#[1]alternate [2]John B. Goodenough, 100, Dies; Nobel-Winning Creator
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[6]Science|John B. Goodenough, 100, Dies; Nobel-Winning Creator of the
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John Goodenough (1922-2023)
* [8]Obituary
* [9]2019 Nobel Prize
* [10]From Opinion: A Late-Blooming Genius
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John B. Goodenough, 100, Dies; Nobel-Winning Creator of the Lithium-Ion
Battery
An unassuming professor who remained active into his 90s, he is
credited with the breakthrough that gave rise to the batteries powering
today’s electronic devices.
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A portrait, in profile, of John B. Goodenough. He has white hair, is
wearing a blue shirt and tie, and seems to be looking into the
distance.
John B. Goodenough in 2017. Two years later, when he was 97 and still
active in research at the University of Texas at Austin, he became the
oldest Nobel Prize winner in history.Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The
New York Times
By [14]Robert D. McFadden
June 26, 2023Updated 1:02 p.m. ET
John B. Goodenough, the scientist who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry for his crucial role in developing the revolutionary
lithium-ion battery, the rechargeable power pack that is ubiquitous in
today’s wireless electronic devices and electric and hybrid vehicles,
died on Sunday at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas. He was
100.
The University of Texas at Austin, where Dr. Goodenough was a professor
of engineering, [15]announced his death.
Until the announcement of [16]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 technological 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 University
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.
Image
Dr. Goodenough in his laboratory at the University of
Texas.Credit...University of Texas at Austin, via Getty Images
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 [17]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 1950s 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.
Image
King Carl Gustaf of Sweden presented Dr. Goodenough with his Nobel
Prize at the Stockholm Concert Hall in December 2019.Credit...TT News
Agency, via Reuters
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.
“It was the first lithium-ion cathode with the capacity, when installed
in a battery, to power both compact and relatively large devices, a
quality that would make it far superior to anything on the market,”
Steve LeVine wrote in “The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a
Battery to Save the World” (2015).
“It would result,” he added, “in a battery with twice to three times
the energy of any other rechargeable room-temperature battery, and thus
could be made much smaller and deliver the same or better performance.”
There was little interest in his discovery at first. Oxford declined to
patent it, and Dr. Goodenough signed the rights over to a British
atomic energy research organization. Scientists in Japan and
Switzerland, meanwhile, found that lithium layered with graphitic
carbon improved the anode.
Dr. Yoshino’s contribution, the Swedish Academy said, was to eliminate
pure lithium from the battery, instead using only lithium ions, which
are safer. He created a commercially viable lithium-ion battery for the
Asahi Kasei Corporation, which started selling the technology in 1991.
In 1991, Sony, recognizing the commercial potential of the emerging
technology, combined Dr. Goodenough’s cathode and a carbon anode to
produce the world’s first safe rechargeable lithium-ion battery for the
marketplace. Applications proliferated. Labs found new ways to shrink
battery sizes, yoke them together and raise energy output. A revolution
in wireless mobile devices and vehicular applications exploded.
“Goodenough’s original lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode structure is still
used in the lithium-ion batteries found in almost all personal
electronics like smartphones and tablets,” Helen Gregg wrote in [18]The
University of Chicago Magazine in 2016. “When he was tinkering with
oxides back at Oxford, Goodenough had no idea of the impact his battery
would have.”
John Bannister Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922,
the second of four children of Erwin and Helen (Lewis) Goodenough. His
father was finishing graduate studies at Oxford University, and the
family returned to the United States when John was an infant and
settled in Woodbridge, Conn., after his father joined the Yale faculty
to teach comparative religion.
In an interview for this obituary in 2017, Dr. Goodenough said that he
and his siblings, Ward, James and Hester, had “mismatched” parents who
were “aloof” with their children. John also struggled with undiagnosed
dyslexia and was regarded as a backward student at local primary
schools. As a teenager at the Groton School in Massachusetts, he made
adjustments to cope with dyslexia.
“I overcame it in a sense,” he recalled. “I was able to read
mechanically. And I covered my tracks a bit by avoiding English and
history, and focusing on mathematics and languages — six years of Latin
and four of Greek.” Rigorous educational standards at Groton and Yale
also gave structure to his life, he said.
He graduated at the top of his Groton class in 1940 and received a
scholarship to Yale, where he majored in mathematics, tutored and
worked other jobs to pay for his education. He had almost completed
coursework for his bachelor’s degree in 1943 when he was called to
active duty in the wartime Army Air Forces. He received his degree
after Yale gave him credit for a military meteorology course. He served
in Newfoundland and the Azores.
After the war, he received a government scholarship to study physics at
the University of Chicago. He earned a master’s degree in 1951 and a
doctorate a year later. After working briefly for Westinghouse, he
began his career at M.I.T.
In 1951, he married Irene Wiseman. They had no children. She died in
2016. He is survived by a half sister, Ursula W. Goodenough, and a half
brother, Daniel A. Goodenough, both of whom are emeritus biology
professors.
Dr. Goodenough held the Virginia H. Cockrell centennial chair in
engineering at the University of Texas. He wrote eight books and more
than 800 articles for scientific journals. His honors included the
Japan Prize, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Charles Stark Draper Prize,
the Welch Award in Chemistry and the National Medal of Science, which
he was given by President Barack Obama in 2011.
Alex Traub and Chang Che contributed reporting.
A correction was made on
June 26, 2023
:
An earlier version of this obituary, using information from the
University of Texas at Austin, referred incorrectly to Ursula and
Daniel Goodenough. They are Dr. Goodenough’s half sister and half
brother, not his sister and brother.
How we handle corrections
Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the
winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined
The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.
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