So the Nobel Prize in Chemistry got announced yesterday and it went to three guys for inventing the lithium-ion battery, and I've been thinking about it all morning instead of doing actual work. John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino split it. Goodenough is 97. Ninety-seven! He's reportedly still going into his lab at the University of Texas most days, still chasing a better battery, and somehow that detail is stuck in my head more than anything else about the announcement.
Whittingham did the early work back in the 70s at Exxon of all places (oil company funding battery research is its own little irony), Goodenough figured out how to make the cathode actually stable enough to be useful, and Yoshino built the first commercially viable version that Sony shipped in 1991. Three different decades, three different countries, one battery chemistry that ended up in basically everything I own.
I did a rough count last night of how many lithium-ion cells are within arm's reach of me right now. Laptop, phone, a Kindle from 2013 that still holds a charge better than it has any right to, wireless earbuds, a battery pack I keep in my bag for emergencies, my kid's Nintendo Switch. Seven, if you count the spare phone battery I never use anymore because phones stopped having removable batteries (still bitter about that, not going to pretend otherwise). None of that exists in its current form without the chemistry these three guys worked out.
What gets me is how unglamorous the actual invention is compared to what it enabled. Nobody's writing a movie about cobalt oxide cathodes. But without this specific piece of boring, patient materials science, there's no iPhone, no Tesla, no laptop you can actually carry somewhere. The smartphone era, the whole thing, sits on top of a battery breakthrough from decades before smartphones existed. Whittingham started this work in 1973 — before I was born, before this blog existed by about 38 years, before basically anything I write about here was possible in any portable form.
And yet. I still complain about battery life constantly. My phone is barely two years old and by 4pm most days it's begging for a charger if I've done anything more than check email. That's not really Goodenough's fault, it's more that screens got bigger and apps got greedier and manufacturers decided "thin" mattered more than "lasts all day," but it's funny to sit here typing a mild battery complaint on the same day the Nobel committee is basically saying these guys changed the world. Both things are true. The battery is a miracle of 20th century chemistry and it also cannot survive a long flight plus a layover without a power bank.
There's a thing that happens with foundational tech where it becomes invisible specifically because it worked. Nobody thinks about lithium-ion chemistry when they plug in their phone at night, the same way nobody thinks about the internal combustion engine when they turn a car key (well, less of a thing people do these days, but you know what I mean). It just works, so it disappears into the background, and it takes something like a Nobel Prize announcement to yank it back into view for a day.
Goodenough not getting this until 97 says something too, and not a flattering something about how these prizes work. He'd been doing Nobel-worthy work since the 80s. Whittingham's contribution goes back to the 70s. The committee doesn't seem to be in a hurry, and I guess when the invention already reshaped the planet you don't need to rush the paperwork.
Anyway. My battery pack is charging in the other room as I write this, which feels like an appropriately dumb way to mark the occasion. Go plug something in and think about cathodes for a second.