Elton Cairns was another among the few Western scientists still working on lithium batteries in the 1980s. He had already had a long career, leading the battery-development efforts at General Motors for its Electrovette concept car before coming to the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. Like Bruce, he watched Western companies actively cede this new industry to Japanese competitors. “Throughout the eighties, the Japanese really kept at the R. & D,” he said. “It took a lot of systematic work to develop a commercial lithium-ion cell: testing carbons for the negative electrode, working on procedures for making the positive electrode, finding out what would be the best electrolyte. But they did it rather quietly. Most people not inside those efforts didn’t fully realize what was taking place in terms of moving toward commercialization.” As for the Evereadys and Duracells, American “battery companies have never been very aggressive about doing research,” he said. “They kind of got left in the dust.”
In the early 1980s, Sony pursued nontoxic batteries through its subsidiary Sony-Eveready, a partnership with Union Carbide, the owners of the dry-cell giant Eveready. According to Sony’s official history, the company wanted to work with Eveready on a rechargeable lithium battery, but then on December 3, 1984, Union Carbide presided over a catastrophe. A disaster at its pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, sent a forty-two-metric-ton cloud of methyl isocyanate gas wafting into town. A half million people were exposed to the poison; 2,259 people died immediately, and at least 25,000 would eventually perish as a result.
Union Carbide would be entangled in lawsuits in India for decades. In the immediate aftermath, however, the company faced another threat: a hostile takeover bid by the New Jersey chemical company GAF. To raise money, Union Carbide sold off all its consumer goods businesses, which included iconic American brands such as Glad and STP. The company sold its battery division, which through its Eveready and Energizer products held 60 percent of the American battery market and 30 percent of the world’s, to Ralston Purina for $1.4 billion.
In the shadow of ten-figure corporate sales like these, the fate of Union Carbide’s Sony-Eveready joint venture drew little notice. In Sony’s account, Keizaburo Tozawa, head of Sony-Eveready, learned of the Union Carbide fire sale by telegram and promptly set off for the United States with a gaggle of lawyers. For a meager $12 million he secured all of Union Carbide’s shares of the Sony-Eveready battery venture, on the condition that the business could continue only under a different name. Sony would call the company Sony-Energytec.
In 1987, Tozawa’s group decided to focus on finally developing a mass-market rechargeable lithium battery. They had two decades of published research to work with, research by people like Stan Whittingham, Bob Huggins, Michel Armand, Elton Cairns, and John Goodenough. In the late 1980s, a few blips on the Japanese media radar had reported that Sony-Eveready was excited about the potential of a lithium-manganese-oxide battery, which would have built on a chemistry that John Goodenough had developed with a visiting South African researcher named Michael Thackeray. Those reports soon vanished, however, and were replaced by news that Tozawa’s team had finally figured out how to make a lithium-ion battery safe and cheap enough for large-scale manufacturing.
The solution: a carbon anode. Using Goodenough’s cobalt compound in the cathode and Sony’s carbon anode, the battery operated on this simple reaction:
LiC6 + CoO2 = C6 + LiCoO2
A compound made of lithium and carbon—LiC6—reacts with a compound made of cobalt and oxygen—CoO2. Lithium ions flee the carbonbased electrode and swim across the electrolyte to the cathode. Once they arrive, they burrow into the crystalline lattice of the cobalt oxide, docking into place and forming a new compound, lithium cobalt oxide. Meanwhile, this reaction sends a steady stream of electrons out of the anode and through an external circuit; after leaving the external circuit, these electrons burrow into the cathode, finding their own place in the atomic Jenga puzzle that is an insertion compound battery material.
The high electrochemical potential between the two electrodes gave the battery a potent 3.6 volts, which is desirable because of this equation: P = VI. Electric power (P) equals voltage (V) times current (I). With a higher voltage, you can get more power with the same amount of current, and that’s why it’s often more efficient to run certain devices at higher voltages.
The major jump in voltage and the near doubling of energy capacity that Sony’s rechargeable lithium battery delivered would radically shrink the power supply in all kinds of electronic gadgets. At the time, for example, cell phones used a7 volt radio-frequency power amplifier to convert the phone’s electrical signals into radio frequencies and then beam them to a base station. Nickel cadmium (NiCad) and even the new nickel-metal-hydride batteries, which came out in 1990, both had a nominal voltage of 1.2. That meant that it took six of the most advanced cells on the market, wired in series, to reach the 7 volts necessary to run the cell phone’s power amplifier. Along comes Sony’s rechargeable lithium battery: simply by virtue of its 3.6 volts, it reduced the number of battery cells necessary to power a cell phone from six to two—a dramatic reduction in the amount of physical stuff that had to be built into each phone.
Sony’s new battery would last longer than any that had come before too, because the chemical reaction it relies on is extraordinarily reversible. Change the direction the electrons are flowing, and the whole thing happens in reverse. Both electrodes return to their original, untouched state. This can happen again and again with only minimal collateral damage, which means the battery can be charged and discharged hundreds of times without losing enough capacity to render it useless. Moreover, lithium ion didn’t suffer from the “memory effect,” a tendency of NiCad and nickel-metal-hydride batteries to permanently lose energy capacity if recharged before having been run completely dead.
The sum of these benefits made Sony’s battery revolutionary. By 1988, the company was preparing its Koriyama factory to build the cells. To distinguish them from the flaming lithium-metal-based batteries that made news at Exxon in the 1970s, these would be called lithium-ion batteries. In February 1990, Sony made the official production announcement. After more than two decades of misfires, the rechargeable lithium battery would finally make it into the world.
Sony’s announcement immediately focused attention and funding back on advanced battery research. “The commercialization of the lithium battery nailed down the argument of the detractors,” who argued that lithium was too volatile ever to put in a rechargeable battery, Peter Bruce said. “There was a view from people who didn’t work in the area that [rechargeable lithium batteries] had good theoretical potential, but that you couldn’t make them practical. Commercialization demonstrated that you could.”
The naysayers who had claimed that rechargeable lithium batteries could never be made practical had at least two good cautionary tales to back them up: Exxon, and the story of Moli Energy, a Canadian company that three years before the arrival of Sony’s lithium-ion technology began selling rechargeable lithium batteries, mainly for use in cellular phones in Japan.
Moli was started primarily to find a good use for a mineral resource. The founder was Rudi Haering, a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia, who in the late 1970s heard about Exxon’s titanium disulfide battery. Haering was interested in layered compounds like titanium disulfide, and he knew that his corner of Canada was, oddly enough, home to a large stash of a different but very similar layered compound, molybdenum disulfide. Molybdenum disulfide has almost exactly the same structure as titanium disulfide, but the difference is that molybdenum disulfide is a stable, hardy mineral—a compound resistant enough to rain and air that it occurs in nature. Titanium disulfide (TiS2) is a different animal, and the contrast between the two makes Exxon’s decision to kill Whittingham’s TiS2 battery sound reasonable.
“TiS2was a poor choice,” said Jeff Dahn, a scientist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who worked as a researcher at Moli in the 1980s. “Y
ou have to synthesize it under completely sealed conditions. This is extremely expensive. And as soon as you expose it to air, it stinks—it literally stinks—because the moisture in the air reacts with TiS2 to make hydrogen sulfide. People like Stan Whittingham and whoever 2 will tell you, ‘Oh, you know, Exxon had everything figured out in the 1970s, and it was all about management screwups.’ Well, not true. Their electrode material was totally unworkable.” When Exxon began working in earnest on Whittingham’s battery, one company set out to manufacture raw titanium disulfide in bulk. “It was like $1,000 a kilo just for TiS2 raw material,” Dahn said. “It was ridiculous. I bought a kilo of that just so I could see what it was like. Boy oh boy, open that can, and you gotta clear the room.”
In 1977, with money from the mining magnate who owned rights to the region’s giant molybdenum disulfide stash, Haering founded Moli Energy, its name a mashap of the elemental symbols for molybdenum and lithium. The original goal was a battery big enough to power an electric car, but as Exxon did, they had to start much smaller.
Until the mid-1980s, Moli remained a privately held company operating in research and development mode. Jeff Dahn was hired as a project leader for materials science in 1985. “When I got to Moli, it had prototype products of this lithium-molybdenum-disulfide cell that could do three hundred charge-discharge cycles or so, and they had demonstrated and shipped samples to various customers,” he said. “People were showing an interest because they were far better than NiCads at the time, which were the competition.”
By the spring of 1986, Moli was making four hundred of its rechargeable lithium cells each day in its R & D plant in Burnaby, British Columbia, and soon it was pitching its technology as “the first breakthrough in battery technology in almost half a century.” James Stiles, a senior researcher at the company, bragged to the Globe and Mail that unlike unnamed previous lithium rechargeables, “our batteries don’t explode.” The Japanese trading house Mitsui bought the rights to sell the batteries in Japan, and the U.S. military became interested.
That same year the company held a public stock offering, which it used to finance the construction of a factory in the Vancouver suburb of Maple Ridge designed to build as many as thirty million cells a year. Problems with manufacturing equipment made putting the plant into production something of a nightmare. For a negative electrode, Moli’s batteries used ultrathin sheets of metallic lithium foil; the foil needs to be stretched tight and run through machines, but “handling lithium foil is like handling a wet lasagna noodle,” Dahn said. “We were the first manufacturing plant for rechargeable lithium ever. Today setting up a lithium-ion plant is trivial; you go to Japanese or Chinese equipment makers and you say, ‘Give me a winder’”—the device that winds electrode foil into a roll before it’s placed in the cylindrical container—“and you have a machine that works. In those days, it was the first time it was ever done.” The equipment problems led to delays and the wanton burning of money.
In 1988, after plenty of technical fixes and a second round of financing, Moli’s first battery, the 2.2-volt MoliCel, hit the market. Most of them went to Japan, where they were used in NEC laptops and NTT cell phones. And it turned out that while they might not explode, they burned quite well, and did so spontaneously after just a couple of months of use. In August, an NTT phone equipped with a Moli battery caught fire and injured its user. NTT recalled ten thousand phones that used Moli’s battery, and Moli suspended production and began a months-long period of crisis-level safety testing.
“We were quite shocked, because we had put these things through extremely intensive safety testing,” Dahn said. “And they passed them all. So in R & D we were saying, ‘Holy maloney, what’s happening here?’ And guys like me, we were really on the hot seat.
“What we learned was that in a cell-phone application, you have your phone on standby most of the time. It’s turned on and is discharging at a low rate. It will take four to five days for your phone to discharge itself, and then you’d have to charge it, and that is a situation we’d never tested the cells under.” Under deadline pressure, Moli’s engineers never thought to subject the batteries to this slow, tedious cycle, in which a cell is slowly drained for five days and then recharged in ten hours, and then the whole thing is repeated hundreds of times. “What happens under such a situation is that the lithium gets extremely high surface area,” which can cause it to react violently with the electrolyte should something go wrong. Dahn emphasizes that fewer than twenty of two million Moli batteries malfunctioned—a failure rate that is “very hard to detect in testing at any level.”
In October, Moli laid off 56 of its 192 employees, which was a dramatic enough move that four days later the Toronto Stock Exchange stopped trading in the company. Before long Moli was in bankruptcy. Mitsui stepped in and bought the company, and today it still exists in the form of E-One Moli Energy Canada.
It does not, however, still build rechargeable batteries using metallic lithium.
Back in the late 1980s, those who used the downfall of Moli to argue that rechargeable lithium batteries could never work didn’t see the lithium-ion battery—which contains no metallic lithium, only benign charged lithium ions—coming. For Dahn, the lesson of Moli is that “lithium metal is completely out of control, because you have no control over what the user is gonna do.”
Despite their exorbitant price, ungainly dimensions, and limited coverage, cell phones established a solid American foothold in the second half of the 1980s. Motorola sold $180 million worth by the end of 1984, the first year the devices were on the market. The number of cities with cell-phone providers grew from two in 1984 to eighty-two in 1985. By 1990, every American market had at least one cellular provider, and five million Americans subscribed to a cell phone service.
As cell phones and other gadgets proliferated, battery power once again registered in the public consciousness. “The competition is becoming fierce,” a Sanyo battery-plant manager told the Associated Press. “Everybody is demanding products with longer life and less weight.” In 1992 The Economist declared that it was about time the battery business caught up with the rest of the consumer-electronics world. “While electronics manufacturers produced ever smaller and cleverer machines, the sleepy battery business barely changed. So light have most portable devices become that the battery now accounts for a quarter of the weight, compared with a tenth a decade ago. Now, with advances in microchip technology making even tinier electronic products possible, battery makers are scrambling to come up with the lighter, more powerful and longer-lasting batteries needed to turn such gizmos into mass-market items.”
In 1990, the nickel-metal-hydride battery had arrived as a less toxic, higher-energy alternative to NiCad, and it took off quickly. Almost immediately, however, it was thoroughly one-upped by Sony’s lithium-ion battery. Beginning in 1992, Sony offered its new lithium-ion battery as a $60 optional power pack for the Handycam CCD-TR1 8 mm camcorder. It was 30 percent smaller and 35 percent lighter than a NiCad battery that contained the same amount of energy. It stored 90 watt-hours of energy per kilogram—triple the capacity of lead-acid batteries, nearly double that of nickel cadmium, and a good 10 to 20 percent better than nickel metal hydride. Demand for Sony’s lithium-ion battery grew quickly. By March 1993, the company had shipped some three million of them, and by the following year, that number became fifteen million.
Competitors quickly entered the fray, almost all of them Japanese. Within a few years, Sanyo, Matsushita, Mitsui, Yuasa Battery, a company called A&T Battery (which was owned by Toshiba and the chemical company Asahi), and the newly Japanese-owned E-One Moli Energy were all chasing Sony in the lithium-ion race.
Meanwhile, the cell phone was working its way into the mainstream. “As recently as five years ago the cell phone was still seen as about as essential as a second Porsche,” The Economist wrote that October. “No longer.” In 1993, there were thirteen million cell phones in the United States, and they were getting cheaper by some
25 percent a year. The wireless revolution did have its birth pangs. In 1992, when the 33.5-million-circulation USA Weekend magazine polled its readers on their most pressing health concerns, electromagnetic fields came in at number one. January 1993, a guest on Larry King Live blamed his wife’s brain cancer on cell-phone use; Motorola’s stocks plummeted (and then quickly rebounded). As wireless carriers began building more and more cell-phone towers across the country, not-in-my-backyard protests became widespread. Even so, nothing could stop the advance of the cell phone.
Released in 1994, Motorola’s MicroTAC Elite was the first mass-market mobile phone to use a lithium-ion battery—two of them, because the phone still used a 7-volt RF power amplifier. A press release trumpeting the arrival of the “world’s lightest cellular telephone” used a battery analogy to put the phone’s low weight in context: the entire 3.9-ounce phone was lighter than a single D-cell battery. It got forty-five minutes of talk time, six hours of standby, and it also happened to be the first phone to come with voice mail.
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