The official Nobel Prize statement reads, "They have created the right conditions for a wireless, fossil-fuel-free society, thereby maximizing the benefits for humanity."
We are all familiar with lithium-ion batteries, which are the batteries in smartphones, laptops, cameras, other mobile digital products, and electric cars .......
They are lightweight, rechargeable over and over again, and powerful.
It can be said that without lithium-ion batteries, we would not have such a widespread and fast-growing electronic smart society.
(Just the thought of a cell phone moving and shutting down without power is devastating!)
So, these scientists won the prize, and it was well deserved.
Among them, John B. Goodenough, the 97-year-old father of the lithium battery, became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history.
The old man, hardcore!
Goodenough, however, was not a man who grew up with clear ambitions.
Though his name was Goodenough, his whole life, pretty much, was driven by accidents that weren't good enough.
Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, in 1922 and spent his childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
He did not have a wonderful childhood; his parents were not affectionate or loving, and although the family was well off, the family atmosphere was very depressing and tense.
In his autobiography, he has mentioned several relationships that were important to him: siblings, a dog, a domestic helper, former neighbors.
But his parents are not on that list.
He even suffered from dyslexia at one point, always running off into the jungle alone, looking at flora and fauna all day, catching butterflies and groundhogs.
He was also once banned from eating at the table for skinning a skunk (weasel). (Presumably because he stank so much)
Later, Gudinav's parents divorced anyway.
And Gudinav gritted his teeth and studied hard to get into Yale University (the Chinese equivalent of Tsinghua University).
But when he reported for school, his father gave him only 35 dollars.
At that time, the tuition fee for Yale was 900 dollars a year.
Gudinav gritted his teeth, took the $35, and walked out the door.
Today you ignore me, tomorrow I'll make you climb up.
From then on, Gudinav didn't ask his parents for a penny, and relied on the rich kids to do tutoring, work and study to support themselves.
Yale in the 1930s
While at Yale, he was very unfocused ...... on changing majors.
He read Classics as a freshman, switched to Philosophy halfway through, took Chemistry for credit, then switched to Mathematics and graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics.
He chose math because he was still dyslexic, so he ruled out majors where he had to read too much.
Yale is also too permissive of its students, isn't it?
After Gurdeneff graduated, WWII broke out.
Part-time work was impossible part-time work, he had to join the army and go to war.
He was ready to die for his country, but his superiors sent him to an island in the Pacific Ocean to collect weather data.
The front line fights in full swing, and he is as quiet as a chicken on the island, and can only work, read and study.
After the war, in order to accommodate veterans, the US Congress passed the US Servicemen's Bill of Rights in 1944, which gave veterans a variety of benefits.
With the help of this bill, Gudinav was given the opportunity to go to the University of Chicago to study physics. (Changing majors again!)
Gudinav during his military service
The downside of switching majors was that he had to take some undergraduate science courses to make up from the ground up.
Despite his diligence, he was ridiculed by one professor: anyone who had accomplished anything in physics, at your age, would have done it long ago.
Indeed, that era of geniuses, Einstein 26 years old proposed the theory of relativity, Edison 32 years old lit the incandescent lamp, Mrs. Curie 36 years old has got the Nobel Prize.
And Dr. Gudinov was already 30 when he graduated.
Luckily for him, his mentor for his PhD was Clarence Zinner, the inventor of the Zinner diode and an industry leader.
Under his tutelage, Gudinav built a solid theoretical foundation.
After graduating from the University of Chicago, he was recommended to go to MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he focused on research related to solid-state magnetism and contributed to the development of random access memory.
This technology is what became computer memory.
Gudinav was content to work, but then the unexpected happened.
In 1969, the U.S. Congress banned the use of military funds for research on projects unrelated to specific military functions.
Gurdenev's lab was funded by the U.S. Air Force, but his research program had nothing to do with it.
So he had a mid-life crisis and lost his job.
A physicist has to make ends meet, pay his mortgage, and save for his children's tuition, and he's so desperate to find a job that he almost goes to pre-revolutionary Iran.
That's when the oil crisis happened.
Seeing the long lines of people at gas stations, Gudinav was concerned about the future of human energy use, a big problem.
"That's why I turned to studying energy materials and then was invited to Oxford. At that point, I was officially a chemist." He said in a later interview.
So after receiving the offer from Oxford, Gudinav began his energy research.
Yes, the father of the lithium battery, who only started researching how to make batteries at the age of 54.
The Oxford years
In 1976, the same year Gudinav moved to Oxford, M. Stanley Whittingham invented the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
Yes, Whittingham was the second winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
However, while Whittingham's battery was a leap forward for the battery industry, it had a serious problem: it was extremely prone to exploding when overcharged. This meant that the technology could not really be commercialized on a large scale.
Fortunately, four years later, Gudinov found lithium cobalt.
Lithium-ion batteries made from lithium cobalt electrodes are safe, reliable, and can be made smaller, larger, and more stable,
The principle is illustrated below:
Did you get it? If not that's great, because I can't read it either.
In short, this invention is awesome.
It would allow lithium batteries to be fully utilized in the real-world market, both for compact devices and for powering large devices.
But because of the previous explosion, no one wanted to touch this field, and Oxford didn't even want to help patent it, giving the rights to a government lab, and then the patent was bought by Sony in Japan.
In 1991, Sony took Gudinav's lithium cobaltate cathode, and put it together with an anode developed by Akira Yoshino (who was the third winner), to make the world's first commercially available lithium-ion battery.
Within a decade, lithium-ion batteries had completed their sweep of the market against all other competing products: cell phones, cameras, computers, and countless other devices were fitted with the lithium cobaltate lithium-ion batteries invented by Gudinov.
Today, the global market for lithium-ion batteries is more than $35 billion.
Because he did not apply for a patent, Gudinov did not get any revenue from it.
He didn't care much about it: "I didn't know it was going to be worth that much when I did it anyway, I just knew it was something I should do."
Please take my hat off to the big guy who treats money like dirt. （
Originally, as a professor in Oxford, it was a noble thing to do, and Oxford has a mandatory retirement policy at age 65, as long as they stayed up to 65, Gurdenev would be able to receive a generous pension, and bring their grandchildren during the day, and square dance at night.
But he jumped ship and ran off to the University of Texas at the age of 64 in order to continue his research.
The old man is still old.
moncler outlet online I'm only 64, so I'm young, and I have plenty of energy.
Sure enough, the old man and his research batteries as long as standby, charging 5 minutes, working 30 years.
75 years old, he built a new material lithium iron phosphate, much cheaper than cobalt and more stable, commonly used in power tools.
At 90, he started working on solid-state batteries, which are less flammable, have at least three times the energy density of current lithium-ion batteries, and have a long cycle life, while dramatically reducing the charging rate from hours to just minutes.
If successfully commercialized, the future of electric vehicles, will be completely rewritten.
At the age of 96, Gudinav expressed two wishes:
First, he hoped to live to see the last PhD student he took on a doctoral degree, and as a precaution he no longer accepts four-year PhD students.
Second, he hoped he would live to see his research change the world a second time.
At the age of 97, Gudinav was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
But the committee was unable to contact him personally when they announced the winner.
Because Gudinov was in London, receiving the Royal Society's Copley Medal, the world's oldest scientific medal, he had no time to answer the Nobel Committee's call.
True to form, if you're Goodenough, Nobel gives you an award and has to stand in line with a love number plate.
In a later interview with Nature, he said, "I'm very grateful to receive this honor, it's wonderful. But I'm still the same person I was before."
To this day (2019), Gudinav, 97, remains a professor in mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Texas at Austin.
Of his own tumultuous, tumultuous life, he describes it in just one sentence:
"Some of us are like the tortoise, walking slowly, struggling along, and not finding a way out by the time we reach our prime. But the tortoise knows that he must go on."
Old man, hats off to you.