He was, he said in a memoir, “Witness to Grace” (2008), the unwanted child of an agnostic professor of religion at Yale University and a mother with whom he never bonded. With no friends other than three siblings, a family dog, and a maid, he grew up lonely and dyslexic in an emotionally distant household. He was sent to a private boarding school at the age of 12 and rarely heard from his parents.
With patience, advice and intense struggle to better himself, he overcame his reading limitations. He studied Latin and Greek at Groton and studied mathematics at Yale, meteorology with the Army Air Forces during World War II, and physics with Clarence Zener, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 1952.
At MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s and 1960s, he was part of teams that helped lay the foundations for random-access memory (RAM) in computers and developed plans for the nation’s first air defense system. In 1976, when federal funding for his MIT work ended, he moved to Oxford to teach and run a chemistry lab, where he began his battery research.
Essentially, a battery is a device that allows electrically charged atoms known as ions to move from one side to the other, creating an electric current that powers everything connected to the battery. The two sides, called electrodes, hold charges — a negative one called an anode, and a positive one called a cathode. The medium in between, through which the ions travel, is an electrolyte.
When a battery releases energy, positively charged ions shuttle from the anode to the cathode, creating a current. A rechargeable battery is plugged into an electrical outlet to draw electricity, forcing the ions to return to the anode, where they are stored until needed again. Materials used for the anode, cathode and electrolyte determine the amount and speed of the ions, and therefore the battery’s capacity.
