoyed the culture of the Weimar Republic; he spent much of his long summer vacations in Germany as well as in Rome”.
John was taken as a baby to the US, where his father became a professor of religious history at Yale University. John grew up mostly in a boarding school in Massachusetts, from where, despite being an undiagnosed dyslexic, he won a place to study mathematics at Yale. After wartime military service as a meteorologist, he gained a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago and in 1952 began research on magnetic materials for information storage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That work qualified him to switch to inorganic materials chemistry when in 1976 he moved to Oxford. At that time, interest was growing in electric vehicles, which were being held back by the lack of suitable batteries.
The potential benefits of electric cars as quieter and less polluting than those using the petrol-fired internal combustion engine had been recognised since their inception. But the lead-acid batteries used as starter batteries and the power source for vehicle electronics were utterly unequal to the task of supplying the motive power: they were too heavy and offered too little power.
The dream of battery-powered cars was resurrected in the 60s, but it was only a decade later, with the Opec oil crisis in full swing, that the industry took them seriously.
The key was to find the right materials for the battery electrodes. Lithium metal looked attractive because it is lightweight and capable of delivering high voltages. The idea was that lithium at the positive electrode would provide electrically charged ions that travel to the negative electrode, where they could be trapped between the layers of atoms in materials called intercalators.
The British chemist Stanley Whittingham, one of Goodenough’s co-laureates, working at the Exxon laboratories in New Jersey, found a suitable intercalator called titanium disulfide in 1976. Four years later, Goodenough in Oxford identified the material – a form of cobalt oxide – that became the industry standard, offering a higher voltage and greater power density.
Early lithium batteries had a tendency to catch fire because of the high chemical reactivity of pure lithium. But the third 2019 laureate, the Japanese researcher Akira Yoshino, of the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo, replaced lithium electrodes with graphite-like carbon made from petroleum coke, which also intercalates lithium so that the ions merely shuttle back and forth between the two sets of layers, making them easily rechargeable.
The lithium-ion battery was commercialised in 1991 by the Sony Corporation, and now commands an estimated $92bn market. Without it there could have been none of today’s handheld electronics – laptops, smartphones, tablets. Elon Musk’s Tesla electric cars depend on them.
There is still room for improvement and Goodenough never stopped seeking it. In the past decade he was working, among other things, on making batteries that operate at low temperatures, suitable for powering cars in the winter.
He was also seeking a new, safer way to reinstate pure lithium electrodes, which could give lithium batteries more energy capacity. At the same time, he expressed concerns about the international tensions that might arise over the limited global supplies of lithium.
Goodenough maintained a strong Christian belief throughout his life, seeing no conflict with his scientific work. “The scientist is trying to do something for society and for his fellow man,” he said. “In that sense why should there be a conflict?” During his 90s he cared for his wife, Irene (nee Wiseman), who had Alzheimer’s disease. They had married in 1951; she died in 2016.
“I’d like to get all the gas emissions off the highways of the world”, Goodenough said in 2018. “I’m hoping to see it before I die.” It was always an ambitious aspiration, even for someone with his staying power. But if it happens one day, Goodenough will have played a central part in that.
• John Bannister Goodenough, materials scientist, born 25 July 1922; died 25 June 2023
