But electrics were quiet and easy to maneuver compared with the noisy and dirty combustion engines, with their aggravating hand cranks. Then, a series of inventions, including the electric starter, gave combustion the advantage.
For decades, few seemed to think that things should be different. But in , Ford Motor—which with the Model T and the assembly line had done more than any company to make combustion mainstream—tried to bring back the electric car. It announced a battery with a sulfur cathode and a sodium anode.
It was a new way of thinking—a light battery that could store 15 times more energy than lead-acid in the same space. There were disadvantages, of course. Realistically, the battery was practical only for stationary storage, for electric power stations. Yet at first, both Ford and the public disregarded prudence. With its promise of clean electric cars, Ford captured the imagination of a s population suddenly conscious of the smog engulfing its cities.
In the initial stages, electric Fords using lead-acid batteries could travel 40 miles 64 km at a top speed of 40 miles an hour. As the new sulfur-sodium batteries came into use, cars would travel miles at highway speeds, Ford claimed.
You would recharge for an hour, and then drive another miles. Such talk created an excitement resembling the commercially inventive 19th century all over again. Around the world, researchers sought to emulate and, if they could, best Ford. Goodenough, then a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that everything suddenly changed. Batteries were no longer boring. The frenzy continued into the next decade, gaining momentum, Goodenough said, by a combination of the Arab oil embargo, a general belief that the world was running out of petroleum, and rousing scientific advances on both sides of the Atlantic.
Whatever it was, electrics seemed to be back. Now Goodenough dived into the fray. Over a two-decade period, he would either himself produce, or be part of the invention of, almost every major advance in modern batteries. John Goodenough grew up in a sprawling home near New Haven, Connecticut, where his father, Erwin, was a scholar on the history of religion at Yale. When John was 12, he was sent on scholarship at Groton, a private boarding school in Massachusetts, and rarely heard from his parents again.
In a slender, self-published autobiography, Goodenough cites many influences: siblings, a dog named Mack, a family maid, long-ago neighbors. But he conspicuously ignores his parents and never mentions them by name. Theirs was a solely biological place in his life. Suffering from dyslexia at a time when it was poorly understood and went untreated, Goodenough could not read at Groton, understand his lessons, or keep up in the chapel. Instead, he occupied himself in explorations of the woods, its animals and plants.
Nonetheless, somehow everything finally came together. He won a place and an aid package at Yale, and went on to graduate summa cum laude in mathematics. Educators had stumbled on unspent budget money and advocated using it to send 21 returning Army officers through graduate studies in physics and math. Goodenough had taken almost no science as an undergrad but, for reasons obscured by time, a Yale math professor had added his name to the group.
So he found himself at the University of Chicago, studying under some of the leading physicists of the era, including and Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi. But it turned out that Goodenough had an intuition for physics. He joined a team that was working on a system of computer memory. Not long after Goodenough joined MIT, the team unveiled magnetic-core memory, a much faster, more reliable, and more compact form of storage. In addition to helping enable SAGE, it became the foundation of computer memory systems until semiconductors superseded it in the s.
By the mids, Goodenough was fixated on finding a scientific answer to the OPEC-led energy crisis, which seemed to be the largest problem facing the country. Under that law, energy was the responsibility not of the Air Force but of the national labs. A friend sent word of an opportunity across the Atlantic.
Oxford University required a professor to teach and manage its inorganic chemistry lab. In , Goodenough was surprised to be selected; he was not a chemist and had completed just two college-level chemistry courses. He was lucky a second time to be chosen for a position for which he was underqualified, on paper. Goodenough was a tough professor. Clare Grey, a student of his at Oxford, recalled a physics course that started with students.
After a stern Goodenough lecture, she was one of just eight to return for the second class. He was equally exacting in the lab. But that was because, after MIT, he was on the hunt for big advances in solid-state chemistry, a field known for creating the kinds of materials that go commercial.
At about the time Goodenough went to Oxford, a British chemist named Stan Whittingham had announced a big breakthrough in batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionised our lives since they first entered the market in They have laid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society, and are of the greatest benefit to humankind. John B. Goodenough , born in Jena, Germany. Virginia H. Stanley Whittingham , born in the UK. Akira Yoshino , born in Suita, Japan. Prize amount: 9 million Swedish krona, to be shared equally between the Laureates.
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In , the first viable Lithium-based battery was patented by British chemist Michael Stanley Whittingham. However, the battery still had a few kinks that needed smoothing out: as the battery charged and discharged, the surface of the lithium metal anode became rough, eventually spawning long narrow fingers, or dendrites, of lithium.
These grew across the electrolyte and, when they touched the cathode, caused internal short-circuit that could make the battery explode. This inspired Goodenough to pursue the development of an improved lithium-based battery. It was here that he and his team showed how oxide cathodes would perform in a Li-ion battery and would be safer than the previous lithium designs. Goodenough reasoned a layered oxide cathode would react similarly, providing a higher voltage that would enable a significantly higher energy density However, Goodenough faced another problem: Lithium is inherently unstable and batteries were, until then, always produced charged, ready to power electronics once out of the factory.
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