The Lithium-Ion Battery

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.

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

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.