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Akira Yoshino
Also Known As Akira Yoshino
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Akira Yoshino is a Japanese chemist who spent his entire industrial career, from 1972 to 2017, at Asahi Kasei Corporation, where in 1983 he built a prototype combining John Goodenough's lithium cobalt oxide cathode with a carbon-based anode, producing the first safe, commercially viable lithium-ion cell, and received the basic patent in 1985. The design became the basis for the lithium-ion batteries used in cellular phones and notebook computers worldwide. Since 2017 he has been a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, and in 2019 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with M. Stanley Whittingham and John Goodenough.
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Yoshino, Sony, and the Battery in Every Pocket
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Akira Yoshino found the missing half of the lithium-ion battery in 1985: an anode made from petroleum coke, a carbon material that could hold lithium ions between its atomic layers without ever needing metallic lithium at all. Paired with John Goodenough's lithium cobalt oxide cathode and an electrolyte based on carbonate esters, Yoshino's design was the first lithium-ion cell safe and stable enough to sell, and he patented it that same year. It took Sony and Asahi Kasei until 1991 to bring Yoshino's design to market as the world's first commercial rechargeable lithium-ion battery, but once it arrived it did not stay still: the same high energy density that made it safe to carry in a shirt pocket made the modern laptop, smartphone and electric vehicle possible in roughly that order. In 2019, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino together, a rare acknowledgment that a single invention can genuinely take three people, working decades apart, to finish.
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Combined Goodenough's cathode with a carbon-based anode to build the first commercially viable lithium-ion cell at Asahi Kasei Corporation, receiving the basic patent in 1985; shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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