The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World

by Steve LeVine

  Freund put up a fight when he learned that the Met scouts had settled on Tulgey Wood as the lab’s new home. He decided to employ “every means at my command for as long as necessary to prevent its being seized from me.”2 The government’s intent was to buy, not seize, the property, yet Freund battled to keep his estate. The dispute went on for a year, when, in 1947, Freund died of a sudden heart attack, allowing the federal acquisition to proceed.

  The boxers were easy to move, but the deer would have to go to game parks. Some simply could not be captured and were left behind to wander. Over time, the scientists noticed the herd growing back, “glimpsed along the tree line through a morning fog, found on a knoll during an evening rain, or spotted in headlights near a road at night.”3 They became an enduring remnant of Erwin Freund’s grand project.

  But what to officially call the Met now that it occupied a new place? Someone suggested Fermi Lab, but since such dedications ordinarily honored the deceased and the scientist was still living, the name of a local town was selected—Argonne.

  The government purchased additional surrounding farmland. Argonne now covered 4,100 acres. To fill it in, workers planted about a million pine seedlings, which thrived and created a massive home for the growing deer herd. Argonne still looked like a military base, dotted with Quonset huts erected as offices. In the 1950s, red brick structures were added. They were given numbers instead of names. Building 205 was finished in 1951. The two-story structure would become home to Argonne’s Battery Department.

  • • •

  Many of Argonne’s first scientists commuted from Chicago aboard a shuttle bus for thirty-five cents’ fare. The lab provided the service because nearly all its staff lived in the city. Some called Hyde Park “Little Argonne” because of the number of residents employed by the lab. The ride took ninety minutes and passed streets dense with factories, warehouses, and rail yards before giving way to an expanse of farmland. It might seem long, but the driver, an amateur ventriloquist, entertained as he went. In one trick, he would startle boarding passengers with a voice that suggested someone shouting from behind to get on. But gradually the shuttle was discontinued as the scientists gave up the city and sought homes in nascent suburbs such as Aurora, Naperville, and Downers Grove. These communities, with roots stretching back to the 1830s, often resisted newcomers, and Argonne would have to vouch for their character before they could move in. Yet eventually most were accepted and some even found themselves embraced. Among the latter was Stephen Lawroski, head of the Chemicals Technology Division, whom tony Naperville dubbed “the Professor” and honored with a regular invitation to a daily breakfast club of local dignitaries at a downtown drugstore.

  Dieter Gruen was awarded his doctorate in 1951. Graduates with his background had many choices. Fundamental research was under way across American industry. He interviewed at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and heard of positions at General Electric, Ford, and General Motors. Universities, too, were hiring professors and basic researchers. But Gruen remained drawn to Argonne, where he was already known and still proud to work. Argonne was already one of the world’s premier research facilities. Experimentalists enjoyed a free flow of funding from Washington and tremendous liberty to research what interested them. Gruen accepted badge number 1989 and an office in Building 205.

  At first, Gruen was assigned to a team building a nuclear submarine under the direction of Captain Hyman Rickover. His task was to figure out how to eliminate hafnium from zirconium, needed in combination with uranium to fuel the subs. The regime was strict. Virtually everything was top secret given that Argonne’s primary function was to create sensitive nuclear technology. Gruen felt the danger. Scientists wore special yellow shoes and provided regular urine samples, both precautions against radiation contamination. An eight-foot fence surrounded the building, accessible only through a guard post. Every office contained a red wastepaper basket with bold all-capital lettering: BURN. They were for the classified papers that were no longer wanted. You weren’t supposed to incinerate such documents yourself—the label was aimed at the disposal staff. But at least once, a scientist took the designation literally, setting his wastepaper basket afire and sending smoke into the hallway.

  A couple of hundred people were already working in Building 205. Most of them were in their twenties and thirties, a mix of men and women, the latter mostly secretaries, and many were single. At lunch, the men bet over rounds of pinochle in the basement and through the day frequented coffee groups organized along every corridor. On weekends, the scientists visited one another’s homes and numerous couples ultimately married. But generally speaking, Argonne seemed organized for the work conducted there without regard for the conditions under which it was carried out. Only rooms that absolutely required air conditioning were equipped with it, which meant that in the humid summer, moisture collected on overhead water lines and dripped onto the scientists. Some of them draped their equipment with protective plastic but they themselves still often got wet. At departmental meetings, overheated researchers regularly fell asleep.

  Gruen didn’t find it at all like Oak Ridge—the intensity was not there. After all, the war had ended. If you ignored the dangerous and classified projects under way, the lab seemed ordinary. Scientists worked from nine to five. In 1956, Gruen and his wife moved to Downers Grove, which had become another Little Argonne. “We didn’t think anybody lived in Downers Grove except people who worked at Argonne,” one of their children remarked.

  Yet Gruen also noticed the envy of university friends. He had the use of rare and advanced equipment. If you were a “hotshot,” which he was—he was his team’s youngest senior scientist and assigned his own research group—you were smart to be at Argonne.

  4

  “Discouraged Weariness in the Eyes”

  At times, the ferment of the 1960s seemed aimed at Argonne. Seeing their nuclear research stigmatized and budgets reduced, some people thought that Argonne’s existence was threatened. After a while, the lab director noticed “discouraged weariness in the eyes” of the scientists. Recalling his own time in Exxon’s research lab a few years back, the director reckoned that much of the gloom sprang not from the national politics but Argonne’s atmosphere—scientists were likelier to produce first-rate work if they were surrounded by first-rate facilities. He asked his wife to help. Before long, she had workers retiling and painting Building 205. They added lights in the public areas and gussied up the hitherto pale green offices with pinks, golds, and blues. The overall effect was a softer ambience, “a brand new building,” especially with the finishing touch of a jazz and blues concert series.

  One researcher carried a loaded derringer into the lab, explaining that he attended classes in a dodgy neighborhood and needed the protection. He was fired when the pistol discharged as he changed clothes, wounding him. “No further gunplay in the locker room,” the division director said. At the annual Turkey Raffle in the basement auditorium, Sandy Preto, a lab researcher who moonlighted as a belly dancer at a nearby club, surprised colleagues with a performance.1

  Throughout, the lab’s hazards remained unignorable. One day, a new scientist named Paul Nelson assisted a senior researcher who was heating and freezing molten zinc mixed with a few tenths of a gram of plutonium. For protection, they wore gas masks, but the concoction accidentally spilled and burned straight through some hot stainless steel. Nelson “thought about my children and decided it was time to leave.” Colleagues subjected him to good-natured ribbing for fleeing a harmless bit of combustion. They were somewhat less casual a few years later when an experiment with uranium and plutonium oxide blew out the glass panels of a working lab, created a bulge in the concrete walls, and scattered radioactivity.2 Researchers had accidentally installed the safety meter backward, leading to a buildup of hydrogen and oxygen. Cleaning crews removed the contamination while the researchers sat out some time on medical watch.

  Some things went unchanged—g
azing from his window one day, Nelson counted eighty-three white deer—but Argonne was aging. In the 1970s, a former senior manager remarked that the lab “isn’t exactly the Club Med type of atmosphere that one would expect to engender romantic relationships.”3 When high emotions did arise, they seemed to pit the various arms of science against one another. The engineers called the chemists “pharmacists,” who assailed the former as “pipefitters.” The physicists had a similarly low opinion of materials scientists. But the physicists cast themselves favorably as “part of the big science world [that] thought big.” Unlike the energy storage scientists, who insisted on going home for dinner at six, the physicists frequently worked around the clock, through weekends and on holidays if necessary, to repair, say, a failed particle accelerator.4

  There was truth in what the physicists said—Argonne’s battery guys by and large were not the type who stuck out.

  • • •

  That was new, because for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, batteries and the electricity held within them were treated as an almost unfathomable force by poets, philosophers, and scientists. Those who had unleashed the epoch were accorded tremendous deference. Alessandro Volta invented the first battery and thus launched the electric age in 1799. It was a feat rooted in a debate with fellow Italian Luigi Galvani, who claimed that frogs possessed an internal store of electricity. Volta theorized that the electricity observed by Galvani originated in metals used as part of the experiment, rather than in the frogs themselves. Volta created his battery while carrying out experiments to disprove Galvani. Benjamin Franklin, a contemporary, had already coined the word to describe a rudimentary electric device he built out of glass panes, lead plates, and wires. But Franklin’s was a battery in name only, while Volta’s was a true electric storage unit. After Volta’s brainchild, scientists kept hooking up batteries to corpses to see if they could be coaxed back to life. Many wondered whether electricity could cure cancer or if it was the source of life itself. What if souls were electric impulses?

  To make a battery, you start with two components called electrodes. One is negatively charged, and is called the anode. The other, positively charged electrode is called the cathode. When the battery produces electricity—when it discharges—positively charged lithium atoms, known as ions, shuttle from the negative to the positive electrode (thus giving the battery its name, lithium-ion). But to get there, the ions need a facilitator—something through which to travel—and that is a substance called electrolyte. If you can reverse the process—if you can force the ions now to shuttle back to the negative electrode—you recharge the battery. When you do that again and again, shuttling the ions back and forth between the electrodes, you have what is called a rechargeable battery. But that is a quality that only certain batteries possess.

  The battery’s very simplicity—its remarkably small number of parts—has both helped and hindered the efforts of scientists to improve on Volta’s creation. They had only the cathode, the anode, and the electrolyte to think about, and, to fashion them, a lot of potentially suitable elements on the entire periodic table. Yet this went both ways—there was no way to bypass those three parts and, as it soon became apparent, only so many of the elements that were truly attractive in a battery. In 1859, a French physicist named Gaston Planté invented the rechargeable lead-acid battery. Planté’s battery used a cathode made of lead oxide and an anode of electron-heavy metallic lead. When his battery discharged electricity, the electrodes reacted with a sulfuric acid electrolyte, creating lead sulfate and producing electric current. But Planté’s structure went back to the very beginning—it was Volta’s pile, merely turned on its side, with plates stacked next to rather than atop one another. The Energizer, commercialized in 1980, was a remarkably close descendant of Planté’s invention. In more than a century, the science hadn’t changed.

  In the early part of the twentieth century, electric cars powered by lead-acid batteries seemed superior to rivals featuring the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. But a series of inventions, including the electric starter (which eclipsed the awkward rotary hand crank), finally gave the advantage to the internal combustion engine propelled by gasoline and contained explosions rather than a flow of electricity. For four decades, few seemed to think that things should be different.

  In 1966, Ford Motor tried to bring back the electric car. It announced a battery that used liquid electrodes and a solid electrolyte, the opposite of Planté’s configuration. It was a new way of thinking, with electrodes—one sulfur and the other sodium—that were light and could store fifteen times more energy than lead-acid in the same space.

  There were disadvantages, of course. The Ford battery did not operate at room temperature but at about 300 degrees Celsius. The internal combustion engine operates at an optimal temperature of about 90 degrees Celsius. Driving around with much hotter, explosive molten metals under your hood was risky. Realistically speaking, that would confine the battery’s practical use to stationary storage, such as at electric power stations. Yet at first, both Ford and the public disregarded prudence. With its promise of clean-operating electric cars, Ford captured the imagination of a 1960s population suddenly conscious of the smog engulfing its cities.

  Popular Science described an initial stage at which electric Fords using lead-acid batteries could travel forty miles at a top speed of forty miles an hour. As the new sulfur-sodium batteries came into use, cars would travel two hundred miles at highway speeds, Ford claimed. You would recharge for an hour, and then drive another two hundred miles. A pair of rival reporters who were briefed along with the Popular Science man were less impressed—despite Ford’s claims, one remarked within earshot of the Popular Science man that electrics would “never” be ready for use.

  The Popular Science writer went on:

  They walked out to their cars, started, and drove away, leaving two trains of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and other pollution to add to the growing murkiness of the Detroit atmosphere. [The other reporter’s remark] was a good crack. But it was wrong. When a development is needed badly enough, it comes. Without some drastic change, American cities will eventually become uninhabitable. The electric automobile can stop the trend toward poisoned air. Its details are yet to be decided. But it will come. And it won’t be long.5

  For a few years, the excitement around Ford’s breakthrough resembled the commercially inventive nineteenth century all over again. Around the world, researchers sought to emulate and, if they could, best Ford. As it had been on nuclear energy, Argonne sought to be the arbiter of the new age. In the late 1960s, an aggressive electrochemist named Elton Cairns became head of a new Argonne research unit—a Battery Department. Cairns initiated a comprehensive study of high-temperature batteries like Ford’s. Someone suggested a hybrid electric bus assisted by a methane-propelled phosphoric acid fuel cell, and it was examined as well. Welcoming suggestions, the lab director insisted only that any invention be aimed at rapid introduction to the market. To be sure that would happen, he invited companies to embed scientists at Argonne for periods of a few months to a year, and many did so.

  John Goodenough, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that everything suddenly changed. Batteries were no longer boring. Goodenough attributed the frenzy to a combination of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, a general belief that the world was running out of petroleum, and rousing scientific advances on both sides of the Atlantic. Pivoting off the Ford work, a young British chemist named Stan Whittingham, working as a postdoctoral assistant at Stanford University, discovered that he could electrochemically shuttle lithium atoms from one electrode to the other at room temperature with inordinate damage to neither. To explain this action, which created rechargeability, Whittingham borrowed the term intercalation from chemistry, and it stuck. Exxon, the oil giant, wishing to compete with Bell Labs—“to be perceived as the lab of the energy business”—offered to hire Whittingham at a
significant salary.6 He accepted and set out to make a battery from his findings.

  Whittingham was drawn to lithium, silvery white and malleable, because it is the lightest metal on the periodic table. But it reacts with air and, in certain circumstances, catches fire. Scientists therefore handle pure lithium metal only in a laboratory setting in which all moisture has been removed from the air. Whittingham could make lithium metal practical only if he could combine it with another metal into an alloy—which is what he did, coupling it with aluminum to create a small and powerful anode. In 1977, Exxon released Whittingham’s device as a promotional product, a coin-size battery that fit in the back of a solar watch. It was the first rechargeable lithium battery. But when Whittingham tried to make them larger, his batteries kept igniting in the Exxon lab. Despite the presence of aluminum, the lithium metal was still too reactive.

  Then Goodenough, the MIT scientist, proceeded to outdo all that Ford, Argonne, and Whittingham had accomplished. By the time he was finished, he would either himself produce, or be part of the invention of, almost every major advance in modern batteries.

  5

  Professor Goodenough

  John Goodenough grew up in a sprawling home near New Haven, Connecticut, where his father, Erwin, was a scholar on the history of religion at Yale. His parents’ relationship “was a disaster,” he said, friction that extended into aloofness toward their children; Goodenough and his mother, Helen, especially “never bonded.” When he was twelve, John and his older brother, Walt, were sent to board on scholarships at Groton and he rarely heard from his parents again. John’s mother wrote just once as he grew to adulthood. In a slender, self-published autobiography, Goodenough cited many influences: siblings, a dog named Mack, a family maid, long-ago neighbors. But in this regard he conspicuously ignored his parents and never mentioned them by name. Theirs was a solely biological place in his life.