John Goodenough is In Your Home and Phone

By Shlomo Maital

Nobel Award: Senior King, Senior Engineer

     John Goodenough, inventor of the lithium-ion battery, passed away yesterday. He was 100 years old.  His genius is everywhere, in our homes and our phones.

      In 2019, he was the oldest person, 97, ever to receive a Nobel Prize.  (You have to be alive to win it – lots of great creators never made it).  And we can learn a lot from his life, thanks to the wonderful obituary written by Robert McFadden in the New York Times.

       Bottom line:  One reason Goodenough’s genius is ever-present, is that he was a mentsch. (Yiddish for a person with strong moral values).  He never patented his breakthroughs. He never accepted royalties, that could have made him many billions. This made his batteries widely and quickly available. 

      Overcoming great challenges:  Goodenough was an unlikely person to change the world.  In his memoir, he wrote that he was the unwanted child of an agnostic Yale professor of divinity and a mother with whom he never bonded.  He grew up lonely and dyslectic, went to boarding school at age 12, and rarely heard from his parents.  He figured out how to overcome his dyslexia, and got his Ph.D. from the U. of Chicago, then worked at MIT’s famous Lincoln Labs.

      Inventing a great battery:    A battery is a device with two terminals – cathode, positive, and anode, negative —  and chemicals that generate ions.  The ions flow from the anode to the cathode, generating an electric current.  A British chemist, Dr. M. Stanley Whitttingham, who shared the Nobel with Goodenough, invented a patented lithium battery (patented by Exxon) that used titanium sulfide for its cathode.  It was a huge breakthrough, producing high voltage at room temperature.  But it overcharged, overheated and sometimes, caught fire and exploded.  Ooops..

      Goodenough found the solution, layering lithium with cobalt oxide, creating pockets for lithium ions.  It took him four years.  He was helped by postdoctoral students at Oxford. His device “had two to three times the energy of any other rechargeable room-temperature battery and could be made smaller and deliver the same performance”. A Japanese engineer, Yoshido (who also shared the Nobel), eliminated pure lithium from the battery and used only lithium ions, much safer. Sony used the technology to make the first safe rechargeable lithium ion battery for commercial sale.

      OK. I know.  Elon Musk, that great liberal humanitarian, has given away all of his Tesla patents, too.   Oh, my.  Put him up for sainthood?  Saint Elon?

    I don’t think so.  He’s already leveraged those patents to become the world’s wealthiest person, owning nearly $200 b.

    John Goodenough did this, gave it away, WITHOUT becoming a billionaire. He was a mentsch. And he helped Musk become a zillionaire.  Goodenough’s lithium ion batteries are in every Tesla – and indeed, in my own hybrid Toyota Auris —  over 25 kms. per liter of gasoline. 

    Thanks, Goodenough (pronounced good-enough). If only more of us would follow your path.