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

by Steve LeVine

  In the subsequent days, Thackeray, working in the lab library, prepared the manganese spinel experiment. As he did, Bill David, another new researcher under Goodenough, introduced himself.

  In a way, David and Thackeray were equals. They were both postdoctoral assistants and had started work around the same day. But David felt like a “young lad” around the South African, who was six years older. Part of that was Thackeray’s deceptively unassuming attitude: he told almost no one why he was specifically at Oxford or his accomplishments thus far. Once, David queried him over lunch about a possible jog together. The conversation seemed to go nowhere. Thackeray barely acknowledged any personal interest in running; he said nothing of the Comrades, nor of his status as one of his country’s fastest amateurs. For David, once he came to know Thackeray, this reserve lent him powerful mystery.

  • • •

  From a pure physics standpoint, David was under no spell. Like Goodenough, he felt that Thackeray’s work was fundamentally counterintuitive—it broke all the rules. He could not dispute the X-ray crystallography—Thackeray was right despite the physics. But there was the blockage cited by Goodenough. Until the obstruction was removed, the experiment could not be called a masterstroke. David thought he could help. He understood atomic-scale crystallography better than Thackeray. David scrutinized the X-ray diffraction of the LiMn2O4. The intercalation worked perfectly this time, with an open pathway for the lithium. And the spinel had not been torn apart by the foreign material.

  Thackeray was right.

  He was deliriously content. One day, Goodenough was strolling the halls with Thackeray and said, “You know that this could have commercial value, Mike.” Though neither man could put a finger on how the invention might be used, Thackeray repeated the remark in a subsequent call to his South African supervisors, who rushed to London. They drew up a patent application—as the inventors, Thackeray’s name was listed first, followed by Goodenough as supervising investigator. The owner of the patent would be the South African Inventions Development Corporation, the intellectual property (IP) arm of the government lab in Pretoria where Thackeray was on staff.

  Later, there would be dueling personal accounts about who was more responsible for the spinel breakthrough—Thackeray or Goodenough. The older man would claim credit, suggesting that Thackeray merely followed his instructions. Thackeray would retort that he himself had arrived in Oxford with the spinel samples; he had the big idea. But the warm memories made them respectful friends and, ever the diplomat, Goodenough finally summed it up best: “I don’t think he would have done it by himself, and I wouldn’t have done it without him.”

  David said that successful science “is about people and it is about ideas.” It is about aspiration. Scientists in places like Oxford had such surpassing ambition to reach the top of their field that success seemed the natural result. That was the fun and visceral excitement of Goodenough’s lab. Oxford was on the extreme leading edge of a new field.

  But there had to be collaboration. “No one man sits there and spits it out,” Goodenough said. “It’s through interaction, through our openness to others, where we get an idea.”

  But such collaboration had to be cautious, as Goodenough would discover.

  7

  Batteries Are a Treacherous World

  After oil prices slid back down from their spike in the energy crises of the 1970s, the urgency went out of battery research. Exxon abandoned electric storage and licensed out Stan Whittingham’s lithium battery. Ronald Reagan canceled government-funded energy projects of the prior decade, as did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

  Japan was different. Though Exxon had distributed Whittingham’s lithium batteries in watches in 1977, researchers struggled to build them bigger. Whittingham’s work kept igniting, a result of the presence of pure lithium metal as the anode. But, working on the problem for a decade, a Japanese researcher named Akira Yoshino managed to combine Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode with a carbon anode. In 1991, Sony, pivoting off Yoshino’s brainchild, released a lithium-ion battery for small electronic devices. Later versions of the Sony battery would contain a better anode made of benign graphite, whose absorptive layers were a perfect temporary burrowing place for lithium ions. But the advance as a whole—the combination of Goodenough’s cathode and a carbon or graphite anode—created an overnight blockbuster consumer product. It enabled several multibillion-dollar-a-year industries of small recording devices and other electronics. It triggered copycat batteries and a frenzy in labs around the world to find even better lithium-ion configurations that would pack more energy in a smaller and smaller space.

  Despite his central role in the first lithium-ion battery, Goodenough earned no royalties. Unlike Thackeray’s South Africa lab, which itself might profit should his invention of spinel prove commercially valuable, Oxford had declined to patent Goodenough’s cathode at all—the university seemed to see no advantage in owning IP. In the end, Goodenough signed away the royalty rights to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, a U.K. government lab just south of Oxford in Harwell, reasoning that at least his invention might reach the market. He never fathomed the scale of the market to come. No one did.

  It was not the only time that American battery inventors lost ground in the race to commercialize. Until the middle 1980s, Union Carbide controlled a full third of the global battery market through its Eveready and Energizer brands. But in 1984, thousands of people in India were killed and injured in a gas leak at a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal. In the aftermath, the company sold leading divisions for cash. Its battery unit went to Ralston Purina, which itself ceded lithium-ion to Japan under the rationale that the profit margin per unit was too thin. The nickel-metal-hydride battery that powered Toyota’s market-leading Prius was also American born, created by a prolific Detroit inventor named Stan Ovshinsky. After the Prius’s 1997 launch as the world’s first major hybrid, licensing fees for the battery went to a Chevron subsidiary that acquired Ovshinsky’s patents. But Chevron relinquished much of the profit to Panasonic, Toyota, and other Japanese companies that made the final products.

  American companies lacked their Japanese competitors’ vision, courage, patience, or perhaps all three. Students of economic history ridicule the Japanese juggernaut of the 1980s. They say Japan was a flash in the pan and contemporary panic over its rise a reflection of Western insecurity, not a new, Japanese-led future. But this version of events is not quite right. The Japanese embraced the model of an American celebrated but not emulated at home—Thomas Edison, the consummate tinkerer, who, absent a governing theory to create a new invention, systematically attempted as many ideas as necessary to reach a solution. South Korea and China then also borrowed Edison’s method and captured their own large chunks of the global electronics market. As a group, the three countries added energy storage to the arc of America’s four-decade-long industrial decline—and a subtext to its anxiety about getting the new battery-and-electric-car race right and dominating the sprawling industries to come.

  • • •

  Charlatans and hucksters abound in eras of invention, since no one can truly know what will become the next bonanza, and batteries have been unusually marked by exaggeration and outright fraud: because people intuitively understand the importance of a much better battery and think that therefore the world should have one, they are vulnerable to deception. In 1883, Edison, misled too many times in the midst of creating his electronic empire, sized up rechargeable batteries as a mere fable. He wrote:

  The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies. The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame thing. . . . Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery it brings out his latent capacity for lying.1

 
; Goodenough tells the story of a Japanese materials scientist by the name of Shigeto Okada. Okada arrived in 1993 at the University of Texas, where Goodenough had moved the previous year from Oxford. He came from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the Japanese phone giant, which requested permission to embed him on Goodenough’s team at company expense. After the usual stipulations regarding confidentiality, Goodenough agreed. He put Okada to work next to an Indian postdoc named Akshaya Padhi.

  In hosting such researchers, Goodenough was part of the peculiar world of materials scientists, who at their best combine the intuition of physics with the meticulousness of chemistry and pragmatism of engineering. It is their role to dream up a new order from the existing parts in front of them.

  Padhi and Okada began to tinker with spinel formulations, searching for one with more energy than Thackeray’s manganese spinel and better safety than Goodenough’s own lithium-cobalt-oxide. They started by methodically swapping in metals to see if any achieved their teacher’s objective. They tried cobalt, manganese, and vanadium, but none was quite right. Finally, they winnowed down the list to a final option—a combination of iron and phosphorus.

  Goodenough was skeptical. “Padhi,” he said, “you won’t get the spinel structure.”

  Then the old man left for summer vacation.

  As had happened with Thackeray at Oxford years before, Goodenough arrived back to news. Padhi said the professor was right—he did not achieve the spinel structure. Instead, he had produced a synthetic version of a different, naturally occurring crystal structure called olivine. And he had managed to intercalate lithium in and out of it. On inspection, Goodenough saw that the result was sensational. Lithium combined with iron phosphate met all the metrics for which he had hoped.

  Goodenough didn’t learn until much later that Okada—the Japanese researcher—had gone on to disclose Padhi’s discovery to his own employer, which had proceeded to secretly develop the formulation itself. In November 1995, NTT, using Padhi’s methodology, quietly filed for a patent and began to canvass Japanese electronics makers, gauging their interest in a new, lithium-iron-phosphate battery.

  Goodenough caught wind of the subterfuge only the following year. He was incredulous. “Padhi, he was a spy, for goodness sakes,” he nearly shouted at his postdoc. “Wake up and start putting something in your notebook.” He meant that Padhi should commit his work to writing in his lab book; that record would prove crucial should there be an IP battle. And there very well could be.

  “Sorry,” Padhi replied to Goodenough. “He is my friend.”

  A race of priority was joined. The Japanese and the Americans rushed out competing papers and patent applications. On behalf of Goodenough’s lab, the University of Texas filed a $500 million lawsuit against Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.

  The complications worsened. An MIT professor named Yet-Ming Chiang began to fiddle with Goodenough’s idea and filed for his own patents. Asserting that his improvements had created yet another new material, Chiang launched a Massachusetts company called A123. His stated aim was to sell a version of the lithium-iron-phosphate for use in power tools and eventually motor vehicles. This established another legal front for Goodenough as Chiang’s company sought to persuade a European tribunal to strike down the old man’s patents, which it eventually did in 2008.

  The result was a free-for-all, one that reached an apex late in 2008 when Warren Buffett spent $230 million to buy 10 percent of BYD, a Chinese car company that announced a new lithium-iron-phosphate-powered electric car. No one spoke of the source of BYD’s batteries but, coming after Chiang’s actions, the impression in the industry was that the Goodenough lab’s invention might turn up anywhere.

  In 2009, A123 sold shares in an initial public offering. Chiang’s charisma, the MIT name, and the general tenor of the times created an aura of sizzle, and the share price surged by 50 percent on the first day of trading. Chiang’s company raised $587 million, the biggest IPO of the year and a tremendous payday for him and all involved. Except, again, Goodenough.

  In the end, the University of Texas settled with NTT. The payoff to the school was $30 million along with a share of any profit from its Japanese patents, recognition that Goodenough had been infringed. Goodenough received nothing from A123. He regarded the outcome as a travesty. The university-hired lawyer was a mere big talker, a naïf out of his depth against cunning shysters. As for the university, Goodenough said it lacked the courage to fight.

  8

  Creating NMC

  In the early 1990s, the researchers at Argonne’s Building 205 were griping openly about oppressive management. The Department of Energy wanted invention on demand but also mandated excessive safety training, the combined impact of which was to “discourage spontaneity.” The lab was no longer as secretive—since Argonne was working on so many nonnuclear projects, it had abandoned the practice of declaring everything classified. Much of the work remained confidential, as basic invention was under way, but often did not involve matters of national security. Scientists no longer had to wear color-coded shoes to protect against nuclear contamination. They could take food and coffee into their offices. And their offices were air-conditioned.1

  Still, you could not enter or move around Argonne without a lab identification badge. They hung by a string from everybody’s neck. Many were imprinted with the word “COUNTERINTELLIGENCE.” The IDs were mildly jarring in that the photographs often showed a much younger, college-age version of the scientist. In his, Chamberlain resembled a California surfer, with brushed-back hair that could be mistaken for blond. His hair had long since grayed.

  Of course it was no crime to brandish a dated photograph, such as Chris Johnson’s. He had spent his entire career at Argonne. Now in his forties and fullish, Johnson was once a slim professional with a stylishly trimmed beard. You could imagine the go-getting young scientist who, working with Thackeray as his chief researcher, coinvented Argonne’s NMC almost a decade and a half before.

  Johnson was an unpretentious and earthy Ohioan. His father taught high school chemistry and strewed science textbooks about the house, but he did not press the subject on the boy. “I just want you to feel like it’s not work when you get up and go to your job,” he told his son. So Johnson did not at first grow up as a science geek. He did not puzzle over test tubes in the garage or ponder garden insects underneath a microscope. But when he reached high school, a science teacher’s enthusiasm infected him, which led Johnson to major in chemistry at the University of North Carolina. There, in the electrochemistry lab, Johnson felt in his element.

  In 1991, Johnson joined Argonne as a postdoctoral assistant. Sony had just commercialized lithium-ion.

  As he briefed himself by reading scientific journals, Johnson noticed copycat behavior. Papers fixated on the fashion of the day—the Goodenough lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode that had enabled Sony’s new batteries. None seemed to pose daring new ideas—they only plumbed how to make lithium-cobalt-oxide better, and even when they did that, their science seemed “lacking.” But one chemist stood out—Mike Thackeray, who was working back in South Africa after his Oxford stint. Thackeray was talking about his alternate system—manganese oxide, which he said would cost less than lithium-cobalt-oxide. In Johnson’s view, only Thackeray seemed prepared to say something original and produce the data to back it up.

  About this time, Thackeray’s South Africa bosses informed him that they were shutting down his lithium-ion program. Notwithstanding Sony’s coup, the lab did not foresee sufficient sales in the lithium-ion play. Thackeray debated the point, but the decision was made. He was to find other projects.

  In 1993, Thackeray met a talkative American named Don Vissers at a battery conference in Toronto. Vissers was a senior manager in Argonne’s Battery Department. He and Thackeray agreed that the market for lithium-ion batteries was bound to swell. Yet both were frustratingly on the outside in this discernible tren
d: while South Africa was erring by abandoning lithium-ion, Argonne was falling behind because of its passiveness in the same field. The Chicago lab continued to work on high-temperature sulfur batteries and had yet to make its own push in the new technology. Vissers suggested that they had a common cause. So why didn’t Thackeray consider a move to Chicago and taking Argonne into the science of lithium-ion?

  Thackeray pondered it and a year or so later agreed.

  • • •

  Thackeray’s wife, Lisa, dreaded moving to an unfamiliar land where none of them—not they or their three daughters—knew a soul. Thackeray described reaching O’Hare that February: “As the American Airlines aircraft approached the landing strip with the wheels a few feet from touchdown, the pilot opened the throttle and took the plane back into the air. There was a stunned silence in the aircraft. Lisa, looking at me at her side, said quietly, ‘Thank God—we’re going home!’”

  They were not going home. The pilot looped back around and landed the plane without incident. Emerging later from customs, the Thackerays saw an Argonne man with a sign. Greeting the family, he bestowed a silver dollar on each of the daughters. The gesture swept aside Lisa’s apprehensions about life in a new country.

  Work started at once. Thackeray adopted Chris Johnson as a protégé and took him along to an international lithium battery conference in Boston. Arriving there, Johnson watched as a slew of scientists greeted Thackeray in the hotel lobby. “Everyone knew Mike,” Johnson said. “Everyone was coming up to him. ‘How are you doing? I understand you are at Argonne now.’ I am thinking, ‘Wow, he is really major in the field. And this is going to be a really nice relationship.’”

  Thackeray began to brief Johnson about his plan. If you reduced the amount of expensive cobalt in the cathode and substituted plentiful manganese in its place, you could make batteries that were both cheaper and safer than Goodenough’s industry-standard chemistry. But you could only use so much manganese because it tended to degrade over time and destroy the battery’s performance. Instead, you needed to deploy it together with nickel, which preserved the manganese and hindered its degradation. That made the ideal compound a combination of nickel, manganese, and cobalt, or NMC, coupled of course with lithium.