The People Who Made Rechargeable Batteries Practical

An early lead-acid storage battery Planté introduced a practical rechargeable lead-acid cell around 1860. It made the idea of restoring a cell by passing current through it useful in hardware. The early design is the starting point for comparing what a cell could do at all with the work of making one easier to produce and put to use.

Making the lead plate do more work Faure improved the lead-acid cell by coating plates with a paste containing lead oxide. The change increased capacity and helped make the design more practical. Set this beside Planté’s work to see how a different way of making an electrode can change what you get from the same basic chemistry.

Developing the nickel-cadmium cell Jungner patented work on rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries around the turn of the 20th century. He and K. L. Berg reached pilot production for applications such as standby service. This is a useful stop in the story because it shows an alternative to lead-acid taking shape in the factory as well as in patents.

Building a nickel-iron battery for vehicles Edison started looking for a better storage battery for electric vehicles in 1899. The resulting nickel-iron battery reached a real market, including electric trucks. Its history shows how the problem changes when a battery has to move a vehicle and come back for another day of work.

Giving lithium ions a place to go Whittingham’s rechargeable lithium cell used titanium disulfide on the positive side to take up lithium ions and release them again. Its other electrode still used lithium metal. The work showed that an electrode could host moving ions repeatedly and left a practical problem for the next teams to solve.

Looking for a higher-voltage positive electrode At Oxford, Goodenough’s team pursued oxides for the positive electrode. Their work on lithium cobalt oxide produced a cell voltage of about four volts, compared with a little over two in Whittingham’s earlier design. That change gave later engineers a better starting point for compact rechargeable cells.

Finding lithium cobalt oxide at Oxford Mizushima worked with Goodenough on a search for materials that could both take up and release lithium ions. He helped identify lithium cobalt oxide and was first author of the team’s 1980 paper. Read his account alongside Goodenough’s to see the difference between choosing the research direction and testing the material that made it work.

Showing that graphite could take up and release lithium Yazami and Philippe Touzain reported a reversible graphite electrode in 1983. The work showed that lithium could move in and out of graphite under suitable conditions. This is a separate step from finding a good positive electrode, and it helps explain why the material on the other side of a lithium-ion cell matters too.

Putting both electrodes together in a prototype Yoshino paired the lithium cobalt oxide positive electrode with a carbon material made from petroleum coke, in place of the lithium metal used in earlier designs. The prototype showed how to make a rechargeable lithium-ion cell without relying on a lithium-metal negative electrode. That is the bridge from the materials research to a usable design.

Developing another route for rechargeable power Ovshinsky and colleagues pursued nickel-metal hydride cells, which store hydrogen in a solid material at one electrode. That chemistry found uses in hybrid vehicles and consumer electronics. It belongs alongside the lithium-ion work because different kinds of rechargeable batteries reached practical products through different materials.

Taking lithium-ion from the lab to the market Nishi led the Sony team that brought rechargeable lithium-ion cells to market in 1991. The step was turning a promising design into a battery a company could produce and sell for portable electronics. Read this after Yoshino’s prototype to see where research ends and commercial engineering begins.