Yoshio nishi biography of martin

Claudia Flavell-While speaks with Yoshio Nishi, the Sony engineer who led the development of the ubiquitous lithium ion battery

Our world today is one of gadgets, of electronics, of mobile everything – communication, computing, entertainment.

Big devices, securely resting on a desk, with leads snaking a trail to the plug in the wall are so1980s.

Laptops have turned planes, trains and sofas into offices, smartphones replace the TV and stereo (as well as your Filofax, map and spirit- level, to name but a few), and handheld spectrometers give you instant results without two days of lab time.

None of this would be possible without a crucial innovation that powers practically all of this on-the-go gadgetry: the lithium ion battery, or LIB.

So far, so obvious, you might think.

But how many people would have known that the driving force behind the development and commercialisation of the LIB is a chemist and chemical engineer?

No household name

Yoshio