Battery pioneer John B. Goodenough has died. The chemical scientist was one of the main developers of the lithium ion battery. His work was especially important for improving the efficiency of those batteries. Goodenough lived to be a hundred.
Goodenough died on Sunday at the age of 100, writes the University of Texas, where he worked as a professor since the 1980s. Goodenough was one of the main founders of the lithium ion battery. He discovered in 1979 that lithium and cobalt oxide could act as cathodes for batteries to achieve a high energy density. Although battery technology had already been worked on for some time, it was mainly this insight that could make batteries commercially successful. Goodenough’s discovery allowed batteries to reach a higher voltage, made them more stable and made it possible to make them smaller and therefore suitable for household appliances. When Sony introduced the lithium ion battery to the market in 1991, Goodenough was the one who provided the prototype.
He continued to work on battery technology for the rest of his career. In recent years, Goodenough has been working on a glass battery, which uses glass in addition to lithium as the electrolyte.
In 2019, Goodenough received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his battery work. He was 97 years old at the time and the oldest person to ever receive the prestigious scientific prize. Goodenough was also one of the first people at MIT’s Lincoln Lab to work on the building blocks for RAM in computers.