July 25
If you have an electric or hybrid car, use a smartphone, take your laptop to a cafe to work, or just generally enjoy not worrying that much about dying batteries any more, you have John Goodenough to think. He was born July 25, 1922, and he invented the lithium-ion battery that’s used in all those devices. He also made fundamental discoveries in material science that enable us to have computer memory measured in terabytes instead of kilobytes.
Goodenough was born in Germany, but his parents were American. The family returned to the US at some point and Goodenough attended Yale (where his father became a professor), then earned a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago, and after that worked as a researcher and professor at places from MIT to the University of Oxford. He won, basically, all the awards his field had to offer, including the Nobel Prize, and there’s even a John B. Goodenough Award in materials science named after him. He just died last month, at 100, and for a while he was the oldest living Nobel laureate. He grew up in an academic family; his father was a professor of the history of religion, his brother became an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, he has a half-sister and a half-brother who are both emeritus professors of biology (at different universities, though).
You’d think that growing up in that kind of environment, and achieving so much in a highly technical field, Goodenough would have been a voracious reader. On the contrary, though, he found reading pretty difficult. He suffered from dyslexia for his whole life. He could write, though — he authored 550 technical articles, 85 textbook chapters, and five books, including two that are still used as basic texts in materials science. All that really does seem like it’s good enough.
