Stanley Whittingham, joint Nobel Prize winner with John Whittingham and Akiro Yoshino as one of the inventors of the lithium battery, has received a further honour. Britain’s King Charles III has invested him with a knighthood as part of his official June birthday honours list.

“I am absolutely delighted that the British government has given me this great honour,” Whittingham said. “I may be wearing a lab coat instead of armour, but I’ll continue to fight the good fight for energy storage, knowing the King is behind me!” 

It is a singular honour for a singular man.

Whittingham has been a seminal figure in the development of lithium-ion batteries.  

In the 1970s he discovered intercalation electrodes and described intercalation reactions in rechargeable batteries. He holds the patents on the concept of using intercalation chemistry in high power-density, highly reversible lithium-ion batteries. He is often called the founding father of lithium-ion batteries as his work paved the way for others to follow.

Whittingham graduated from Oxford with a DPhil in 1967 and in the following February he became a post-doctoral fellow, investigating solid-state electrochemistry under professor Robert Huggins at Stanford University. 

In 1971, his published findings on fast-ion transport, particularly in the conductivity of the solid electrolyte beta-alumina, won Whittingham the Young Author Award of the Electrochemical Society. This was the springboard to greater things. 

Whittingham’s star continued to rise in the early 70’s when he was employed by Exxon Research and Engineering to look at alternative energy production and storage. 

“They wanted to be prepared for the company to survive when oil ran out — a major theme of corporate thinking in the 1970s,” he later recalled. “They invested in a research laboratory like they invested in drilling oil. You expect one out of five wells/ideas to pay off. 

“Our research team began to look at tantalum disulfides. They found that by intercalating different atoms or molecules between the sheets of tantalum disulphide, they could change the superconductivity transition temperature.”

Although 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.

Towards the end of 1972 Whittingham and his colleagues informed their Exxon bosses that they had a new battery, and patents were filed within a year. Within a couple of years Exxon Enterprises wheeled out prototype 45Ah lithium cells and started work on hybrid vehicles. 

The Exxon battery promised to make a huge impact. At the time, Bell Labs had built up a similar research group, again made up of chemists and physicists from Stanford. “We were competing head-on for a while, also in publications. If you look at our publications on the battery, you will see a lot of basic science with no mention of batteries at all. Exxon came up with the key patents early on,” he said.

“These early batteries were quite remarkable, and some of the smaller ones, used for marketing, are still operating today, more than 35 years later.

“We had an incredibly good patent attorney. They would write up your invention and then ask you: ‘why can’t you do it this or that way?’ And they provoked us into building a battery fully charged or fully discharged.” 

The latter is the way almost all of today’s batteries are constructed. 

In 1977, Whittingham teamed up with John Goodenough to publish a book called “Solid State Chemistry of Energy Conversion and Storage”. To better disseminate information about the field, he launched, in 1981, a new journal “Solid State Ionics”, which he would edit for the next 20 years.

After 16 years in industry, in 1988, he joined the Binghamton campus of the State University of New York as a professor of chemistry to initiate an academic programme in materials chemistry. 

He continues to work at his  laboratory at the Center of Excellence at the Innovative Technologies Complex at the university. 

This centre has, as its goal, a fundamental understanding of the electrode reactions in lithium batteries. Without such an understanding the ultimate limits of energy storage will never be met. The centre includes top scientists from MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley and Michigan.