Background
John Bannister Goodenough was born on July 25, 1922, in Jena, Germany. He was a son of a professor of history Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough and Helen Miriam (Lewis) Goodenough. He had a brother anthropologist Ward Goodenough.
John Goodenough during his University of Chicago years.
1982
Oxford OX1 2JD, United Kingdom
John B. Goodenough in Oxford, 1982.
2011
John B. Goodenough receiving the National Medal of Science from the former President of the United States Barack Obama.
2015
Austin, TX 78712, United States
John B. Goodenough in his laboratory in 2015.
2019
London, United Kingdom
Chemistry Nobel Joint Laureate John B Goodenough attends a press conference on October 9, 2019, in London, England. (Photo by Peter Summers)
2019
London, United Kingdom
Chemistry Nobel Joint Laureate John B Goodenough attends a press conference on October 9, 2019, in London, England. (Photo by Peter Summers)
2019
Stockholm, Sweden
Nobel Prize In Chemistry Laureate Akira Yoshino, John B. Goodenough, and M. Stanley Whittingham are seen after the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2019, in Stockholm, Sweden. (Photo by The Asahi Shimbun)
2019
Stockholm, Sweden
Nobel Prize In Chemistry Laureate John B. Goodenough is seen during the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2019, in Stockholm, Sweden. (Photo by The Asahi Shimbun)
A young John B. Goodenough.
Austin, TX 78712, United States
John B. Goodenough at his work desk at the University of Texas at Austin.
John B. Goodenough holding a battery in his hand.
John B. Goodenough
John Goodenough's invention of the lithium-ion battery has helped power modern electronics, including cell phones, laptop computers and electric cars.
Austin, TX 78712, United States
John B. Goodenough, currently a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, works with students in his office.
1982
Oxford OX1 2JD, United Kingdom
John B. Goodenough in Oxford, 1982.
2011
John B. Goodenough receiving the National Medal of Science from the former President of the United States Barack Obama.
2015
Austin, TX 78712, United States
John B. Goodenough in his laboratory in 2015.
2019
London, United Kingdom
Chemistry Nobel Joint Laureate John B Goodenough attends a press conference on October 9, 2019, in London, England. (Photo by Peter Summers)
2019
London, United Kingdom
Chemistry Nobel Joint Laureate John B Goodenough attends a press conference on October 9, 2019, in London, England. (Photo by Peter Summers)
2019
Stockholm, Sweden
Nobel Prize In Chemistry Laureate Akira Yoshino, John B. Goodenough, and M. Stanley Whittingham are seen after the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2019, in Stockholm, Sweden. (Photo by The Asahi Shimbun)
2019
Stockholm, Sweden
Nobel Prize In Chemistry Laureate John B. Goodenough is seen during the Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2019, in Stockholm, Sweden. (Photo by The Asahi Shimbun)
A young John B. Goodenough.
Austin, TX 78712, United States
John B. Goodenough at his work desk at the University of Texas at Austin.
John B. Goodenough holding a battery in his hand.
John B. Goodenough
John Goodenough's invention of the lithium-ion battery has helped power modern electronics, including cell phones, laptop computers and electric cars.
Austin, TX 78712, United States
John B. Goodenough, currently a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, works with students in his office.
John Goodenough during his University of Chicago years.
https://www.amazon.com/Magnetism-chemical-Monographs-chemistry-inorganic/dp/B0000CLUF4/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1594300535&refinements=p_27%3AJohn+Bannister+Goodenough&s=books&sr=1-1&text=John+Bannister+Goodenough
1963
John Bannister Goodenough was born on July 25, 1922, in Jena, Germany. He was a son of a professor of history Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough and Helen Miriam (Lewis) Goodenough. He had a brother anthropologist Ward Goodenough.
John B. Goodenough and his brother attended boarding school at Groton in Massachusetts.
Goodenough received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yale University (1943) while serving in the United States Army Air Forces as a meteorologist. After the end of World War II, he did his graduate studies in physics at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s (1951) and a doctorate (1952).
In 1952 Goodenough became a research scientist at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There one of Goodenough’s first projects was developing the SAGE air defense computer’s memory cores, which were the first random access memory (RAM).
Goodenough became a professor at the University of Oxford in 1976 and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. That same year, M. Stanley Whittingham had developed the first lithium-ion battery with an anode of metallic lithium and a cathode of lithium ions in between layers of titanium disulfide. Goodenough knew the battery would have a higher voltage if the cathode was a metal oxide rather than a metal sulfide. In 1979 Goodenough and his collaborators developed a battery with a cathode of lithium ions between layers of cobalt oxide. This battery had a potential of 4 volts, while the Whittingham battery had a potential of only 2.5 volts.
Goodenough became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1986 in the departments of mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering. He has been honored with the National Medal of Science (2011), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2014), and the Copley Medal (2019). He wrote Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963), Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Technology: Principles, Performance and Operations (2009, with Kevin Huang), and an autobiography, Witness to Grace (2008).
John Goodenough is a solid-state physicist who has made a particularly profound impact on the development of materials for efficiently converting and storing energy in fuel cells and batteries. John’s discovery of lithium cobalt oxide led to the development of the high-performance rechargeable lithium-ion batteries now widely used in devices such as mobile phones and laptop computers.
He has also made fundamental advances in understanding magnetism. He helped to develop the first random-access memory - RAM - used in computers, and jointly devised the Goodenough-Kanamori rules on magnetic superexchange. Recently, he made discoveries relating to superconductivity and magnetoresistance - a change in electrical resistance brought about by a magnetic field.
John’s achievements have won wide recognition. He is a winner of the Enrico Fermi Award of the US government, and the Royal Society of Chemistry established the John B. Goodenough Award in his honor. John is also the recipient of the Japan Prize, which recognizes work that is both scientifically outstanding and of benefit to humanity in general.
John Goodenough is known around the world for his pioneering work that led to the invention of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.
In 1979, Goodenough 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. This discovery paved the way for the development of lithium-ion batteries, which are now ubiquitous in portable electronic devices and electric vehicles.
He identified and developed the critical materials that provided the high-energy density needed to power portable electronics, initiating the wireless revolution. Today, batteries incorporating Goodenough’s cathode materials are used worldwide for mobile phones, power tools, laptops, tablets, and other wireless devices, as well as electric and hybrid vehicles.
Along with other materials scientists and engineers in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, he continues to research battery materials. He studies the relationships between the chemical, structural and electrical properties of solids, addressing fundamental solid-state problems in order to design new materials that can enable an engineering function.
Quotations:
"Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge, and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted. We believe our discovery solves many of the problems that are inherent in today’s batteries."
"So a good teacher always makes you do something a little bit more than you thought that you could do."
John B. Goodenough is a member of the National Academies of Engineering and Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society and the Academies of Science of France, Spain, and India.
Physical Characteristics: John B. Goodenough struggled with reading and writing from a young age, only discovering later he was dyslexic. This serendipitously drew him away from subjects heavy on writing and towards the more physical sciences and engineering.
In the University of Chicago, John B. Goodenough met his future wife, history graduate student Irene Wiseman. The two remained doting partners to each other until she died in 2016 of Alzheimer’s disease.
