“Goodenough’s original lithium-cobalt oxide cathode structure is still used in the lithium-ion batteries found in nearly all personal electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets,” Helen Gregg writes in her article. University of Chicago Journal in 2016. “When he was working on repairing oxides at Oxford, Goodenough had no idea what effect his battery would have.”
John Bannister Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, the second of four children to Irwin and Helen (Louis) Goodenough. His father was finishing graduate studies at Oxford University, and the family returned to the United States when John was an infant and settled in Woodbridge, Connecticut, after his father joined Yale College to teach comparative religion.
In an interview for this obituary in 2017, Dr. Goodnough said he and his siblings, Ward, James, and Hester, had “mismatched” parents and were “aloof” with their children. John also suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia and was seen as a retarded student at the local elementary schools. As a teenager at Groton School in Massachusetts, he made adjustments to deal with dyslexia.
“I got over him in a sense,” he recalls. “I was able to read mechanically. And I covered my tracks quite a bit by avoiding English and history, and concentrating on mathematics and languages—six years of Latin and four years of Greek.” He said the strict educational standards at Groton and Yale also gave structure to his life.
He graduated at the top of his class at Groton in 1940 and won a scholarship to Yale University, where he majored in mathematics, studying and working other jobs to pay for his education. He had almost completed his bachelor’s degree coursework in 1943 when he was called up for active duty in the wartime Army Air Forces. He received his degree after Yale University gave him credit for a military meteorology course. He served in Newfoundland and the Azores.
After the war, he won a government scholarship to study physics at the University of Chicago. He received his master’s degree in 1951 and his doctorate a year later. After working briefly at Westinghouse, he began his career at MIT
In 1951, he married Irene Wiseman. They did not have children. She died in 2016. He was succeeded by a half-sister, Ursula W. Godino, and a half-brother, Daniel A. Godino, who are both professors emeritus of biology.
Dr. Goodenough held the Virginia H. Cockrell Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas. He has written eight books and more than 800 articles for scholarly journals. His awards have included the Japan Prize, the Enrico Fermi Prize, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Welch Prize in Chemistry, and the National Medal of Science, awarded to him by President Barack Obama in 2011.
Alex Troup And Zhang Chi Contribute to the preparation of reports.
“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”