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

by Steve LeVine

  Littlewood went on from Bell to run Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, where in the 1950s Francis Crick and James Watson discerned the structure of DNA. But when he arrived at Argonne in 2011, it was Bell Labs he invoked. If AT&T had been in energy storage rather than the phone business, he said, you might have very different battery technology today. Bell would have spent years if necessary exploring the tiniest fundamentals of battery chemistries and how they interacted. It would have derived a road map—a precise electrochemical latticework of the battery. It would have then methodically ticked off the possible routes to an answer until the puzzle was solved. The proof was in what happened when Bell dabbled in batteries—in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a Bell researcher named Samar Basu developed the first graphite anode, which, improved by Moroccan researcher Rachid Yazami and combined with Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode, became the basis for today’s standard lithium-ion battery. “We haven’t done that,” Littlewood said, “which is why we’re in the mess we’re in now and why you see scrambled proposals to try to get something that works in a period of a few years.” He said, “We’re driven because the energy problem is so close to us that we need to solve it. But we don’t understand properly how batteries work.”

  Littlewood turned up at Bell in 1980, just out of graduate school. His specialty was exotic phenomena such as the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle crucial to quantum physics. Bell had no distractions—no teaching, no pesky students—and researchers enjoyed seemingly limitless resources. New researchers would show up and be told, “Do something interesting.” Not prolific invention, but do one important thing every year. “Now what’s important?” Littlewood wondered. The answer he got was, “You can tell when you see it.”

  You were being appraised against Bell’s legacy, which meant the question, “Have you won a Nobel Prize? Have you invented some new method of doing something?” That was the standard through Bell’s three quarters of a century of history. “There were ten thousand scientists at the heyday,” Littlewood said. “They were not all Nobel laureates, but were all at a very high level. A bunch of arrogant bastards, all of them.” But as self-assured as they were, Bell scientists also realized that, because they were aiming at the truly big breakthroughs, they needed the help of colleagues. They cooperated.

  If you looked at Bell that way, you realized that the lab had been assembled rather carefully, with different kinds of talent—all individuals, all excellent at their specialties—put in an environment where they could not afford not to interact. Because AT&T was a regulated monopoly, it exerted little pressure on its Bell unit for a commercial payoff. Company managers hoped that any particular piece of Bell’s research would prove useful perhaps decades down the line. So while the pressure was intense to produce first-rate science, there was almost no insistence that expenses be justified from a business aspect.

  The atmosphere discomfited some researchers. “Every year they’d hire a bunch of kids who would work eighteen hours a day,” Littlewood told a group of visiting battery guys, and the veterans would have to compete with them, too.

  “Did ideas get stolen?” asked Venkat Srinivasan of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

  “Of course.”

  As for Steven Chu, he felt like a member of the “chosen ones” when he joined Bell in 1978. The atmosphere was “electric,” and “the joy and excitement of doing science permeated the halls,” he said. Chu grew up on Long Island, the son of Chinese immigrants who expected their children to earn Ph.D.s. His maternal grandfather was an American-trained engineer. His father was an MIT-educated chemical engineer and his mother an economist. He earned his doctorate at Berkeley and was hired to stay on as an assistant professor, but before starting the job he was offered a leave of absence to broaden his experience and he used the time to go to work at Bell.

  Chu’s first Bell boss admonished him to be satisfied with nothing less than starting a new scientific field. Five years later, he was leading the lab’s quantum electronics research team. Among his first accomplishments was measuring the energy levels of positronium, an atomlike object with its electric charges flipped. Measurements were hard because positronium has an average lifetime of 125 picoseconds (125 trillionths of a second, a scale that is to a second as a second is to 31,700 years). Then Chu puzzled out how to use laser light to cool and trap atoms. “Life at Bell Labs, like Mary Poppins, was practically perfect in every way,” he said.

  As secretary of energy under Obama, Chu wanted to capture the magic of Bell and its peers, the great industrial labs that had been run by scientific and commercial visionaries like Thomas Edison and T. J. Watson. He wanted to assemble the best minds in one place and focus on a single mission. The objective would be to disrupt the largest industry on the planet—fossil fuels.

  A half century back, such an approach to business was part of the American DNA. But today, Intel, for instance, while still on top after decades in semiconductors, had narrower aims. “They’re not going to do the stuff like Bell did,” Chu said. Neither were universities.

  Chu wanted to establish long-term research programs that, while undirected as to their specific product, would almost certainly emerge with important and most likely foundational results. At Bell, Chu said, you learned to take on “a problem, think about it hard, solve it, write up the paper, submit it, and move on to the next one.” He wanted a similarly fast environment.

  Bell sought to elevate the best scientists to management. Given authority, they were held responsible for the productivity of those under them. There was no peer review. Some scientists called the system “su-PEER-ior review,” Chu said. The culture kept the checks and balances. If you made a bad decision, a community of great scientists was on hand to step in to help fix it, “but not because they wanted to be the boss.” It was, “You’ve got an idea? Come. Let’s go to the board. Let’s talk about it now. ‘Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing,’” Chu said. He himself could be an exacting boss. When he later was named director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he became known for his “Chu-namis,” stormy fits of pique when something had not been carried out to his standard. Chu wanted to replicate this atmosphere at the national labs that the Department of Energy funded.

  • • •

  Littlewood cautioned Chu that there were bits of Bell that you would not wish to copy. AT&T was very good at its reliable phone business. It had some of the world’s best fundamental scientists, who thought ambitiously about the future. Bell employees were proud of their technological leaps. But the company often did not drive its breakthroughs through to an actual product. AT&T earned only nominal licensing fees for the transistor, for example, though it was invented at Bell. Its scientists conceived the first cellular phones in 1947 and, a quarter century later, the system of transmission towers through which they work, but others pioneered the mobile phone business. AT&T had a landline monopoly and gave away its other inventions as a price of peace with regulators. It worked as a business strategy, until Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department aggressively pursued AT&T’s breakup. That left it in pieces, absent the patents and side businesses that could have fueled its survival.

  Littlewood said Bell was commercially flat-footed. Unless efforts were fully deliberated, he continued, long-term achievements would be limited. He saw Bell as an example of unfulfilled potential, like the Apollo Moon mission. Had Apollo been better planned, he said, “we’d still be there.” “It turned out to be an interesting technology program that, if you were thinking ahead and not just to 1970, you would have studied the fundamentals and taken it to Mars.” You would not aim for a victory that meant simply stepping your toe on the Moon a few times. In numerous cases, the declared goals of starry-eyed American politicians went unmet. The Apollo narrative promised big leaps if only the goal and budget were pledged. But it was a singular event. Apollo could not be replicated by force of will.

  • • •

  The national
labs had originated as entrepreneurial places in World War II. Eventually numbering seventeen, the labs had lost their spunk in the intervening five and six decades. At Argonne, a scientist often would mention a certain chemistry that seemed promising, but when you plumbed further you would discover that he was not actually working on it. “That’s not funded,” he would say. It had not been sanctioned and paid for by the Department of Energy. When a battery guy would invoke that excuse, you would presume he or she was joking because it sounded so pathetic. But you would see it was not a joke. The truth was that the labs lacked the system, and the scientists the mind-set, for the rapid pursuit of hot new ideas.

  The federal research effort had devolved into an assemblage of disparate projects, each worth $300,000 or so. This gave the labs the feel of aimless institutions. No one vetted battery projects from the top, ensuring that the outcome was at least one very good battery system rather than a dozen wonderful electrodes and an unrelated electrolyte. The philosophy seemed to be that somehow the better battery would all come together of its own accord. But it hadn’t—not yet anyway.

  Chu’s idea was to overturn this system. He would cut out the “principal investigator,” the main scientist answerable to almost no one before all the money was spent. In his or her place would be team-funded work grouped in blocks to attack big problems identified either from below or from above. If scientists veered off on their own, they could be halted in their tracks because funding would not follow them. In theory you could corral people into line and achieve more coherent results.

  You could recreate the major industrial lab.

  Chu considered China’s method. What China did, he said, was to identify a known technology and, in a twist on Japan’s approach, squeeze efficiencies out of it by methodically, incrementally improving it over a long period of time. By doing that continually, say, for a decade, China would end up with a dramatically different technology. Not something of the scale of the integrated circuit but, stretched out over a few decades, a very, very good result—“unbelievable,” Chu said. “Revolutionary.”

  If you looked at the leading ideas in batteries, America’s were of a different order from those in China, Chu said—they were embedded in products, while China’s innovations were by and large accumulations of tweaks on others’ work. The lesson of history was that you could not be satisfied with that lead. Quite apart from the battery debacle, the United States invented the airplane but soon lost the lead to French and other European inventors. Germany invented automobile manufacturing but was overtaken by Henry Ford.

  Chu intended to follow the latter example. “We’re gonna lead in batteries,” he said.

  21

  The No-Start-up Mystery

  Chamberlain could not forget a conversation he had back in 2006. He and a lab manager were admiring a new piece of prototyping equipment that could create the large batches of cathode material demanded by industrial customers before they would consider licensing a patent. Chamberlain, then new to Argonne, imagined that the equipment would prompt greater risk-taking innovation by the researchers, now able to demonstrate their inventions in a format that companies understood. It would play to Argonne’s advantage. “I imagine that your scientists take risks all the time,” Chamberlain said.

  Perplexed, the supervisor glanced at Chamberlain’s direct boss. Then he said, “Oddly, it works the opposite of what you’d think. Yes, the jobs are safer than in industry, but the job is so good, why take a risk at all?”

  Over the next couple of years, Chamberlain witnessed the problem himself—Argonne researchers suffered from a mortal fear of screwing up, or simply looking stupid, that often trumped the desire to make a big splash.

  The aversion to risk did not seem to flow from the top. Three consecutive presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama—generously funded lithium-ion research, spurred on by optimism about electric cars. But Chamberlain said that, along the way, a couple of Department of Energy program managers were “whacked” for their risk taking. Their careers had been derailed. Memories of those bruises were still alive at Argonne and might have partly underpinned the hesitancy to gamble.

  Given Amine’s inclinations, it was easy to imagine him wrestling with the temptation to make the jump and form his own company. But he discouraged this line of thought. “If I take one of the technologies that Argonne invented and spin it off and make a company, I will be successful. I’m pretty sure,” he said. “But if you move completely to business, you are more likely to be product-focused—you will focus on money. Your innovative brain will go down. It’s not my style. . . . I’m not really motivated just to earn money.” He said, “I’m not extremely wealthy, but I’m doing fine. A middle-class guy.” Amine was entrepreneurial within the confines of the lab. He was proactive and aggressive. But he lacked an appetite for the outside gamble.

  Thackeray’s impulses were similar. He said he never contemplated a leap such as Kumar’s—raising venture capital, licensing his own technology, and building a business around it.

  It was the same with the rest of the battery guys—and really the entire lab. Unlike their entrepreneurially frenzied university contemporaries in Austin, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay, the Argonne guys had no record of turning their ideas into profit-making enterprises.

  But the option existed. In 1980, two American senators—Birch Bayh and Robert Dole—pushed through legislation that gave federally funded universities and laboratories the right to profit from their research. The Bayh-Dole Act was a response to the listless economy of the 1970s. American inventiveness meant the economy could eventually persevere, but the thinking was that it would help if scientists were motivated by personal profit as well as national honor. Prior to Bayh-Dole, federally funded researchers received no profit share from their inventions. Now they could. The precise cut depended on the institution. At Argonne, the allotment was 25 percent of licensing fees and royalties to the scientist or scientists and, as recognition of the general effort, the remaining 75 percent to the department and division in which they worked. That was how Thackeray, Amine, and the handful of other battery guys had pocketed more than a million dollars from the NMC patents. Yet by and large, the battery guys were timid.

  It turned out that not just Argonne but the nearby university as well seemed to ignore the value of its intellectual property. Over the years, researchers at the University of Chicago had won fifty-five Nobel Prizes. Just one discovery—erythropoietin, a hormone used to treat anemia in dialysis patients—would eventually earn Amgen some $40 billion. But neither the university nor its discoverer, a researcher named Eugene Goldwasser, would earn any royalties, as the university hadn’t patented it.

  In 1986, two graduate students from the University of Chicago moved into offices at Argonne. Clint Bybee and Keith Crandell were volunteers in a new initiative to shake up the sleepy lab and university and cultivate some start-up businesses. They called their firm ARCH, targeting unseen inventiveness at Argonne and the University of Chicago. Starting from scratch, the two men—both twenty-six-year-old business school students—would wander the long halls and collar a scientist. “Tell us what you’re working on,” Bybee would say. But after a number of fruitless encounters, Bybee came to understand that the Argonne guys simply “didn’t think of commercial applications for what they were doing very much.” They by and large aimed at the tastes of their principal funders—the Department of Energy or the Pentagon. “That’s who their customer was,” Bybee said. The ARCH men unearthed a dozen ventures, including four at Argonne, over the subsequent few years. They came up almost empty-handed.

  As for the battery guys, they knew the ARCH team was around—they gathered it was a high-level scheme cooked up by the lab director and university officials. But almost nobody came face-to-face with either Bybee or Crandell. Bybee said neither he nor anyone else at ARCH found any battery technology sufficiently interesting to pursue, then or
ever, and never took a glance at the NMC. “I never met them,” Thackeray said.

  The battery guys were feeble entrepreneurs compared with their Silicon Valley counterparts, and so was Chicago’s VC community, even when embedded right in the lab. Sujeet Kumar and companies from Germany, Japan, and South Korea grabbed the NMC while the ARCH men were present but looking the other way.

  • • •

  Chamberlain had a stock of stories from his pre-Argonne days. He knew enough science to hold his own with the scientists but seemed to deliberately steer clear of their projects. He was there to create the conditions in which they could produce their magic and then marshal it into the market. Apart from the occasional pointed question that demonstrated he knew his stuff, he left them to the battery work. He was not really a “battery guy” was how he put it. Thackeray would repeat his flattering assertion that, no, by now Chamberlain was a battery guy; he had been around long enough. But that was just Thackeray as a gentleman. Chamberlain wrung his hands over his paucity of actual time in the laboratory. His bench time had been short—at Georgia Tech and a bit here and there in private industry jobs. Could he himself invent something new or write a profound scientific paper that drove peers to sit up? No one could say, and he had never put himself on the line to find out. Yet Chamberlain occupied a supremely respected place in the lab, anchored in his perceived appetite for risk and his grasp of business.

  He was different from those around him.