Austin, Texas — John Goodenough, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing technology-changing lithium-ion batteries with rechargeable power for devices ranging from cellphones, computers and pacemakers to electric cars, aged 100 has passed away, the University of Texas announced Monday.
The university announced that Goodenough died Sunday at an assisted living facility in Austin. No cause of death was given. Goodenough remained a faculty member at Texas for nearly 40 years.
Goodenough was the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize, when he shared the prize with M. Stanley Whittingham, a British-American scientist, and Akira Yoshino of Japan.
When awarded the Nobel Prize, Goodenough said, “Live to be 97 and you can do anything,” adding that he was grateful that he was not forced to retire at 65.
And while his name may not ring a bell to most people, Goodenough’s research helped spark a revolution in technology that is today seen in the world of portable phones, tablets, and pretty much anything else with a plug-in port for recharge. It is believed.
Lithium-ion batteries were the first truly portable and rechargeable batteries, and took more than a decade to develop. Whittingham said in 2019 that he had no idea decades ago that his work would have such a profound impact on the world.
Goodenough said, “We thought it would be cool and help with some things, but never dreamed it would revolutionize electronics and everything else.”
Goodenough, Whittingham and Yoshino each had unique breakthroughs that laid the groundwork for developing a commercial rechargeable battery, and all three shared the $900,000 Nobel Prize.
Whittingham’s work in the 1970s harnessed the propensity of lithium – the lightest metal – to give up its electrons to create a battery capable of generating just over two volts of electricity.
By 1980, Goodenough built on Whittingham’s work and doubled the battery’s capacity to four volts by using cobalt oxide at the cathode, one of the two electrodes that make up the ends of the battery.
That battery remained too explosive for normal commercial use. Yoshino’s work in the 1980s removed the unstable pure lithium from batteries and instead chose lithium ions which are much safer. The first lightweight, safe, durable, and rechargeable commercial batteries hit the market in 1991.
Born in Jena, Germany, in 1922, Goodenough grew up in the United States and earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago. He began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research laid the foundation for the development of random-access memory for digital computers.
When Goodenough discovered lithium-ion, he was head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England. He joined the Texas faculty in 1986, and was still teaching and researching battery materials and solid-state science and engineering problems when he won the Nobel Prize.
Goodenough and his wife, Irene, were married for 70 years until his death in 2016.
