John B. Goodenough, a former soldier, was awarded the Nobel Prize for helping create the lithium-ion battery, used today in a plethora of civilian and military systems, including vehicles, cellphones and laptops.
Their advantages include high-energy output, light weight and long lifespan.
So important are these batteries to the military that the Defense Department published the “Lithium Battery Strategy 2023-2030,” which outlines supply chain security measures of these vital components.
Research for the lithium-ion battery was started by Michael Stanley Whittingham in the late 1970s. Goodenough improved on it in the 1980s and Akira Yoshino made further refinements to the point where it could be produced commercially in 1991. For their achievements, the three shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research helped to fund Goodenough’s research.
Besides developing lithium-ion batteries, Goodenough was also on the team tasked with improving memory capabilities in early computers that resulted in the first random-access memory used in today’s computers.
During World War II, Goodenough joined the Army Air Force, training as a meteorologist in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “The Army training, mostly by civilians, was efficient and quite professional,” he wrote in his 2019 Nobel Prize autobiographical sketch.
Upon being commissioned a second lieutenant in the autumn of 1943, he was posted at an air base in Houlton, Maine, a few miles south of a more active air base in Presque Isle, where fighter planes were dispatched to England.
“After two weeks, I found myself in charge of the weather station in Houlton. In those days we drew our own maps and made our own forecasts; there was no satellite and no computer-aided forecast from Washington,” he wrote.
In the summer of 1944, he was sent to Stephenville on the west coast of Newfoundland. Stephenville was the jumping-off base for the cargo B54s flying to either the Azores or directly to England.
These planes also stopped in Stephenville on their way home to Washington, D.C. The B54s had a longer range than the fighter planes. The tactical bombers were dispatched from Gander on the east side of the island.
“Although almost all my forecasts were reasonably accurate, including a clearing of Eisenhower from Stephenville that landed him safely in Paris within six minutes of his estimated time of arrival, a forecast could be dangerously wrong,” he wrote, referring to Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander, Allied Expeditionary Force.
“As D-day approached, we tried to predict from the weather when the allies would storm the beaches of France. Eisenhower and our forces had bad luck with the strength of the cold front behind which they attacked. We followed closely the battle of the hedge rows and the final breakout across France,” he wrote.
“One December day, civilian pilots flying the B54s were congratulating themselves that they were going to make it home for Christmas. When I refused to clear them for the trip to Newfoundland because a strong headwind from there to the Azores would prevent them from reaching their destination, they set out anyway. Six hours later they were back on base; the headwinds were so strong they had barely cleared the islands,” he wrote.
Goodenough had attained the rank of captain when he was discharged at the end of the war.
Born to American parents in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, Goodenough married Irene Wiseman in 1951. She died in 2016, and he died at age 100, June 25, 2023, in Austin, Texas. They had no children.
