Dr Goodenough

[MickeyAO]

You might have heard me mention Dr. Goodenough before (and if you did, you immediately Googled the name to see if it was a real person).
Sadly, the inventor of the Li-ion battery has passed at the age of 100.
Professor in the University of Texas and a Nobel Laurate.

"Quietness. I mean you have to think. That's hard work!"

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[HaroldCal]

It's rare that one man changes the world so dramatically for the better. He gave us a century of his life, and we're better for it. RIP Doc.

 

[MickeyAO]

I find it funny that Oxford (where he worked at the time) decided not to patent his invention and that Sony is credited has having released the first Li-ion battery.

 

[Jim Lewis]

The New York Times has a very detailed obituary. It says that he was the unwanted child of an agnostic Yale professor of religion and a mother with whom he never bonded. His parents' marriage was a mismatch, and at age 12, he was sent away to a private boarding school and rarely heard from his parents after that. He had to overcome dyslexia as well as coming from a dysfunctional family. He worked at MIT's Lincoln Lab in the '50s and '60s, which is famous for its advanced tech defense work, before going to Oxford, where he began his battery research. The obituary said that he amazed his colleagues at UT-Austin by continuing to be active in research well into his 90s.

John B. Goodenough, 100, Dies; Nobel-Winning Creator of the Lithium-Ion Battery - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Dr. 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.

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, Dr. 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, Dr. 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 Corporation in Tokyo and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan.

 

[TaxmanHog]

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