He was, as he wrote in his memoir Witness to Grace (2008), the unwanted child of an agnostic religion professor at Yale University and a mother with whom he had 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. At the age of 12 he was sent to a private boarding school and hardly heard anything from his parents.
With patience, guidance, and intense self-improvement efforts, he overcame his dyslexia. He studied Latin and Greek at Groton and earned his masters in mathematics from 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 PhD in 1952.
During the 1950s and 1960s at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, he was a member of teams that helped lay the groundwork for random access memory (RAM) in computers and developed plans for the country’s first air defense system. In 1976, when federal funding for his MIT work ran out, he moved to Oxford to teach and run a chemistry lab, where he began researching batteries.
Essentially, a battery is a device that causes electrically charged atoms called ions to move from side to side, creating an electrical current that powers anything connected to the battery. The two sides, called electrodes, hold charges – a negative one called the anode and a positive one called the cathode. The medium between them through which the ions move is an electrolyte.
When a battery discharges energy, positively charged ions move from the anode to the cathode, creating a current. A rechargeable battery is plugged into an outlet to draw current, forcing the ions to return to the anode, where they are stored until needed again. The materials used for the anode, cathode and electrolyte determine the quantity and speed of the ions and thus the performance of the battery.