Stanley Whittingham

Stanley Whittingham is a British-American chemist who while working at Exxon in the 1970s built the first rechargeable lithium battery, using titanium disulfide as a cathode material that could reversibly intercalate lithium ions, a design that offered far higher energy density than the lead-acid or nickel-cadmium batteries then available. Whittinghams lithium battery was not stable or safe enough for widespread commercial use, since the lithium metal anode he used was prone to forming dendrites that could short-circuit or ignite the cell, but his intercalation cathode concept became the foundational principle that John B. Goodenough and later Akira Yoshino built on to create the safe, commercially viable lithium-ion battery. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Goodenough and Yoshino for the development of the lithium-ion battery. His early work is credited with opening the field of lithium-based rechargeable energy storage that now underlies portable electronics, electric vehicles and grid storage.