Congratulations chemists!

John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittington and Akira Yoshino, chemists who published the seminal work on lithium ion batteries in 1980, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-09/nobel-prize-in-chemistry-for-lithium-ion-battery-development/11588298



This fellow chemist is proud today

+1 on the congrats. Really a game changer.

But why did it take so long to get the prize?

fechter said:

+1 on the congrats. Really a game changer.

But why did it take so long to get the prize?

Click to expand...

That's the nature of the Nobel Prize - the significance of a discovery is often not known for many decades. Sometimes it's much faster, depending on the environment the discovery is made - Michael Smith won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993 with Kary Mullis for his work on site directed mutagenesis and polymerase chain reaction technology respectively. These discoveries were made 10-15 years earlier.

Yeah that's cool
I noticed their names in the Wikipedia entry for lithium-ion batteries with the dates at 1979, so 40 years ago now.
Its amazing that not much has really changed since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Invention_and_development
1979 – Working in separate groups, Ned A. Godshall et al.,[38] [39][40] and shortly thereafter by John Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima, both teams demonstrated a rechargeable lithium cell with voltage in the 4 V range using lithium cobalt dioxide (LiCoO
2) as the positive electrode and lithium metal as the negative electrode.[41][42] This innovation provided the positive electrode material that enabled early commercial lithium batteries. LiCoO
2 is a stable positive electrode material which acts as a donor of lithium ions, which means that it can be used with a negative electrode material other than lithium metal.[43] By enabling the use of stable and easy-to-handle negative electrode materials, LiCoO
2 enabled novel rechargeable battery systems. Godshall et al. further identified the similar value of ternary compound lithium-transition metal-oxides such as the spinel LiMn2O4, Li2MnO3, LiMnO2, LiFeO2, LiFe5O8, and LiFe5O4