M. Stanley Whittingham

M. Stanley Whittingham was born 22 December 1941 and became a British-American chemist working at the intersection of materials and energy. In the 1970s, while at Exxon, he discovered intercalation electrodes - a way for lithium ions to slip in and out of layered materials reversibly - and described the reactions that would define rechargeable battery chemistry for decades. He patented the first rechargeable lithium metal battery in 1977, built on a LiAl anode and a TiS2 cathode, intended for small devices and electric vehicles. The work didn't commercialize then, but it laid the technical foundation others would build on. Today he directs the Institute for Materials Research and the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage at Binghamton University. In 2019 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough, recognition that the portable-power world runs on the reversibility he unlocked five decades earlier.