John Bannister Goodenough was an American Nobel laureate who invented rechargeable lithium batteries. Nature.Com describes him as ‘large in stature, with a formidable intellect, genial and kind, yet patrician and private, quietly considered but with a long, loud and exuberant laugh’. He grew up in a rural environment, defining his and his wife’s shared faith according to Nature.Com.
How John Bannister Became Goodenough for a Nobel Prize
John Bannister Goodenough achieved a number of battery firsts, despite the Second World War putting his early career on hold. He ignored his physics professor’s warning to him and his class, ‘I don’t understand you veterans.
‘Don’t you know that anyone who has ever done anything significant in physics had already done it by the time he was your age?’ As Nature.Com observes wryly, ‘he clearly was an exception’. Notable achievements included working on solid-state random access memory devices for computers in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Then he turned his attention to renewable energy, but not for the reasons that make it an imperative nowadays. You see, he had grown concerned about the volatility of the international oil trade. And how this affected the quality of life of people in poor countries.
Goodenough Turns His Attention to Lithium Metal
John Bannister Goodenough obtained the position of head of Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at University of Oxford, UK. There, he applied his mind to lithium batteries earlier explored by Whittingham, at oil company Exxon. He gathered a number of other superb minds around him. This team revolutionized battery-fabrication techniques, and their work enabled a rechargeable lithium battery based on lithium cobalt oxide.
John continued to work on, despite having officially retired in 1987. He soldiered on in his laboratory at University of Texas, Austin shunning his aging. But he never chased after financial rewards for this work, for his world was the world of pure science. And he measured his success to the end in terms of this simple question. What is your contribution really, to society? Rest well now John.
More Information
Grid-Scale Battery Storage in a Nutshell
