When John B. Goodenough was 12, he was sent on scholarship at Groton School, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. John’s mother wrote just once as he grew to adulthood. John suffered from dyslexia at a time when it was poorly understood and went untreated (back then, he says, “you were just a ‘backward student’”).
Goodenough could not read at Groton, understand his lessons, or keep up in the chapel. Instead, he occupied himself in explorations of the woods, its animals and plants. Nonetheless, somehow everything finally came together. He won a place and an aid package at Yale, and went on to graduate summa cum laude in mathematics.
After some time in the army, Goodenough enrolled at the University of Chicago. He can still remember, word for word, what one of his professors told him when he arrived on the University of Chicago campus 70 years ago: “I don’t understand you veterans,” said John A. Simpson, then a new instructor fresh off the Manhattan Project, later a pioneer in the study of cosmic rays. “Don’t you know that anyone who has ever done anything significant in physics had already done it by the time he was your age; and you want to begin?”
Now, John B. Goodenough is proving age means nothing when it comes to developing history-changing concepts. The 94-year-old inventor is working with a team of researchers to develop a new, solid-state battery capable of storing three times what today's lithium-ion batteries can handle.
In an interview a couple of years ago, Goodenough said: "I want to solve this problem before my chips are in. I'm only 92 - I still have time to go."
According to research by Benjamin Jones, the average age at which inventors are having their "aha!" moments is increasing--the median age of an inventor in the United States is 47.
What would you like to invent? And will you do it before you are 94?
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