The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (10 page)

K
umar greeted you in a high, halting lilt, his black hair flopped flat to the side. He wore plain, long-sleeve dress shirts and conservative slacks and evaluated you through rectangular specs. The picture was dated, rumpled, and bumpkinesque. This might have been a problem given a Silicon Valley CEO’s need to impress a variety of sophisticated outsiders. But then he would talk batteries and unpretentious authenticity would surface. Meeting him face to face at a Fort Lauderdale battery conference, Chamberlain sensed “a man of his word. He would do what he said.” Sinkula—with his stylishly cut hair, slacks, and jacket—was clearly the businessman of the two. Sizing them up, Chamberlain saw “two young, aggressive entrepreneurs.”

The eastern Indian city of Patna, where Kumar grew up, is situated along the south bank of the Ganges River. After school, Kumar and his friends played cricket and football in vacant lots that dotted their neighborhood. At dusk, the electric grid would be overwhelmed for three or four hours, sending the homes into darkness, and he would study by kerosene lamp before scurrying back outside for more play in the dark. He was the excessively pampered youngest of six children, and his father finally decided that this circumstance was hampering his education. At ten, Kumar was packed off to board at a military school. “I cried a lot—every time I had to leave, I cried,” Kumar said. But by the time he arrived at school in Hazaribagh, a forested, mountainous area five hours south of Patna, he would tumble into play with the rest of the ten-year-olds, the sorrow forgotten.

Each year, some 100,000 Indian students completed the entrance exam for 2,000 slots in India’s exclusive Institutes of Technology (IIT), a 2 percent admission rate. By comparison, Harvard University admitted
16 percent
of its applicants in 1986, the year Kumar had to decide his college future. But there was substantial motivation for the multitudes who tried—those admitted to one of the Institute’s seven campuses went on to make up the cream of Indian science and technology, on par with the best in America, or anywhere. Graduates in fact often moved to Silicon Valley and assumed dominant roles there. Those who took the test often carried with them the lifelong ambitions of their entire extended family. If you were successful, Kumar said, “your life was set.”

Kumar aspired to attend IIT. And when he took the exam, he scored in the top 1,800, winning him a place in the Institutes’ statistics program, a cause for jubilation. But in his case it wasn’t. He aspired not only to study at the Institutes, but admission to their engineering program.
Those
were the IIT grads who were admired—they were whom you pictured when hearing of an alumnus; barely anyone knew that IIT even offered statistics. But Kumar needed a much better score to qualify for engineering. He felt more dejected than thrilled.

One of his brothers said he was misinformed—
admission
to the Institutes was the point, whether in statistics or any other program, and he ought to “get into IIT any way I could.” But Kumar’s father echoed his own thinking. “Why do you want to study statistics?” he said. “You should go into engineering.”

There was another option. Kumar could use his still very good test score to study at the technological institute in Varanasi, a four-hour drive from Patna, almost straight west along the Ganges. Varanasi was a distinguished school—not long after, it in fact would be absorbed by the Institutes. But its graduates typically went on to uncreative jobs in steel or other basic industries, which to Kumar was a numbing thought. He didn’t know what would be worse—to study statistics or work in the steel industry. His parents stepped in: Varanasi was relatively close by, which comforted his mother; engineering was the more secure career, which decided his father. The teen packed for Varanasi.

Three years into his studies, stories began to trickle in from the United States. Recent Varanasi alumni spoke of scholarships for doctoral programs and good, high-paying jobs for top graduates. Institutes of Technology alumni had the pick of the tech and engineering jobs at home, but in the United States your school was not necessarily the main thing. As long as you were talented, you could be on the same track as IIT grads.

Kumar opted to try. In his senior year, he studied for the Graduate Record Examinations (GREs) and scoured descriptions of American universities. A letter from the United States arrived. The University of Rochester offered a full scholarship including a thousand-dollar-a-month stipend. He would have to work as a teaching assistant and in other campus jobs. But he would have a full ride toward a Ph.D.

No one in the Kumar family had ever studied abroad. His mother had discouraged him from even trying. But now that he was in, there was no question that he should go. His father found the money for his son’s airfare. Kumar landed in New York all but penniless. He was twenty-one.

 • • • 

Kumar arrived on the cusp of a powerful surge of Asian immigrants into Silicon Valley and throughout the American technology industry. Asians already held a third of the technology jobs in the Valley and were half of the software developers.
1
More than a quarter of American doctoral degree recipients as a whole were foreign born and half of those from Asia.
2
In engineering and computer science, about 40 percent of the Ph.D.s were born abroad.
3

These demographics created racial tension. A black leader in Silicon Valley said the Asian employment bulge was not incidental—technology companies, she said, “do not want to employ Americans. They import labor from overseas, pushing for H-1B visas,” residency permits allotted annually to specially skilled foreigners. It was true that there were relatively few blacks in Silicon Valley technology. But there was no evidence that any particular racial group was favored or excluded. In the case of battery guys in particular, other dynamics seemed at play in the appearance of partiality.

When you looked around a quarter century later, one of the first things you noticed in the battery race was the trend’s deep roots—America’s battery team was largely foreign born. There was the occasional American-born battery guy—the families of most of the researchers on Thackeray’s small team had been in the United States for generations, as had Chamberlain’s. But Thackeray himself was born in Pretoria. Chamberlain’s deputy, Tony Burrell, was from Palmerston North, on New Zealand’s North Island. Chamberlain’s immediate boss, Emilio Bunel, was Chilean.

The same was true across the American battery brain trust: though John Goodenough grew up in Connecticut, Stanford’s Yi Cui was born in China, Berkeley’s Venkat Srinivasan in India, and MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang in Taiwan. In the industry, not just Sujeet Kumar and Atul Kapadia but almost their entire team of scientists was born in India.

Moroccan-born Khalil Amine unapologetically hired only foreigners. His group included not a single American-born researcher. Over the years, Amine had employed the occasional American and even a Frenchman. But now, apart from two other Moroccans (and himself), his group was entirely Chinese. Over sushi after work, Amine said he had concluded that the job was too demanding for United States–born Americans. And not just for them—some Asians, too, were not up to the task. “I have had Caucasians in my group before. Also Indians, Koreans,” Amine said. “But I will tell you this—I’m very demanding. I come to work at six
A.M
., five
A.M
. I work weekends. I have to make sure that we produce. The Chinese work this way, too—they are extremely hardworking. But some of the Caucasians, they don’t like that. It seems like big stress on them.”

Amine was not alone in invoking a supposedly unique Asian cultural DNA when it came to science, technology, and the work ethic, in particular one native to Chinese, but he said the results spoke for themselves. If you considered inventions and published papers, his group was the most prolific in the Battery Department. By Amine’s own count, his group had produced 120 or so inventions over the last decade. “The next group is not even close,” he said, which was true. “And if you look at papers—last year we published about forty-seven, forty-eight. Some professors, they publish that many in their entire careers.” Amine himself had been awarded thirty-eight patents since arriving at Argonne. The next-highest recipient in the department—Thackeray—had twenty-four. Numbers alone were not a definitive metric—China turned out a torrent of forgettable patents and papers. But American patents were not as easily obtained. For Amine, they told the story of his group’s stature.

The subtext wasn’t merely the view that foreign-born battery guys worked harder but that Americans were simply not a large part of the job pool. The battery guys said that when they advertised a new position, dozens of applicants would respond of whom just two or three typically would be American. The proportions explained why these few Americans, whatever their qualifications, were often outshined by the mountain of overseas competition.

There simply did not seem to be
many Americans eager to invent the next big battery. Americans trained in the disciplines attacking the battery challenge—in physics, chemical engineering, material science. But their jobs of choice tended to be in other fields. Among the places they landed were Silicon Valley’s high-tech firms. Or, even if they did go into batteries, they rejected basic research, which almost certainly required up to three years of uncertain toil as a postdoctoral assistant, and went into private industry.

The story was similar with most foreign students. They piled into information technology jobs in the 1990s. High-tech industry demand for them as engineers and other specialists was substantial, and although the necessary H-1B visas were limited, computer hardware and software companies often managed to obtain them for those it sought. One could live very well and even become rich in such jobs.

But there was also a large well of foreign students attracted to batteries. Perhaps again it was a simple matter of proportions—when there were so many foreign Ph.D.s, it stood to reason that would-be battery guys would make up a certain minority. But one trait of Argonne’s foreign-born staff was traditional personal and family aspirations: they were seeking a new life with greater prospects for their children. “I’m not saying it in a way to degrade the other guys,” Amine said, “but Caucasian Americans—they don’t want to do Ph.D.s. They go for an MBA or something like that. For example, I was invited to give a talk at MIT. I would say seventy percent of the students were Asian. Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. I went to Berkeley—same thing.” Foreign battery guys in fact often completed not just one postdoctoral assistantship before securing permanent employment, but two or even three three-year stints. A postdoctoral researcher at Argonne earned about $61,000 a year, which was high for such a position. When offered a staff job, the pay was bumped up a bit and rose regularly from there, which became even more attractive in combination with the stability of federal lab work. But it was not high-tech scale. Their determination was distinct not just from Americans’ but also from that of the Silicon Valley immigrants.

Once you settled on a life in batteries, a simple calculus made Argonne and the other national labs special magnets for such foreign Ph.D.s—the number of private battery companies was small and with it the possibility of obtaining an H-1B visa. The national labs, on the other hand, could sponsor an unlimited number of H-1Bs—in 2000, Congress had created a working visa exemption for nonprofit, university, and national labs.

The national labs served as a miniature Lower East Side—not quite a teeming melting pot, but a greenhouse where battery-minded immigrants were invited to succeed and, if they did and so desired, could take citizenship. “They go an extra length. They’re smart. And they are extremely reliable,” Amine said. Why was his team predominantly Chinese? “That’s why,” he said.

Amine said his strategy did not always work in his favor. He had lost numerous military contracts because the Pentagon permitted only American citizens to work on such sensitive projects, and his group lacked them. But he was straightening that out, too. Six years earlier, Amine himself had taken American citizenship. His two Moroccan researchers had as well, and a Chinese scientist was on his way. “I think within five years, all these Chinese will be U.S. citizens,” Amine said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Ultimately, Amine said, his personnel preferences were unimportant. “At Argonne, the policy is you hire people based on capability. Not nationality,” he said. Of course, Amine had determined that there was a difference—he
was
hiring according to nationality. It was among the reasons why an American victory in the battery race oddly depended on scientists from rival countries.

 • • • 

Kumar finished his Ph.D. in 1996. The most obvious places to apply for work were Kodak and Xerox, both of which had large local research labs. But neither company was hiring. Then Kumar noticed a job posted at a university—a California professor was looking for a postdoctoral assistant to help him set up a battery company. Until then, Kumar had not considered electrochemistry as a profession. Nor did he have any expertise in batteries. But the professor was persuasive—Kumar would be his first employee, he said. The professor was confident the start-up, called Nanogram, would succeed, making the early employees wealthy. They would use nanotechnology to create batteries for medical devices. Kumar would be responsible for setting up the entire lab. He took the job.

Eight years later, Nanogram was sold, resulting in a $300,000 payout to Kumar for the shares he held, a sum that gave him financial stability for the first time in his life. He put it away in the bank. Two years after that, Kumar was hired as director of technology for NanoeXa, the battery company that first licensed Argonne’s NMC.

NanoeXa’s CEO, Michael Pak, was not a battery guy. He was a South Korean–born businessman with a Harvard undergraduate degree and a knack for attracting investment cash in Silicon Valley. He had raised money for start-ups creating video games and fuel cells. Now, Pak was interested in lithium-ion batteries and he relied on Kumar to guide the company to the right technology.