American inventor of the rechargeable lithium battery, John Goodenough, dies at the age of 100
To this day, John Goodenough is still the oldest among the Nobel Prize winners in its history, as he won it when he was ninety-seven with British chemists Stanley Whittingham, born in 1941, and Japanese Akira Yoshino, born in 1948.
The American physicist John Goodenough, who was one of the inventors of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery and won with his British and Japanese partners in this invention the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2019, has passed away at the age of 100, according to what his university in Austin, Texas announced on Tuesday.
The University of Texas, where Goodenough has taught since 1986 at its Cockerill College of Engineering, said he died on Sunday.
The university's president, Jay Hartzel, noted in a statement that the physicist, born in 1922 in Germany and raised and educated in the United States, "left a broad legacy as a scientist whose discoveries have improved the lives of billions of people around the world."
To this day, John Goodenough is still the oldest among the Nobel Prize winners in its history, as he won it when he was ninety-seven with British chemists Stanley Whittingham, born in 1941, and Japanese Akira Yoshino, born in 1948.
After the oil crises of the 1970s, Stanley Whittingham, a professor at Binghamton University in America, who was working at the time for the Exxon oil company, began searching for non-fossil sources of energy.
His research led to the discovery of a way to produce energy from lithium, a metal so light that it floats on water.
Then University of Texas at Austin professor John Goodenough worked to increase the innovation's properties by producing energy from metal oxide rather than disulfide.
In 1980, he demonstrated that combining cobalt oxide and lithium ions could produce up to four volts.
Building on these discoveries, Akira Yoshino, 71, invented the first commercial battery in 1985.
The Royal Swedish Academy, when awarding them the Nobel Prize, considered them to have created a "rechargeable world".
She added that "lithium batteries have revolutionized our lives since they were introduced in 1991," and "brought great benefits to humanity," including the development of the ability to use mobile devices and millions of people's access to information and the Internet via mobile phones.
Goodenough said when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, "I am very happy that my discovery has helped communication in different parts of the world. We need to build relationships, not wars."
"I would be happy if people used it for good, not for evil," he added.
Source: websites