John Goodenough, the American co-inventor of Lithium-ion batteries and a co-winner of 2019 Nobel prize for Chemistry, passed away on Sunday. He was just a month short of his 101st birthday.

John Goodenough, the American co-inventor of Lithium-ion batteries and a co-winner of 2019 Nobel prize for Chemistry, passed away on Sunday. Source: Reuters

Back John Goodenough, Nobel laureate and Li-ion battery inventor, dies at 100

Goodenough “was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career," Reuters reported quoting Jay Hartzell, President of the University of Texas at Austin where Goodenough was a faculty member for 37 years.

Goodenough received the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry - along with Britain's Stanley Whittingham and Japan's Akira Yoshino, for their respective research into lithium-ion batteries. He was of 97 years then, making him the oldest recipient of a Nobel Prize.

"This rechargeable battery laid the foundation of wireless electronics such as mobile phones and laptops," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said while making the award in 2019.

"It also makes a fossil fuel-free world possible, as it is used for everything from powering electric cars to storing energy from renewable sources."

He also played a significant role in the development of Random Access Memory (RAM) for computers.

Goodenough and his university team were exploring new directions for energy storage, including a “glass" battery with solid-state electrolyte and lithium or sodium metal electrodes, reported Reuters.

He also was an early developer of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes as an alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based cathodes. LFP is rapidly overtaking more-expensive nickel cobalt manganese in electric vehicle batteries as it uses materials that are sustainable at much lower cost.

Goodenough was born on July 25, 1922 to American parents in Jena, Germany, as per the Nobel Prize website. After studying mathematics at the Yale University, he completed his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago. He became a researcher and team leader at the MIT and later headed the inorganic chemistry lab at the University of Oxford.

He also served the US Army during the Second World War as a meteorologist.

In 2008, he wrote his autobiography, Witness to Grace, which he called “my personal history".