Battery pioneer and oldest Nobel laureate ever John Goodenough dies

Even winning a Nobel Prize in 2019, when he was 97, couldn’t convince John Goodenough to stop tinkering with battery chemistry. Still in the lab until well into his nineties, he never lost hope that he could match or even top the breakthrough he achieved at age 57 – not content with an incremental step, he was looking for a revolutionary improvement. It wasn’t to be. John Bannister Goodenough died on 25 June, aged 100.

In terms of societal impact, the invention of the lithium-ion battery ranks up there with the transistor. The latter gave us computing power, the former enabled us to put that power in our back pockets. Just imagine what the world – and indeed the semiconductor, communication and electronics industries – would look like without the compact but energy-dense battery packs we take for granted today.