From Whittingham's Unstable Cell to Goodenough's Fix

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

M. Stanley Whittingham built the first rechargeable lithium battery in 1974 while working at Exxon, pairing a titanium disulfide cathode with an anode of metallic lithium. It worked, in the sense that it could store and release charge by moving lithium ions back and forth, but metallic lithium anodes have a habit of growing needle-like structures called dendrites as a battery cycles, and a dendrite that bridges the two electrodes can short the cell and start a fire. Whittingham's battery was too dangerous to sell. John Goodenough spent the years that followed looking for a cathode that could hold more charge at a higher voltage without depending on a dangerous anode, and in 1980 he found it: lithium cobalt oxide, a material stable enough and energetic enough to become the foundation of nearly every lithium battery built since. Goodenough had solved half the problem. The other half, a safe way to hold the lithium on the other side of the cell, took five more years and a different researcher entirely.