Remembering lithium-ion battery pioneer John Goodenough
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Did some searching online but all the results seemed of dubious quality.
Lo-and-behold John Goodenough is from Thuringia, Germany, born to Jewish parents, father Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough. So quite likely the name was transcribed at some point in history, even if not documented in Wikipedia et. al. very publicly, we can see that his father in turn seems to come from said "Goodenows" via the references link in the father's Wikipedia page [1].
So all in all, good guess!
[1] https://books.google.ca/books?id=Ak1MAAAAMAAJ&q=Helen+(Lewis...
I have not done any source work. I'm trusting Wikipedia here.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiichi_Goto
> In Los Angeles County, a candidate by the name of John "Lower Taxes" Loew has run in every election for county assessor between 2000 and 2018. He explained that he changed his name in order to send a message about his political positions.[30] [31] In 2000, Loew received less than 1% of the vote[32] in the special election to fill a vacancy in the office. In 2002 and 2006, Loew lost the elections to incumbent Rick Auerbach by a 70%–11% margin in 2002,[33] and by a 77%–23% margin in 2006.[34] Loew ran again in 2010, where he finished in third place with 10.6% of the vote.[35] In 2014 he finished in fourth place with 9.47% of the vote.[36] In 2018 Loew again ran with the name "Lower Taxes" on the ballot and ended up in second place with 23.58%, forcing incumbent Jeffrey Prang into a runoff.[37] Loew lost the runoff to Prang by a margin of a little over 20%.[38]
Still sad that it wasn't about that.
How last names can change is fascinating to me. I have cousins who would have had the same last name as my (Chinese) grandfather, except for the fact that that my grandfather emigrated from Indonesia to the Netherlands before it became independent, and their branch of the family did so afterwards. Meaning Indonesia forced them to change their last names.
Battery production scaling up is something that is a bit under appreciated by many. Basically where we are now is hundreds of ghw of batteries produced every year. Probably closing in on a twh soon. You can do the math and it adds up to a a million cars requiring basically whatever battery capacity they have in kwh times a million. Which means 1m model 3s with 60kwh batteries require 60gwh of batteries to be produced. Tesla is closing in on 2million vehicles produced per year right now and their share of the market is actually dropping because other manufacturers are catching up.
When the market hits 15 million vehicles per year, we'll cross the twh mark. There are of course other uses of batteries on the grid, in buses, trucks, in homes, etc. So, we're likely close to that already or past that point even.
The world produces about 23pwh of electricity per year. If you cycle 1 twh of batteries every day (which you wouldn't, typically) that adds up to 0.365 pwh. So, tripling the battery production gets us to 1phw of power cycled in a year. That's a lot of power to have on standby. And that is the main point because the average state of most batteries will be close to fully charged. You could drive your EV and drain the battery but on average not many people are going to do that at the same time. That's a lot of battery. And this man was key to inventing and developing them.
Trends are towards more batteries being produced cheaper using less and less expensive/rare materials. Sodium ion basically uses no lithium, cobalt, etc. There's not going to be a battery shortage long term.
John B. Goodenough would be The Man Who Invented the 21th Century
Aside from Westinghouse ans Edison, I think Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky‘s contributions are arguably way more important for the modern elecric grid than anything Tesla did. Since three phase AC power was the key invention unlocking its potential, and he set up the first long distance three phase transmission system in Europe. But nobody has heard of him because he’s not as interested a character.
Tesla is more famous mostly because he is cool, weird and did some very interesting things like building the Wardenclyffe tower.
On the power generation side, DC generators and batteries can be switched in and out to adjust the voltage as necessary to maintain the constant 1 amp promised to subscribers.
Metering can be done with a small clock motor and coil of wire and a spring to integrate voltage over time.
Such a scheme is probably cheaper because it requires no transformers.
I am excited that POE has finally provided us a way to run DC power in walls, but that is only approaching useful now that many loads in houses are DC at the endpoints.
I didn't realize that Goodenough and Stanford Ovshinsky (inventor of prismatic NiMH cell) were born within months of each other.
Stanford R. Ovshinsky, November 24, 1922
John B. Goodenough, July 25, 1922