Interview with the 2019 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham on 6 December 2019 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden. 

Do you remember a teacher that inspired you? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: Two of them in particular got me enthusiastic about science. They were so excited themselves and they really tried to teach you – not by telling you “memorise this or memorise that” – they made you understand things and got you involved in the experiments. My fear is that has changed these days. Everybody’s so worried about safety and I don’t think the teachers are so excited. But we had a lot of teachers in that time who were ex-World War II. They’d been in the military one way or the other and this was now their way to make the world better, I guess. One was my chemistry teacher and he just got you excited. He didn’t just recite it to you. He got you involved. He was excited, so he got you excited. I wouldn’t say he got all the class excited because he really wanted you to work and do things, but the more he did things, the more excited you got. 

What kind of teacher do you aspire to be? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: I like teaching the first-year students because they’re still excited. They come out of high school; they’re not after second or third year in college. A lot of students are kind of blase, saying, this is just going to get our degree. The first-year students are still super excited, and I try to get them involved to learn how to learn. I don’t want them just reciting stuff back to me.  

I think I’m very different to most teachers because I spent 15 years in the industry. In the first class I will tell you what you need to know, and I’ll tell you specifically what you don’t need to know. I’ll tell you which chapters in the book you can completely forget. I try to get them real life examples of chemistry and physics, not just what the book teaches them. As an example, I’ll tell them: “You’ve got an airbag in your car. How much chemicals do you have to put in that airbag to make it expand?” and not just do a theoretical calculation.  

When we make the 1-2-3 superconductor, I’d say: “Skip the first 150 pages in the textbook so you’ll learn how to balance equations. Because if you don’t balance it right, your superconductor will not levitate.” So there’s a lot of peer pressure then, and they want to make sure theirs levitate and doesn’t go “bumpf.” 

What advice would you give a young researcher? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: Use your imagination! Don’t just go by the book and don’t believe what you read in the literature. Really imagine the future. Come up with new ideas and pursue those. Don’t let people put those ideas down. Believe in yourself and discuss your ideas with others.  Don’t follow what your boss tells you to do, necessarily.  

At Oxford, my advisor went on sabbatical, after I think my first six months, so I was on my own really for a year and did my own thing. And when I went to Stanford as a postdoc, after two months my advisor went to Washington DC for two years. He told me “you are running the group for two years now.” So really, I had the freedom to do, I won’t say almost anything, but most things. I think that’s very important. For my own students, I don’t say “this is what you should be doing this week, next week and so on. Just tell me in advance what you’re going to be doing and maybe I’ll comment on it.”  

It’s still focused research. We get money to do certain things but it’s not specific things. We have to come up with better batteries or better ways of making things. And their job is to do that. But we don’t say you have to do a, b and c. Use your imagination. Do the best thing you can do.  

What advice would you give a younger version of yourself? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: It would be very difficult. When I started off, I had the choice of university or industry, and I chose industry. Because industry had large corporate labs where you could do very good basic research. I would say much better things than you could do in university, because they had the money. Nowadays that’s totally changed. Those corporate labs don’t exist, I don’t think, anywhere in the world anymore. So you have to go to universities. Then you have to try to get tenure. You have all these challenges which I didn’t really have. I went from industry to a tenured faculty position in university. So I think things have changed but you still got to do your own thing.  

How do you cope with failure? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: You just swing with the punches. Don’t fight them because it won’t help you. 

What type of university environment stimulates creativity? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: A free environment. Don’t put too much pressure. Don’t have exams all the time, which I fear is an American problem right now. Students study to exams and they don’t really think about a problem. What’s the best way of solving that problem and what’s the real future? They’re too much worried about the short term. And that’s the same in business.  

Science is always competitive. But we compete as it were maybe with a Chinese university or a German university or Swedish university. But I think on the campus you want to be collaborative. I learned in industry that in a group you would have physicists, chemists and material science, all in the same group. I want my students to understand that you can’t do everything just as a chemist. You have to work with a physicist, a geologist, and you learn their speech. The same thing may have a different name in chemistry as it does in physics and geology. They have to be able to understand that and really understand the culture of the different disciplines. In Exxon, the scientists would roll in maybe about nine o’clock. They might still be there early evening. The engineers would all be there at 7 or 7:30 in the morning. They’d all leave by about 3:30 in the afternoon. So very, very different approach to work.  

How important is collaboration in science? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: Oh, it’s absolutely essential. I run an energy center. We have 10 different universities and national labs in it. They spread from San Diego in the west to University of Cambridge in England and the east. Each one of us has their own skill. Cambridge is much better at one thing than I am, and the San Diego folks are better at say theory than our group. We all work together. The students work together. They have weekly video calls where they talk to each other without any faculty there, so they can discuss things without fear. They can do their own thing.  

How has your life changed since the Nobel Prize? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: I remember I was in Germany at the big battery meeting, and I think they called me at 11:15 in the morning. Then it became public at 11:45 and the last speaker of the morning session was giving his talk and they said, “no, no questions. We got a big announcement to make.” Then basically all hell broke loose in the meeting. All the press by that time were all outside, ready. This was in Ulm, Germany.  

Then I had a very good experience coming back with Lufthansa. The gauge agent said, “oh, you just got the prize, didn’t you? Do you want a seat up front in the plane?” It was very nice when I got on the plane. There’s empty seats and they say: “This is a seat you’re going to sit in and this is a seat we’re going to make up for your bed.”  

How well do you know your co-laureates? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: I got involved in what we call solid-state ionics – how ions move fast. I worked on a compound called beta-alumina and that was about 1970. At same time John Goodenough was trying to make a new material like that, based on the same ideas that had come out of literature. He and I knew each other. I think it was about 1977, when we organised a big energy symposium in New York City and we jointly published a book on that. So I’ve known him since then. Today we both participate in the Battery500 Consortium. We still do a search together even today. Dr Yoshino, I think I’ve met maybe two times in Japan. He doesn’t go on – how can I put it – the international meeting circuit like John and I and others do. 

How was the battery produced from the beginning? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: When I went to Exxon we were actually working on superconductors. We were working on superconductors and now synthesising some of them, and a lot of energy was evolved. So I said we can store energy in this. We started on these, what we call, layered sulfite structures. We found out they would store energy. Within a few weeks, we got Exxon to buy us the equipment so we could do it in a real environment. I was then sent off to New York City to meet with a committee of the Exxon board of directors to explain to them what we are doing in about five, ten minutes, is my recollection. 

Within a week they said yes, let’s do this. Because Exxon, those days treated research like drilling oil wells; maybe 10% would be successful, so maybe 10% of the research ideas would be successful.  

We started building batteries. We had a development team. They had a manufacturing team and built a manufacturing facility. That went very well. But about 10 years later, Exxon management looked at this and said they’re a huge oil company. What’s the market? They said the market wasn’t a hundred million dollars a year. That was back about 1980, so it’s probably a billion dollars now. They asked themselves, why are we in these markets?  

The other big thing that had changed, was that oil prices had gone up 1973-74, and then they dropped dramatically. So there was less interested in fuel cells, batteries, solar cells. They decided to get out of those markets. But their original goal was to build electric vehicles. They’d bought an electric motor company to make the motors and they were gung ho to make it work. But they were really too early. The timing was just not right. Had it been 15, 20 years later, it would’ve worked probably much better. That’s life isn’t it?  

What are your thoughts on sustainability? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: If we don’t have a sustainable environment, what do we leave for our children and grandchildren? We have to make things better, not create CO2 and then recycle everything. We can’t just toss things aside. I think Sweden’s probably much better at that than the US, where we just toss things aside. But we have to have a sustainable environment. We have to do something about global warming, which I tend to call global messing up, because we seem to have more extremes of both heat and cold and certainly more big storms. 

I think the big issue in places like New York City is how to make it safer. That when the next storm comes in, we’ll still have electricity for the hospitals, electricity to pump gas in the gas stations. When they had the big storm come through, they had plenty of gasoline but no electricity to pump it. I think those things we have to be more responsible about. The first thing is not to use so much energy. If you look at the energy consumption, the US per capita compared with Europe, it’s more than twice as much. The easiest way to be more sustainable is just to use less energy. It’s the simplest way and it’s where everybody can contribute.  

What have you learnt from doing sports? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: You have to ask my wife that. She says I’m too competitive at tennis, particularly when we play doubles. 

Science is competitive in a sense, but you’re competing against the unknown. These days you’re also competing against the thousands of others around the world working in your field. You want to make sure you get something done that’s good, and something where your students won’t do the research and then see: “Whoops, somebody’s already published it!” It’s getting more and more competitive in that sense. That’s why I said they’ve got to think about what they’re doing. Just don’t go through the same path as everybody else. But in the end, science is teamwork. You can’t do everything by yourself.  

So sports is the same thing. It’s all teamwork to make it successful. In a sense, you have to get your mind off what you’re doing at work some hours a day. I played a lot of tennis when I was a scientist and that just gets your mind off what you’re doing. It can refresh itself so when you go back the next day, you’re ready to get back to it.  

What hobbies do you have besides sports? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: I have a large yard that needs lots of work. I grew cacti as a teenager, and I still grow cacti. If you look at my car, it’s called my cactus, because we bought it in Arizona. It was green at one state, but my latest one is now white. I got a lot of teasing, “you can’t have a white cactus.” And I said, “yes, you can.” There’s a certain cactus called Cephalocereus senilis and I tell them that means the grandfather cactus or the old man cactus. So it’s very appropriate and it’s covered with white hairs, so it looks totally white. I started in England when I was maybe 12, 13 years old and grew hundreds of them there. They’re just different.  

Are you an enthusiastic traveller? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: My wife would maybe say it’s a hobby, but I like seeing new environments. Science is an international discipline, so you tend to travel. The better known you are, the more you travel. But our family normally meets every Christmas and New year. My wife and I escape from the New York winter. New York’s beautiful in the summer, so we take our annual vacation in the winter. We’ve been to the Maldives one year. We’ve been to Hawaii another year. Bangkok. Last year Malaysia. We tend to go to warm places. The whole family, all 10 of us, go somewhere other and spend three or four weeks together. You’ve got to see the rest of the world. You can’t just see your own backyard. 

It’s seeing different cultures, meeting different people. What I don’t like about traveling is all the plane stuff, and that was easy in the old days. It’s not easy anymore. But it is seeing all the different things. So when I go to Sydney, I try to go to the Sydney Opera House one night. If you get tired of something, all you have to do is go to the ferry terminal. It’ll cost you maybe a dollar or something, and you can get on the ferry and just go for half hour ride over Sydney Harbour and come back. It’s just thoroughly relaxing. 

How will it feel to talk to astronauts at the International Space Station? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: I’m excited and I think particularly excited because I understand they’ve just switched the batteries over from some old-fashioned batteries to lithium-ion batteries. I want to ask them how these batteries are working out. Was there any real issue? I know they’ve been using lithium batteries on Mars and lunar rovers for some time now. But now, they’re on the space station itself. It’s great.  

My scientific career got started because of the Russians. There was a Sputnik era. I was at Oxford and it was the US Air Force that paid for my undergraduate research. It was to look how atoms reacted on nose cones of rockets. They were very concerned about reactions there. They’re also concerned that the Russians were ahead of the Americans. They pumped lots of money and that was really a big push in science there. Particularly when I went to Stanford, a lot of money to catch up on all that technology.  

What research are you working on right know? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: My research gets funded by the US Department of Energy. Some of it is very fundamental, not targeted to any particular battery system. The other part is very much focused on electric vehicles. How can we increase the energy density, the safety? Reduce the cost of batteries? That’s all driven to what we call the electrical century, off the coal-and-oil-century. 

I think particularly it happens at New York State. Of all the 50 states in the US, it has the largest legal target now for grid energy storage, which is like three gigawatt hours within the next five or six years. They’re pushing extremely hard to do that.  

What discovery do you wish that you had done? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: I think everybody would say if they could find a cure for cancer of all sorts. That’d be the biggest discovery.  

What discovery do you hope will happen in the battery industry? 

M. Stanley Whittingham: Well, we don’t expect any quantum leaks in batteries, but what we’re hoping for is that they’ll be safer, and that we’ll cut the price in half. And that in the end everybody will have, I won’t say necessarily a fully electric car, but at least a partially electric car. And that in all major cities, all the vehicles will be totally electric. 

Watch the interview