How SA lost its batteries in cellphone boom

THE other problem,” e-mailed Tony Robinson from Cape Town, “is that you have to make good use of the R&D work.” He was commenting on my column on innovation and R&D yesterday.

Robinson pointed me to the lithium ion battery, the small device that made possible the cellphone revolution, laptops and, most recently, tablets. It will probably play a huge role in developing electric cars.

The lithium battery was partially developed by a Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) team led by Michael Thackeray, a graduate of the University of Cape Town. In 1983, Thackeray, John Goodenough of Oxford University and coworkers identified manganese spinel as a cathode material. This advanced work done earlier by Goodenough (1979), who first showed that lithium batteries were possible.

The battery development unit was closed down soon after the government changeover in 1994. The scientists who worked on the lithium ion battery have long since dispersed. They now populate leading scientific establishments around the world, mostly in the US. Thackeray is a distinguished fellow, senior scientist and group leader of the Argonne National Laboratory’s battery development department in Illinois.

The CSIR also developed the Zebra battery, based on molten salt; it was invented in 1985 by Johann Coetzer based on work by German scientist Georg Otto Erb, who developed it for military applications such as the V1 and V2 rockets during the Second World War.

Ironically, the CSIR’s 2010 annual report announced the establishment of a new battery research centre. It is, of course, easy to be wise after the event, but the closure of the battery unit in the mid-1990s can be seen now as an example of really abysmal decision-making and an almost total absence of foresight, particularly since this would have coincided with the early years of the cellphone revolution.