John B. Goodenough, 100, Dies; Nobel-Winning Creator of the Lithium-Ion Battery

The University of Texas at Austin, where Goodenough was a professor of engineering, announced his death.

Until the announcement of his selection as a Nobel laureate, 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, 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, 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 Corp. in Tokyo and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan.

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, 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 MIT’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 MIT 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 Goodenough arrived at Oxford, Exxon patented a design by 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, 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 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.

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 Corp., which started selling the technology in 1991.

In 1991, Sony, recognizing the commercial potential of the emerging technology, combined 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 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, Connecticut, after his father joined the Yale faculty to teach comparative religion.

In an interview for this obituary in 2017, 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 MIT.

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.

John 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 former President Barack Obama in 2011.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.