A compass is an essential tool for navigation, even in the age of satellite and GPS devices. Compasses have been around for centuries and were invented to help sailors navigate before the world was developed or mapped. However, who invented the first compass?
The first compass was probably invented by the Chinese sometime around the first century. While historians aren’t sure of the exact origin of the compass, Chinese sailors had it about a thousand years before Europeans invented a version of the compass.
The history of the compass is intriguing. When sailors first created it, they used a magnetic compass to find true north. It wasn’t until years later that other compass types came into existence, and scientists realized that magnetic compasses weren’t as accurate as previously believed.
Lithium-ion batteries have completely revolutionized our modern world. They’re energy-dense, compact, and can handle repeated charge and discharge cycles. They make it possible to have smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles, and off-grid solar power setups. And in our day-to-day life, it’s hard not to take them for granted. But have you ever wondered how they came to be? Or who invented the battery in the first place? Let’s take a deep dive into the history of the battery, why and how it was invented, and how we ultimately found our way to lithium.
John B. Goodenough is a world-class physicist and chemist who is credited for the identification and initial development of the first lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. He is considered to be a world-class solid-state physicist and one of the first to realize how a battery with lithium anode could provide high charge density and thus give us the prerequisite technology for electric cars, smartphones, cordless power tools and so on.
Goodenough was far from predestined to be one of the most influential scientists of our time. As a child, he struggled with reading due to dyslexia and would have to forego college due to the Second World War. After the war, he was selected by the army to study physics at the University of Chicago. In 1952, at the age of 30, Goodenough finished a PhD in Physics under the supervision of Clarence Zener at the University of Chicago.
He ended up at the MIT Lincoln Lab where he helped create one of the first forms of computer memory. By the early 1970s, it became apparent that energy, especially that in the form of fossil fuels, could be subject to bottlenecks which would later manifest in the oil shocks of the late 1970s. This motivated Goodenough into shifting his focus towards battery technologies.
In 1976, the first viable Lithium-based battery was patented by British chemist Michael Stanley Whittingham. Whittingham’s breakthrough was the battery’s low weight, high energy density and its capability to work at room temperature. However, the battery still had a few kinks that needed smoothing out: as the battery charged and discharged, the surface of the lithium metal anode became rough, eventually spawning long narrow fingers, or dendrites, of lithium. These grew across the electrolyte and, when they touched the cathode, caused internal short-circuit that could make the battery explode.
This inspired Goodenough to pursue the development of an improved lithium-based battery. Between 1976 and 1986, Goodenough was head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. It was here that he and his team showed how oxide cathodes would perform in a Li-ion battery and would be safer than the previous lithium designs.
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