June 30, 2023: We’re saddened to report that John Goodenough, father of the lithium ion cell, and one of many three giants who created at the moment’s lithium battery business, died on Sunday a month shy of his th -101 birthday.
John, who has been interviewed a number of occasions for Worldwide Batterywas awarded the joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry in October 2019 with two different lithium battery pioneers, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino.
In our subsequent interviews with Whittingham and Yoshino every acknowledged the world’s nice debt to Goodenough who found the cathode materials of alternative and thus made the lithium ion battery really moveable and rechargeable.
“John was an unassuming, modest and mild man whose work touched the lives of everybody throughout the planet,” stated Bob Galyen, CATL’s former CTO and good friend. Worldwide Battery. “It was a life effectively lived and John had a genius of astonishing proportions and his scientific contributions prolonged far past the lithium cell.”
Surprisingly for an individual whose analysis ends within the dwelling or pocket of many of the planet, he’s thought of a backward youngster. It was later found that he was dyslexic and he later described how he handled this drawback by learning summary mathematical thought and Greek and Latin.
On the age of 18 he left college on the prime of his class and acquired a scholarship to Yale. He graduated whereas working as a meteorologist within the US Air Pressure. A disaster of religion presently led him to a lifetime of service starting with the research of physics on the College of Chicago or Northwestern College.
“Once I arrived in Chicago the registration officer, professor Simpson, stated to me, “I do not perceive you veterans. Do not you recognize that anybody who has completed something attention-grabbing in physics has completed it when he was your age; and also you need to begin?”
Undeterred, he earned a grasp’s diploma in 1951 and a doctorate a 12 months later.
Over the subsequent six a long time his outstanding educational and analysis profession took him from his early work at MIT in laptop reminiscence to the College of Oxford in his 50s the place a lot of his ground-breaking work in lithium cells pioneered and for the final three a long time of his life on the College of Texas, the place he held the Virginia H Cockrell centennial chair in engineering.
He was nonetheless working till his late 90s and within the final years of his life pioneered a strong state battery. In 2017 he introduced patents for brand spanking new battery cells utilizing a strong glass electrolyte as an alternative of a liquid one, utilizing an alkali metallic anode. The glass electrolyte permits the substitution of low-cost sodium for lithium. It has the potential to be the world’s second sport changer within the power storage business.
Caring little for cash, John signed away most of his rights. He shares patents with colleagues and donates stipends that accompany his analysis awards and scholarships.
He was married to Irene Wiseman for 65 years. He died in 2016. Later in his life he would work on the college within the mornings and go to his nursing dwelling, he was affected by dementia, within the afternoons.
Along with being a Nobel laureate, John is a worldwide member of the US Nationwide Academy of Engineering, a member of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, and the Nationwide Academy of Sciences.
He has written greater than 800 articles for scientific journals, 85 chapters and eight books. He’s a fellow recipient of the 2009 Enrico Fermi Award and was elected a International Member of the Royal Society and introduced on the Nationwide Medal of Science by US president Barack Obama.
Amongst his many publications is a really private one: “Witness to Grace”, during which he describes how his mental journey additionally consists of “a non secular seek for the that means of what or who I select to serve in my life.” Born into an agnostic household in the course of the struggle years he developed religion and was a religious Christian till the top of his life.
A fuller evaluation of his life and analysis will be discovered within the subsequent subject of Worldwide Battery.
