BATTERY HEROES: STANLEY WHITTINGHAM The creation of the lithium ion battery cell was the work — often collaborative but equally often on a competitive basis — of a handful of scientists around the world. And Stanley Whittingham, as batteries historian Kevin Desmond reports, was one of that elite handful that can claim to be one of the lithium battery’s founding fathers.
Exxon, Whittingham and the joys of lithium It was so 1970s. Diversification was the new name of the corporate game. And, in 1972 it seemed a no-brainer for Exxon Research and Engineering to look at alternative energy production and storage. So, with the deepest pockets of perhaps the most profitable oil giant in the world, Exxon set about seeking the best scientists in the world for its project. And among this elite was a 31-yearold graduate, then a more than upand-coming researcher at Stanford University by the name of Stanley Whittingham. Exxon’s investment in Whittingham and this scientific elite paid off. Following his investigations of the properties of tantalum disulfide, Whittingham and his colleagues made a remarkable discovery. Their breakthrough? Understanding the role of intercalation electrodes in battery reactions. This would eventually result in the first commercial lithium rechargeable batteries. The batteries were based on a titanium disulfide cathode and a lithium-aluminum anode. Although other entities including General Motors, Sohio and the US Argonne National Laboratory were developing lithium-based batteries at the same time, only Whittingham’s invention worked at room temperature. The implications for the oil major — and the rest of the world — could have been tremendous. In 1976, Forbes magazine declared that “the electric car’s rebirth is as sure as the need to end our dependence on imported oil”. Sadly such enthusiasm had died out by the end of the decade. Profiting from Whittingham’s pioneering breakthrough, later on Japan turned lithiumion batteries into a highly profitable industry. 122 Batteries International Spring 2013
Beginnings Michael Stanley Whittingham was born near Nottingham in the UK in 1941. His interest in science stemmed from his father, a civil engineer, and his chemistry teacher in school. In the early 1960s he read inorganic chemistry at Oxford University, obtained his masters in 1967 and his DPhil the year after that. Whittingham recalls his days in Oxford: “Initially we studied catalytic ac-
tivity and how all that changed with the changes in the electronic properties of the material. There was a great deal of interest in the crystal structure, or rather the band structure, that controls the catalytic activity. “We chose a very simple reactant: mainly oxygen atoms, and we just looked at how they recombine at the surface of tungsten bronzes, NaxWO3, because it was very easy to change their catalytic behaviour by changing the amount of sodium. www.batteriesinternational.com