The Powerhouse - Inside the invention of a battery to save the world

What is it like to have the weight of the world on your technical shoulders? And what is keeping us from getting a super-battery? To find out, Steve LeVine spent two years in a lab with a half-dozen battery geniuses.

At 92, he is focused entirely on lithium metal, and--though he is careful now about his secrets so he did not tell me precisely his approach--he thinks he has a decent shot at figuring out how to fashion lithium metal into an anode without it turning into an explosion while a car is rumbling down a freeway.

The story is character-driven, and so I am driven to reply from that space. The most interesting character from the vantage of a writer--the hardest to write about because of the strong emotions he elicits in others--was Khalil Amine, one of the two battery geniuses at Argonne. I heard no end of gripes about him, most or all of them deeply and sincerely felt. Ultimately, I concluded that Amine's critics had him wrong. The gripes that is were problems not with him, but with the gripers themselves. Those passages weave through the book.

Amine is an immigrant from Morocco. His wife is Chinese. But his style is learned from years working in Japan. As I say, a fascinating window into invention that I did not expect.

I am going to have to take off. I enjoyed it. If anyone wants to follow up, feel free to email: s@qz.com.

Probably not since Alessandro Volta himself has so much public attention been lavished on the battery. Like then (the first decade of the 19th century), that's included big hopes, some inflated claims, and much hoopla. Inventing one that is much cheaper and far more powerful is truly a big deal. But it's not the usual science or technology story -- no one knows when or even whether we are going to get a great battery. Last night, however, I replenished my own sense of reality by catching up on the story of the light bulb. Humphrey Davy first invented a facsimile of an incandescent bulb in 1802. But it took almost eight decades for Edison to create the one that went commercial. We need to relax a bit.

Steve is going to do an AMA at 330 PM PST - ask your questions in advance :)

Hey Steve, Is there anything that surprised you about John Goodenough? I think it's remarkable that he's still grinding it out at 92 years old. Did you come away from this with the feeling that he's close to solving the problem of making an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal?

What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book Steve?

Hey everyone. Glad to be here, and thanks to the Product Hunt for inviting me.