In my last post, I gave a brief overview of the Nobel prize winners in medicine this year and their work in discovering one of the fundamental functions of a cell that led to their winning of the prize.

In this post, I am going to talk about the Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry for developing the lithium-ion battery. Yes, the battery that you can find in almost all electronic devices today.

Nobel Winners In Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2019 has been jointly awarded to three scientists - John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for the development of lithium-ion batteries.

If the contributions of these three great men were to be summed up in a single sentence, it would be that they created a rechargeable world. In fact, this is exactly what the Nobel committee has stated in its press release also.

The modern-day world is characterised by its modern-day devices. Computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, electric cars have all transformed the way we work and live and have transitioned us into a digital era. All these devices were made possible due to the lithium-ion battery which is found in almost every electronic device today.

The three Nobel laureates all had a hand in perfecting the lithium-ion battery which is an invention that took decades to arrive. Goodenough built on the idea of Whittingham and Yoshino perfected Goodenough’s idea and created the first commercially viable li-ion batter in 1985.

Since then, we have been able to make more and more wireless devices as they didn’t need to be plugged into a power outlet all the time. Also, over the past decade, the Li-ion battery has seen more advancements and is now capable of storing much more energy while being able to be charged much faster. The world is just getting started with this invention and it's intriguing to think where it will lead us next.