Co-inventor of lithium-ion batteries John Bannister Goodenough passes away

John Bannister Goodenough, the American co-inventor of lithium-ion batteries and a co-winner of 2019 Nobel prize for Chemistry, has passed away. He was the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize. British-American scientist Stan Whittingham, who shared the Nobel prize with Goodenough, was the first to reveal that lithium can be stored within sheets of titanium sulphide.

The University of Texas, where Dr. Goodenough was a professor of engineering, announced his death yesterday.

Goodenough began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1952, where he worked for 24 years and laid the groundwork for the development of random-access memory (RAM) for the digital computer. After MIT, Goodenough became a professor and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. During this time, he made the lithium-ion discovery.

According to the University of Texas, Goodenough came to Austin in 1986, setting out to develop the next battery breakthrough and educate the next battery innovators. In 1991, Sony Corp. commercialised the lithium-ion battery, for which Goodenough provided the foundation for a prototype. In 1996, a safer and more environmentally friendly cathode material was discovered in his research group, and, in 2020, a Canadian hydroelectric power company acquired the patents for this latest battery.

Photo: The University of Texas at Austin