That's quite big news. The fact that it was kept quiet for 3 weeks is no small feat.

I hadn't realized he also helped develop lithium iron phosphate, which unlike other chemistries seems to have the potential to scale up to what is needed. "good enough" indeed.

He's had an amazing life and was amazingly productive right until the end and had his hand in quite a few recent battery innovations. Quite a life to celebrate.

Battery production scaling up is something that is a bit under appreciated by many. Basically where we are now is hundreds of ghw of batteries produced every year. Probably closing in on a twh soon. You can do the math and it adds up to a a million cars requiring basically whatever battery capacity they have in kwh times a million. Which means 1m model 3s with 60kwh batteries require 60gwh of batteries to be produced. Tesla is closing in on 2million vehicles produced per year right now and their share of the market is actually dropping because other manufacturers are catching up.

When the market hits 15 million vehicles per year, we'll cross the twh mark. There are of course other uses of batteries on the grid, in buses, trucks, in homes, etc. So, we're likely close to that already or past that point even.

The world produces about 23phh of electricity per year. If you cycle 1 twh of batteries every day (which you wouldn't, typically) that adds up to 0.365 pwh. So, tripling the battery production gets us to 1phw of power cycled in a year. That's a lot of power to have on standby. And that is the main point because the average state of most batteries will be close to fully charged. You could drive your EV and drain the battery but on average not many people are going to do that at the same time. That's a lot of battery. And this man was key to inventing and developing them.

Trends are towards more batteries being produced cheaper using less and less expensive/rare materials. Sodium ion basically uses no lithium, cobalt, etc. There's not going to be a battery shortage long term.

What an inspiring life. A life dedicated to good work.

Ugh… saw the headline and didn’t want to believe it. I was made aware of his contributions in a mini documentary a few years ago. He really seemed to be someone extraordinary.

It's still the most unbelievably ironic name for a pioneer/inventor.

On the contrary, innovation is often about being great at doing things "good enough" so that you can rapidly advance to the frontiers. Innovators must be pragmatic, and so they leave perfectionists in the dust.

Perhaps he meant to write "iconic" but misspelled, there's even a song in his name featured in Back To The Future.

What song ?

Johnny B Goode?

Doh

Random, does anyone know how this name is actually pronounced (or, rather, how he pronounced it)? I think it would be awesome if it were actually "good enough".

Did some searching online but all the results seemed of dubious quality.

I was wondering if it might be pronounced “good-in-ow”.

If that'd be so, it might come from a "make it sound and spell English" Goodenowe, Godunov, Gudanowski etc.

Lo-and-behold John Goodenough is from Thuringia, Germany, born to Jewish parents, father Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough. So quite likely the name was transcribed at some point in history, even if not documented in Wikipedia et. al. very publicly, we can see that his father in turn seems to come from said "Goodenows" via the references link in the father's Wikipedia page [1].

So all in all, good guess!

[1] https://books.google.ca/books?id=Ak1MAAAAMAAJ&q=Helen+(Lewis...

But according to the Wikipedia page John Goodenough's dad, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, was born in Brooklyn and the son of Ward Hunt Goodenough. The links suggest he stemmed from a family that emigrated to America in the 17th century.

All the above info I gave is from said Wikipedia page including the link. It's the reference (number 3) that the Wikipedia page for John's father gave.

I have not done any source work. I'm trusting Wikipedia here.

Just speculating, but -enau is a common town name ending in German, a person from that place might be name -enauer (see Adenauer). There is a Gudenau Castle in west Germany. Gudenauer would have been an excellent candidate for Ellis Island-fication

Have the same last name, just pronounced "good enough" as it looks. Have met a few other unrelated families from different countries with the same last name and never heard it pronounced differently either - perhaps historically though.

As I've seen and heard it, it's pronounced "Goodnow"

There's a computer architect with the surname Lowe-Power https://cs.ucdavis.edu/directory/jason-lowe-power

There's a football player with the surname HaHa Clinton-Dix

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha_Ha_Clinton-Dix

I’m not sure if that’s the same thing the others were pointing out…

I fondly remember reading a book for computer architecture from an author called "Linda Null"

There is also the Japanese computer scientist named Eiichi Goto. Among other things he invented the parametron, which tops my list of coolest logic circuit names and which may or may not eventally make a comeback in reversible quantum computing.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiichi_Goto

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametron

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkQySlx4OLc

I think it's apropos considering the absolute longevity of lithium ion batteries across industries despite research labs producing significantly better prototypes for decades.

I am surprised no politician (that I am aware of) has legally changed their name to Lower Taxes before running for election, seems like they’d be a shoe-in with little effort.

Just so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Looper

Especially this bit:

> In Los Angeles County, a candidate by the name of John "Lower Taxes" Loew has run in every election for county assessor between 2000 and 2018. He explained that he changed his name in order to send a message about his political positions.[30] [31] In 2000, Loew received less than 1% of the vote[32] in the special election to fill a vacancy in the office. In 2002 and 2006, Loew lost the elections to incumbent Rick Auerbach by a 70%–11% margin in 2002,[33] and by a 77%–23% margin in 2006.[34] Loew ran again in 2010, where he finished in third place with 10.6% of the vote.[35] In 2014 he finished in fourth place with 9.47% of the vote.[36] In 2018 Loew again ran with the name "Lower Taxes" on the ballot and ended up in second place with 23.58%, forcing incumbent Jeffrey Prang into a runoff.[37] Loew lost the runoff to Prang by a margin of a little over 20%.[38]

I stand corrected

Ok, this took me down the rabbit hole. Life imitates fiction.

Kinda related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Marsh_(boxer)

When I first read "John Goodenough has died" (which was an actual headline here) I thought of "just another" overdone headline for excellence coaching or motivational GTD training...

Still sad that it wasn't about that.

Or the international relations (peace/war studies) scholar Anne Marie Slaughter

If many surnames came from people's professions, does that mean that one of his ancestors was simply considered to be... good enough?

That is actually the most likely explaination for the origins of the name (basically as a nickname)

I'm still wondering how such surnames come to be. In Poland, it feels like some 25%+ of surnames are nicknames / descriptors of a person that aren't just naming someone's occupation. A fraction of them is weird or even derogatory. My own surname literally means "a bad roof", and that's actually on the tame side compared to surnames of some people I know, or know of.

In Italy they still fondly remember a TV host whose (real, not stage) name was Mike Bongiorno. Buon giorno ("good day") is a standard salutation like good morning. He was Mike. an utterly US name, because he was born in New York.

Is Bongiorno a common last name in Italy, or is it also a product of his ancestors migrating to the US?

How last names can change is fascinating to me. I have cousins who would have had the same last name as my (Chinese) grandfather, except for the fact that that my grandfather emigrated from Indonesia to the Netherlands before it became independent, and their branch of the family did so afterwards. Meaning Indonesia forced them to change their last names.

Bongiorno is a regional (Venetian?) or historical spelling; it may be less common in Italy than outside of Italy these days. Wikipedia lists most of the prominent living people with the name as being in Australia, the USA, or Argentina, though there's a few Italians. Buongiorno (the current Italian spelling, extra "u") is a common enough Italian last name.

I see your John Goodenough, and I raise you the Outerbridge Crossing. At the southern edge of New York City, way down near the bottom of Staten Island, it’s named after the first chairman of the Port Authority: Mr. Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.

Technological hero.

I didn't realize that Goodenough and Stanford Ovshinsky (inventor of prismatic NiMH cell) were born within months of each other.

Stanford R. Ovshinsky, November 24, 1922

John B. Goodenough, July 25, 1922

I’m glad he was on our side of the war. I’ll admit I felt a twinge when it lead with “born in Germany 100 years ago.”

I don't think he'd have gotten much done for Germany before age 23. He served as a meteorologist for the US for a year.

imho his name belongs with borlaug and salk, it'll just take another decade to become clear.

Nikola Tesla was known as "The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century"

John B. Goodenough would be The Man Who Invented the 21th Century

Not assigning a whole century during the first 23 years, could be Goodenough

Nikola Teslas contributions are generally vastly exaggerated. Saying he “invented the twentieth century” is certainly way over the top.

Aside from Westinghouse ans Edison, I think Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky‘s contributions are arguably way more important for the modern elecric grid than anything Tesla did. Since three phase AC power was the key invention unlocking its potential, and he set up the first long distance three phase transmission system in Europe. But nobody has heard of him because he’s not as interested a character.

Tesla is more famous mostly because he is cool, weird and did some very interesting things like building the Wardenclyffe tower.

One might also imagine a constant current DC power distribution system with all houses in series that could have been deployed in the 20th century. The power company provides 1 amp constant current, and if you don't want to use any power, you short it out. If you want to run a lightbulb, you put your 1 amp through a lightbulb. If you want to run two bulbs, you put the current through 1 bulb and then the next in series. A 'fuse' would, instead of breaking the circuit, would provide a low impedance bypass for any faulty equipment if it detects an overvoltage event - easy to implement with a solenoid. Entire houses and streets could be fused in this way too, to ensure an open-circuit never occurs.

On the power generation side, DC generators and batteries can be switched in and out to adjust the voltage as necessary to maintain the constant 1 amp promised to subscribers.

Metering can be done with a small clock motor and coil of wire and a spring to integrate voltage over time.

Such a scheme is probably cheaper because it requires no transformers.

Transformers though are the key to efficient power distribution. The power losses on running low voltage everywhere would be a killer.

Imagine the world where every house has a substantial DC potential relative to their local earth (and the plumbing), and where switching any inductive loads causes significant arcing. What fun could be had!

I am excited that POE has finally provided us a way to run DC power in walls, but that is only approaching useful now that many loads in houses are DC at the endpoints.

Goodenough I guess.

Nature did a rather lovely short podcast interview with him after the Nobel. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03079-1

Hopefully I'll recall Mr. Goodenough now when I see the technology. My standing association is Scott's Tots.

Any news about his glass battery? Is it now good enough?