FORTY years after inventing battery chemistries that have touched the lives of billions, John Goodenough is still on a mission.

Goodenough, who has just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, has certainly earned the right to kick back and enjoy the fruits of his labors.

At 97, he dethroned scientist Arthur Ashkin as the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize. Ashkin was awarded the physics prize last year at 96.

Goodenough won the award alongside Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Akira Yoshino of Meijo University for their contributions to the development of lithium-ion batteries.

In the words of the Nobel Foundation, “through their work, they have created the right conditions for a wireless and fossil fuel-free society, and so brought the greatest benefit to humankind.”

“Live to 97 [years old] and you can do anything,” Goodenough said in a statement. “I’m honored and humbled to win the Nobel Prize. I thank all my friends for the support and assistance throughout my life.”

As a professor of mechanical engineering and material science at the University of Texas-Austin, he continues to work, and to search for the next big battery breakthrough.

At a ceremony in Stockholm in December, Goodenough will receive more than US$300,000 for the award as well as a medal and a diploma.

“My share of the Nobel Prize will go to my university to support the people who work there,” Goodenough said Wednesday.

When asked how he thought the university would react to his award, Goodenough replied with a hearty chuckle. “Well, I hope they still keep me employed.”

“This lightweight, rechargeable and powerful battery is now used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles,” said a release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.

The production of these batteries, the academy said, has allowed for the development of cleaner energy technologies and electric vehicles and consequently reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

They credited Goodenough with an important breakthrough in using cobalt oxide, which led to more powerful batteries.

UT Austin noted that in 1979 Goodenough made the discovery which showed that, “by using lithium cobalt oxide as the cathode of a lithium-ion rechargeable battery, it would be possible to achieve a high density of stored energy with an anode other than metallic lithium.”

Goodenough did note that lithium-ion batteries can’t be charged too fast or overcharged.

“The lithium-ion battery is pretty well developed by now; they made it a commercial product and it’s working very well,” he told reporters. “But it has its limitations so ... [we’ll] want to do something a little better.”

But for the time being, Goodenough is still seeing this battery being useful to society, so he thinks it will be around “for a while.”

Born in 1922 in Jena, Germany, Goodenough grew up in a Connecticut farmhouse where education was stressed and was sent on scholarship to the Groton School, a private boarding academy in Massachusetts, at age 12. During that time, his parents divorced, and he never returned home. He finished at Groton, studying Latin and Greek, then entered Yale University, majoring in math and philosophy.

“I was dyslexic as a child and I couldn’t read very well,” he recalled. “I wasn’t going to major in history or English. So I did mathematics.”

Knowing he would be spending some time in the army, the young academic was at a loss over what to do in life. Then he read Alfred North Whitehead’s seminal book “Science and the Modern World,” which analyzed the impact of scientific discovery on different historical periods.

“I just had a feeling that what I was supposed to do was science,” Goodenough said. “I had no money — how was I going to go to graduate school? I didn’t have the vaguest idea. But I knew if I had the opportunity I should go study physics.”

When the war ended, he was given his chance with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill, which granted university stipends to help veterans readjust. “I was very lucky,” he acknowledged.

Goodenough studied solid-state physics under Prof. Clarence Zener and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1952, according to the Nobel Foundation. He went on to work at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he helped develop the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system for air defense.

“It was interdisciplinary, so physics, chemistry and engineering were all involved together,” Goodenough said. “And that gave me the opportunity to really move in the direction of materials science and engineering. It’s that opportunity to work with chemists, physicists and engineers that really matured and developed me.”

Seeing the 1970s energy crisis prompted people to line up at gas stations, Goodenough knew he had to work on something related to energy.

“So that’s why I turned to studying energy materials, and then I was invited to go to Oxford. And I officially became a chemist at that point,” he said.

The energy crisis also inspired others. Early in the decade, Whittingham discovered a way to diffuse lithium ions into sheets of titanium sulfide, something that could be useful for building a rechargeable battery, and was given a job at Exxon.

At the University of Oxford, where Goodenough served as the head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, he made the groundbreaking discovery that helped him win the Nobel, UT Austin officials said in a news release.

Whittingham developed the first functional lithium battery in the early 1970s, but Goodenough was able to double the battery’s potential in 1980 by using lithium cobalt oxide as the cathode of a lithium-ion battery, the foundation said. Using Goodenough’s cathode as a basis, Yoshino created the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery five years later.

“Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized our lives since they first entered the market in 1991,” the Nobel Foundation said in a statement.

“I’m extremely happy the lithium-ion batteries have helped communications around the world,” Goodenough said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “We are indeed happy that people use this for good and not evil.”

After retiring from Oxford in 1986, Goodenough joined UT Austin. Even at the age of 97, he continues to develop new polymers and battery concepts with researchers in his lab. He is now largely focused on developing all-solid-state batteries as they can offer better safety, according to Arumugam Manthiram, a longtime colleague from UT Austin.

Asked if Goodenough still works an eight-hour day, his assistant, Melissa Truitt-Green, replied matter-of-factly, “Not always. Sometimes he works 10 hours.”

Goodenough’s current mission is to develop a chemistry that solves the shortcomings of today’s lithium-ion batteries and lays the foundation for a real revolution in electric cars. The big problem with today’s lithium-ion batteries, he said, lies in their charging times.

“If you charge fast, with a liquid electrolyte and a carbon anode, you plate lithium on it and get dendrites,” he said. “And then you get problems. Today, the solution is to charge overnight. But with an electric car, you don’t want to have to charge overnight. You want to drive up and get charged in 10 minutes.”

To accomplish that, Goodenough is working on a solid-state lithium-ion battery. That is, no liquid electrolytes, no dendrites, no overheating. And very fast charging.

Goodenough knows that’s a tall order. “People have tried to make a solid-state battery, and they could only do it with very thin films and not much capacity,” he said. “It’s a very tricky problem. But I believe it will be ready in five years.”(SD-Agencies)