In his school years Goodenough suffered fromdyslexia. At the time, dyslexia was poorly understood by the medical community, and Goodenough's condition went undiagnosed and untreated.[10] Although his primary schools considered him "a backward student," he taught himself to write so that he could take the entrance exam forGroton School, the boarding school where his older brother was studying at the time.[10][11] He was awarded a full scholarship.[7] At Groton, his grades improved and he eventually graduated at the top of his class in 1940.[10][12] He also developed an interest in exploring nature, plants, and animals.[13] Although he was raised an atheist, he converted toProtestant Christianity in high school.[11][14][15]
After Groton, Goodenough graduatedsumma cum laude fromYale, where he was a member ofSkull and Bones.[16] He completed his coursework in early 1943 (after just two and a half years) and received his degree in 1944,[17] covering his expenses by tutoring and grading exams.[16] He had initially sought to enlist in the military following theJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but his mathematics professor convinced him to stay at Yale for another year so that he could finish his coursework, which qualified him to join theU.S. Army Air Corps' meteorology department.[11][16]
After World War II ended, Goodenough obtained a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics from theUniversity of Chicago, the latter in 1952.[11][18] His doctoral supervisor wasClarence Zener, a theorist inelectrical breakdown; he also worked and studied with physicists, includingEnrico Fermi andJohn A. Simpson. While at Chicago, he met Canadian history graduate student Irene Wiseman.[19][20] They married in 1951.[10][7] The couple had no children.[10] Irene died in 2016.[20]
Goodenoughturned 100 on July 25, 2022.[21] He died at an assisted living facility inAustin, Texas, on June 25, 2023, one month shy of what would have been his 101st birthday.[22][23][10]
Over his career, Goodenough authored more than 550 articles, 85 book chapters and reviews, and five books, including two seminal works,Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963)[24] andLes oxydes des metaux de transition (1973).[25]
The U.S. government eventually terminated Goodenough's research funding, so during the late 1970s and early 1980s, he left the United States and continued his career as head of theInorganic Chemistry Laboratory at theUniversity of Oxford.[27] Among the highlights of his work at Oxford, Goodenough is credited with significant research essential to the development of commerciallithium-ion rechargeable batteries.[27] Goodenough was able to expand upon previous work fromM. Stanley Whittingham on battery materials, and found in 1980 that by using LixCoO2 as a lightweight, high energy densitycathode material, he could double the capacity of lithium-ion batteries.
Although Goodenough saw a commercial potential of batteries with his LiCoO2 and LiNiO2 cathodes and approached theUniversity of Oxford with a request to patent this invention, it refused. Unable to afford the patenting expenses with his academic salary, Goodenough turned to UK'sAtomic Energy Research Establishment inHarwell, which accepted his offer, but under the terms, which provided zeroroyalty payment to the inventors John B. Goodenough andKoichi Mizushima. In 1990, theAERE licensed Goodenough's patents toSony Corporation, which was followed by other battery manufacturers. It was estimated, that the AERE made over 10 mln.British pounds from this licensing.[citation needed]
The work atSony on further improvements to Goodenough's invention was led byAkira Yoshino, who had developed a scaled up design of the battery and manufacturing process.[31] Goodenough received theJapan Prize in 2001 for his discoveries of the materials critical to the development of lightweight high energy density rechargeable lithium batteries,[32] and he, Whittingham, and Yoshino shared the 2019Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research in lithium-ion batteries.[31]
From 1986, Goodenough was a professor at TheUniversity of Texas at Austin in theCockrell School of Engineering departments of Mechanical Engineering andElectrical Engineering.[33] During his tenure there, he continued his research on ionic conducting solids and electrochemical devices; he continued to study improved materials for batteries, aiming to promote the development ofelectric vehicles and to help reduce human dependency onfossil fuels.[34]Arumugam Manthiram and Goodenough discovered the polyanion class of cathodes.[35][36][37] They showed that positive electrodes containingpolyanions, e.g.,sulfates, produce higher voltages than oxides due to theinductive effect of the polyanion. The polyanion class includes materials such as lithium-ironphosphates that are used for smaller devices like power tools.[38] His group also identified various promisingelectrode andelectrolyte materials for solid oxide fuel cells.[25] He held the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering.[39]
Goodenough still worked at the university at age 98 as of 2021,[40] hoping to find another breakthrough in battery technology.[41][42]
On February 28, 2017, Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas published a paper in thejournalEnergy and Environmental Science on their demonstration of aglass battery, a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a longcycle life with a high volumetricenergy density, and fast rates of charge and discharge. Instead of liquid electrolytes, the battery uses glass electrolytes that enable the use of analkali-metalanode without the formation ofdendrites.[43][42][44] However, this paper was met with widespread skepticism by the battery research community and remains controversial after several follow-up works. The work was criticized for a lack of comprehensive data,[45] spurious interpretations of the data obtained,[45] and that the proposed mechanism of battery operation would violate thefirst law of thermodynamics.[46]
K. Mizushima; P.C. Jones; P.J. Wiseman; J.B. Goodenough (1980). "LixCoO2 (0<x<-1): A new cathode material for batteries of high energy density".Mater. Res. Bull.15 (6):783–799.doi:10.1016/0025-5408(80)90012-4.S2CID97799722.
John B. Goodenough (1985). B. Schuman, Jr.; et al. (eds.)."Manganese Oxides as Battery Cathodes"(PDF).Proceedings Symposium on Manganese Dioxide Electrode: Theory and Practice for Electrochemical Applications.85–4. Re Electrochem. Soc. Inc, N.J.:77–96.
^John B. Goodenough (1958). "An interpretation of the magnetic properties of the perovskite-type mixed crystals La1−xSrxCoO3−λ".Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids.6 (2–3): 287.doi:10.1016/0022-3697(58)90107-0.
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