The Electric: The Battery Industry Threw a 100th Birthday Party For Its Father

In 1991, the first portable electronic device hit the market. It was a Sony hand-held video camera, and it was an immediate sensation. The secret behind the camera was a powerful new battery—lithium-ion. Since then, the battery and others like it have revolutionized how we live, enabling devices like the iPhone, laptops, ear buds, and of course electric vehicles. Behind it all is one inventor—John Goodenough. Goodenough turns 100 on Monday, and this week we report on the party that the industry threw him on Friday in Austin, Texas.     

In 1981, Michael Thackeray, a 31-year-old Ph.D. chemist in South Africa, was working with his professor on a molten iron battery, a system that operated at a smoldering 300 degrees Celsius. The battery performed well, but not if you were thinking of an electric vehicle—which people were at the time because of high oil prices. It was simply impractical to think of putting molten metal into a fast-moving vehicle containing human beings. Thackeray, though, thought it might be possible to achieve the same results in a battery that operated at room temperature. As it happened, he was due a sabbatical, and he had hopes of using it to test his room temperature idea at a lab in the U.S. or Europe, and not in South Africa, which could feel like the edge of the universe.

So Thackeray sent letters to leading Western battery labs. Two U.S. national laboratories turned him down flat—Thackeray was certain it was because of apartheid, the racist political system that governed South Africa at the time. Stanford University didn’t respond. But then a letter arrived from John Goodenough, a professor at the University of Oxford in the U.K. Goodenough told Thackeray that he didn’t have money in his budget for a guest researcher, but that if the young man could raise his own funds, he was welcome to join him at Oxford.