John B. Goodenough, inventor of the lithium-ion battery, dies at 100

June 26 (UPI) — Inventor, educator and Nobel Prize winner John B. Goodenough has died at 100.

Goodenough, known for developing the lithium-ion battery in 1980, died on Sunday, a month shy of his 101st birthday. His death was confirmed by the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a professor.

Goodenough was born on July 25, 1922, in Jena, Germany, to American parents. He studied at Yale University, where he briefly considered becoming a lawyer. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a meteorologist. He was called into duty in February 1943. Following the war, he entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he studied physics.

The achievement for which he is most known, the development of the lithium-ion battery, came in 1980. M. Stanley Whittingham had created the first rechargeable lithium-ion battery four years earlier. Goodenough took the battery further, creating a new version of the battery that has become the widely used one known today.

The lithium-ion battery technology developed by Goodenough is used in countless electronic devices, including mobile devices and even electric cars.

“John’s seven decades of dedication to science and technology dramatically altered our lifestyle, and it was truly a privilege to get to work with him for so many years,” Ram Manthiram, a longtime friend and colleague of Goodenough, said in a statement.

In 2019, the developers of lithium and lithium-ion batteries — Goodenough, Whittingham and Akira Yoshino — were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

“In the end, I have had an extraordinary journey, but it is the many colleagues who have worked with me over the years that I wish to thank for making it extraordinary,” Goodenough wrote in his biography for the Nobel Prize. “They are the ones who have performed the experiments and each of them kept an open dialogue with the aim to teach me as much as I tried to teach them.”