At long last, the lithium-ion battery has achieved Nobel recognition.
John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to the lightweight batteries
Collectively, these scientists figured out how to harness volatile lithium to make a safe, efficient, and powerful energy storage technology.
To understand why each of their contributions was important, let's start with the basics of how batteries work.
A battery is made of two electrodes connected to a circuit and separated by an electrolyte.
A lithium-ion battery generates energy by moving lithium ions from one electrode to the other, drawing electrons, and thus electrical current, through an external circuit and powering our devices.
In rechargeable batteries, the process can also be reversed.
But as simple as that may sound, it's difficult to make batteries that are both safe and able to store a lot of energy.
Scientists have long had their eye on lithium as a potential battery material because it's lightweight, and you can fit a lot of atoms into a small battery.
But lithium is also highly reactive and hard to work with.
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