The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve LeVine
Authors: Steve LeVine
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suddenly edged ahead, Chamberlain’s team became agitated.
It aggravated Thackeray to learn that Envia, the California start-up, managed to make batteries work 50 percent longer than his own team could. Thackeray’s wholly predictable reaction allowed Chamberlain to do what he did best, what he called “managing from the backseat.” Even though Envia was effectively an appendage of Argonne—it was improving on the lab’s own patent—Thackeray regarded it as
competition
. He began to push his team harder.
The battery guys would tell you that Chamberlain was hard to get in to see—he was so busy with his double job—but that when you did sit down with him, he tried to understand your ambitions and to create the opportunity for them to be realized. They cherished him for that quality. But they also knew that Chamberlain was a calculating boss with fixed aims, and the most fixed of all was the race. In practice, one meaning was that, even though Argonne was a government lab, technically owned by the public, they could not publish everything they learned for the very reason that a race was
under way. It was an iterative game. You wanted everyone to publish so that the field as a whole moved forward—and the scientists earned the peer respect accorded to prolific writing. But you also hoped to protect your own inventions—as soon as you published, you enabled your competition to use your inventions against you. Thackeray and Amine—everyone—understood that calculus. It was part of Chamberlain’s war-within-a-war.
• • •
Chamberlain drove eighteen miles from home to Argonne every day along 75th Street through the suburbs that had grown up in the decades since the lab first plopped down in Tulgey Wood. He turned on Cass Avenue South, which eventually became a wide, picturesque road flanked by forest. Before long, he turned sharply right at a big, black sign containing Argonne’s logo—a triangle whose flanks were painted the primary colors. A mile-long drive followed through the forest planted at the beginning and ended at a guard shack where Chamberlain would show the badge hanging around his neck. Then he turned right into a sea of mostly red brick buildings, spread over the hundreds of acres. Within minutes, he would see it—Building 205, on a smaller black sign, also embossed with the logo. After fifty or so footsteps, he would be in the building.
Today, Chamberlain made a left toward the “dry room.” It was a state-of-the-art, moisture-proof setting customized for fiddling with advanced lithium-ion batteries. An air lock separated the dry room from the outside world. Inside, a slurry of carbon and NMC was coated onto rolls of aluminum, creating new battery cathodes. “It’s a nineteenth-century technology,” Chamberlain said, deserving of no place in such a lab. In labs he had seen in other countries, Chamberlain added in a whisper, scientists actually stood by and dipped a finger into the slurry in order to pass judgment on its quality. When Wan Gang was at Argonne, he was only Chamberlain’s latest Chinese visitor. A few months previous, the Americans raised the subject of lithium-air with a Chinese delegation and offered to help them develop the technology. But the visitors wanted to discuss only one subject—lithium-ion. The theme was: how do we get what you invented? Meaning the NMC. Chamberlain and his team were extremely cautious, silent. Argonne could build robots that automatically created a perfect slurry. It could invent the NMC. But China could not. “That’s where we will catch up,” Chamberlain said.
Perhaps Chamberlain was right. Thackeray and Amine could be the ones to make it happen.
PART II
FOREIGNERS IN THE LAB
15
The Start-up
I n June 2007, Sujeet Kumar and Mike Sinkula took up office at the public library in downtown Palo Alto. Kumar, a battery scientist born in India, and Sinkula, a San Francisco native, were using a public conference room there to talk on
It aggravated Thackeray to learn that Envia, the California start-up, managed to make batteries work 50 percent longer than his own team could. Thackeray’s wholly predictable reaction allowed Chamberlain to do what he did best, what he called “managing from the backseat.” Even though Envia was effectively an appendage of Argonne—it was improving on the lab’s own patent—Thackeray regarded it as
competition
. He began to push his team harder.
The battery guys would tell you that Chamberlain was hard to get in to see—he was so busy with his double job—but that when you did sit down with him, he tried to understand your ambitions and to create the opportunity for them to be realized. They cherished him for that quality. But they also knew that Chamberlain was a calculating boss with fixed aims, and the most fixed of all was the race. In practice, one meaning was that, even though Argonne was a government lab, technically owned by the public, they could not publish everything they learned for the very reason that a race was
under way. It was an iterative game. You wanted everyone to publish so that the field as a whole moved forward—and the scientists earned the peer respect accorded to prolific writing. But you also hoped to protect your own inventions—as soon as you published, you enabled your competition to use your inventions against you. Thackeray and Amine—everyone—understood that calculus. It was part of Chamberlain’s war-within-a-war.
• • •
Chamberlain drove eighteen miles from home to Argonne every day along 75th Street through the suburbs that had grown up in the decades since the lab first plopped down in Tulgey Wood. He turned on Cass Avenue South, which eventually became a wide, picturesque road flanked by forest. Before long, he turned sharply right at a big, black sign containing Argonne’s logo—a triangle whose flanks were painted the primary colors. A mile-long drive followed through the forest planted at the beginning and ended at a guard shack where Chamberlain would show the badge hanging around his neck. Then he turned right into a sea of mostly red brick buildings, spread over the hundreds of acres. Within minutes, he would see it—Building 205, on a smaller black sign, also embossed with the logo. After fifty or so footsteps, he would be in the building.
Today, Chamberlain made a left toward the “dry room.” It was a state-of-the-art, moisture-proof setting customized for fiddling with advanced lithium-ion batteries. An air lock separated the dry room from the outside world. Inside, a slurry of carbon and NMC was coated onto rolls of aluminum, creating new battery cathodes. “It’s a nineteenth-century technology,” Chamberlain said, deserving of no place in such a lab. In labs he had seen in other countries, Chamberlain added in a whisper, scientists actually stood by and dipped a finger into the slurry in order to pass judgment on its quality. When Wan Gang was at Argonne, he was only Chamberlain’s latest Chinese visitor. A few months previous, the Americans raised the subject of lithium-air with a Chinese delegation and offered to help them develop the technology. But the visitors wanted to discuss only one subject—lithium-ion. The theme was: how do we get what you invented? Meaning the NMC. Chamberlain and his team were extremely cautious, silent. Argonne could build robots that automatically created a perfect slurry. It could invent the NMC. But China could not. “That’s where we will catch up,” Chamberlain said.
Perhaps Chamberlain was right. Thackeray and Amine could be the ones to make it happen.
PART II
FOREIGNERS IN THE LAB
15
The Start-up
I n June 2007, Sujeet Kumar and Mike Sinkula took up office at the public library in downtown Palo Alto. Kumar, a battery scientist born in India, and Sinkula, a San Francisco native, were using a public conference room there to talk on
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