Stanley Whittingham, John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino are the names of the creators of the lithium battery, an invention so innovative that it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.
We have already seen what lithium batteries are, let’s ask ourselves now how lithium batteries are born (correctly: lithium-ion accumulators).
In the '70s, M. Stanley Whittingham, hired by an oil company to work on batteries during the crisis, developed - by pure chance - a technology capable of storing energy in rechargeable batteries, exploiting precisely lithium, to think about using lithium for the ease with which it gives electrons. Whittingham then invented a battery where the negative pole was composed of metallic lithium and the positive pole of titanium disulfide, a compound much less expensive than lithium.
However, the first battery prototype was very risky and flammable, situation given by the pure form of lithium, therefore not very convincing for the scientific public. The breakthrough came thanks to the intervention of John B. Goodenough, who twenty years after the first prototype, created the first Li-Ion battery of Sony replacing disulfide with cobalt oxide, and Akira Yoshino, who replaced the metallic lithium of the anode first with graphite and then with carbon coke, a by-product of oil. In this way, Whittingham lithium batteries were transformed into a commercial product for everyone, increasing their power, durability and safety. Today lithium batteries are used on cars, computers, smartphones but also industrial machines.
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