The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve LeVine Read Free Book Online Page A

badge. They hung by a string from everybody’s neck. Many were imprinted with the word “ COUNTERINTELLIGENCE .” The IDs were mildly jarring in that the photographs often showed a much younger, college-age version of the scientist. In his, Chamberlain resembled a California surfer, with brushed-back hair that could be mistaken for blond. His hair had long since grayed.
    Of course it was no crime to brandish a dated photograph, such as Chris Johnson’s. He had spent his entire career at Argonne. Now in his forties and fullish, Johnson was once a slim professional with a stylishly trimmed beard. You could imagine the go-getting young scientist who, working with Thackeray as his chief researcher, coinvented Argonne’s NMC almost a decade and a half before.
    Johnson was an unpretentious and earthy Ohioan. His father taught high school chemistry and strewed science textbooks about the house, but he did not press the subject on the boy. “I just want you to feel like it’s not work when you get up and go to your job,” he told his son. So Johnson did not at first grow up as a science geek. He did not puzzle over test tubes in the garage or ponder garden insects underneath a microscope. But when he reached high school, a science teacher’s enthusiasm infected him, which led Johnson to major in chemistry at the University of North Carolina. There, in the electrochemistry lab, Johnson felt in his element.
    In 1991, Johnson joined Argonne as a postdoctoral assistant. Sony had just commercialized lithium-ion.
    As he briefed himself by reading scientific journals, Johnson noticed copycat behavior. Papers fixated on the fashion of the day—the Goodenough lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode that had enabled Sony’s new batteries. None seemed to pose daring new ideas—they only plumbed how to make lithium-cobalt-oxide better, and even when they did that, their science seemed “lacking.” But one chemist stood out—Mike Thackeray, who was working back in South Africa after his Oxford stint. Thackeray was talking about his alternate system—manganese oxide, which he said would cost less than lithium-cobalt-oxide. In Johnson’s view, only Thackeray seemed prepared to say something original and produce the data to back it up.
    About this time, Thackeray’s South Africa bosses informed him that they were shutting down his lithium-ion program. Notwithstanding Sony’s coup, the lab did not foresee sufficient sales in the lithium-ion play. Thackeray debated the point, but the decision was made. He was to find other projects.
    In 1993, Thackeray met a talkative American named Don Vissers at a battery conference in Toronto. Vissers was a senior manager in Argonne’s Battery Department. He and Thackeray agreed that the market for lithium-ion batteries was bound to swell. Yet both were frustratingly on the outside in this discernible trend: while South Africa was erring by abandoning lithium-ion, Argonne was falling behind because of its passiveness in the same field. The Chicago lab continued to work on high-temperature sulfur batteries and had yet to make its own push in the new technology. Vissers suggested that they had a common cause. So why didn’t Thackeray consider a move to Chicago and taking Argonne into the science of lithium-ion?
    Thackeray pondered it and a year or so later agreed.
     • • • 
    Thackeray’s wife, Lisa, dreaded moving to an unfamiliar land where none of them—not they or their three daughters—knew a soul. Thackeray described reaching O’Hare that February: “As the American Airlines aircraft approached the landing strip with the wheels a few feet from touchdown, the pilot opened the throttle and took the plane back into the air. There was a stunned silence in the aircraft. Lisa, looking at me at her side, said quietly, ‘Thank God—we’re going home!’”
    They were not going home. The pilot looped back around and landed the plane without incident. Emerging later from customs, the Thackerays