The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (7 page)

N
ot much more came of the NMC until the arrival of Jeff Chamberlain at Argonne in 2006. Chamberlain was tall, muscular, and relaxed, with small hands for his build, used in controlled, almost robotic gestures that conveyed confidence without seeming to be showy. It was his voice that captured attention in meetings. In a room of competing opinions, his basso profundo seemed to prevail. The voice made it impossible to ignore Chamberlain when he began to moralize. Among his gripes was “anti-intellectualism among elected officials.” Another was how Americans were “beholden to the interests of those who produce oil.” Chamberlain would continue to anyone listening: “We are the Saudi Arabia of coal and have nuclear energy. We should aim at energy independence with coal, solar, wind, and nuclear, then use them to charge up electric cars. Use electricity instead of oil—for everything. How do we get there?”

He was hokey, which endeared him to the rank and file, scientists who were unmoved by talk of a battery war but gung-ho on the subject of importing less Middle East oil. Their passions rose at the idea that batteries could help stop climate change. They believed Chamberlain when he said over the following years that many oil despots would be in trouble if drivers turned to electric cars to the degree Obama and Wan Gang both sought and those vehicles were charged with electricity produced by natural gas. Oil prices would fall, undercutting the long-running flood of money to Russia and OPEC, especially members that themselves did not possess gas. Since China would require less foreign oil, a current subtext to tension with outsiders—its colossal need for imported resources—would soften, and its air would be cleaner. When you added up these factors, you also emitted much less carbon. What was to dislike? Chamberlain understood that his boosterism infused the lab with a sense of purpose and that led him to promote the big energy picture even more.

Chamberlain grew up in Longwood, a small town near Orlando where his father, Jack, sold marine engines and family conversation often turned to the auto industry as his grandfather and uncle both worked for Ford Motor. Recalling those years, Chamberlain would tell of knocking on neighbors’ doors with his Red Rider wagon, collecting newspapers to recycle. He and his father would weigh and tie the papers in twenty-five-pound bundles that reaped twenty or twenty-five cents each at the recycling center. Jack Chamberlain explained the commercial chain to his son—idea, execution, money, personal benefit. The son was given trombone lessons as well and by high school was good enough to join a brass quintet. In addition to him, there were two trumpets, a French horn, and a sax. Before long, the group qualified for state competitions and played a gig at Disney Village over in Orlando. In his senior year, school band and chorus members rallied together and helped to elect Chamberlain as class president. It was quite a coup as his opponent was the school quarterback and an unforgettable cap to his years in Longwood.

He had meanwhile won a full scholarship to Wake Forest University and following that earned a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech. Chamberlain had expected to teach. But in 1993, when he began to search for university-level positions, he found that much had changed while he was at school.

Back in 1982, a federal judge had ordered the breakup of AT&T, the telephony monopoly. Bell Laboratories had been AT&T’s research arm, and when it divided into parts in line with the court order, Bell eventually fell apart, too. By the early 1990s, the lab had shrunk. Other industrial research centers followed the same path—General Electric, RCA, and Xerox also diminished their basic research units, firing and retiring thousands of experienced researchers who now poured onto the job market. So many first-rate scientists were available for hire that they all but shut out the prospects for young, freshly minted Ph.D.s like Chamberlain.

There was work, however, if you were open to less-fashionable industries. Chamberlain accepted jobs at a series of mining and chemical companies where he carried out tasks such as leaching gold and copper from rocks and developing new semiconductors. It was not long before his employers perceived a latent talent—an unusual ability to speak to anyone as an equal. To them this meant potential in sales. But if Chamberlain was possibly more valuable on the sales staff than in the lab, his raw ability would require honing. In his first job, his bosses began with instruction in deciphering a client’s desires, in addition to what he didn’t
know
he needed and wanted. Later, Chamberlain would recall those lessons quite a bit.

Chamberlain’s closest friend in these years was Dave Schroeder, a smart, funny, and mouthy Illinois native with whom he worked at a microprocessor company called Cabot Industries. Neither man was liked much by the Cabot hierarchy, which regarded them as troublemakers. For their part, Chamberlain and Schroeder sensed capitalism gone awry with managers who created an unnecessary “battling culture.” They felt they might do a lot better if they started their own firm. So, while keeping their day jobs, they tried out some ideas.

Their first brainchild was Chamberlain’s. It revolved around fantasy baseball. For those unfamiliar with fantasy sports, it is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry
1
whose participants choose imaginary rosters of players from real sporting teams, and keep score—often for money—based on the players’ individual statistics. Chamberlain devised software that he thought could improve the chances of winning. It borrowed from rolling averages used by stock pickers, the insight that events tend over time toward the average. Consider baseball hitting—“somebody like, say, Ryan Braun,” Chamberlain said. “He plays for the Brewers and was the MVP of the National League. He’s twenty-eight, twenty-nine now, and has swung a bat since he was five.” Say Braun’s hitting suddenly takes a dive. “The fantasy baseball player would say: ‘Oh God, the batting average is way down; I am benching him.’” But Chamberlain’s thesis was that that was precisely the moment to muster the nerve to keep him in. Because Braun would return to his average. And the only way to do so was to hit above his average. “It was counterintuitive,” Chamberlain said.

The idea was to sell it to Yahoo!, which at the time had hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of fantasy sports subscribers paying ten dollars a month to monitor statistics in real time. Calling the invention “Trend Tracker,” Chamberlain and Schroeder filed for a patent.

One day, they sat down for a meeting with Yahoo!’s senior fantasy sports executive.

“I can’t believe we didn’t think of this,” the executive said. A young assistant said, “Okay, if it is that great, let’s
us
do it. Thanks for the meeting.” The executive glared. “Did you hear at the beginning of the meeting when they said they already filed patents on it?” he said.

He said he was prepared to do a deal with Chamberlain and Schroeder. “We’ll figure out a way to make this happen,” he said.

Two weeks later, the man was fired for unrelated reasons. His successor didn’t warm to Trend Tracker.

Chamberlain and Schroeder tried another idea. A material known as a dendritic polymer was generating excitement. It was a compound that could be turned into a variety of products. What caught Chamberlain’s and Schroeder’s attention was that it could prevent melting in silicon wafers, a crucial need in computers—you needed to remove as much metal as possible and keep down the heat or your system would go down. A New England inventor had found a way to make dendritic polymers cheaply, and Chamberlain and Schroeder took his idea to Silicon Valley. Here was a certain path to fortune. But no venture capitalist they met felt the same confidence. All the pair heard was, “Do you have anything in energy?” The issue was timing. The smart money was shifting from chips to alternative energy.

The start-up failures coincided with a fiasco in their day jobs. The Cabot bosses created new employee performance evaluations based on general personal goals—something about “you know, honesty and integrity,” as Schroeder put it. A group meeting was held to select five such goals. Both Chamberlain and Schroeder voted against “excellence” as an objective, “the dumbest thing I’d ever heard,” an immeasurable metric, they thought. To illustrate its inanity, Schroeder nominated what he considered an equally unquantifiable goal—“courage.” Chamberlain and a bloc of colleagues voted with him. They won. An unamused boss marched up. “Do you want to work here?” he shouted.

Chamberlain resigned. Awhile later, Schroeder did too.

With three children, Chamberlain needed a new paying job. Start-ups could be attempted on the side. Only one place in the Chicago area was still looking at nanotechnology, the science with which he felt most familiar—Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. But when he applied, Argonne managers assessed his résumé differently—like his previous bosses, they saw a salesman.

The new Washington credo called for an alignment of government and business. Federal lab managers had a new mandate to “do science in a way that was relevant” to industry, Chamberlain was told. He clearly possessed risk-taking entrepreneurial credentials. Thus, he could help arm Argonne for survival in the new political environment, precisely where it most needed help.

The lab offered Chamberlain a position in its intellectual property unit, the office that sought to license inventions to companies. He would handle the licensing of battery patents, which seemed ripe for exploitation but bafflingly were going unnoticed. Chamberlain accepted. But he told Schroeder, “I’m not actually going to do anything. The performance of this group is terrible. No one will notice if I don’t perform.”

 • • • 

Generally speaking, the traditional role of the national labs was fundamental research, the type that moved science forward but might or might not be commercially applicable. But things were changing. Argonne and industry started with an existing symbiotic relationship. With American research labs dismantled, companies were looking for others to conduct this basic work while they concentrated on design, manufacturing, and marketing. Argonne took the long view and saw itself as a throwback to the old private labs. But it had no commercial profile—it didn’t scale up or manufacture anything. It required relationships with companies to put its advances in front of people. This mutual need was now reinforced by politics: one would invent and the other manufacture and sell.

Chamberlain understood this symbiosis intuitively. Schroeder noticed that he began to mention meetings with companies. “Hey, do you remember when you took this job and you said you weren’t going to do anything?” Schroeder said.

“Yeah, I tried,” Chamberlain said. “But I guess I’m working now.’”

For a year, Chamberlain familiarized himself with the Battery Department’s patents. He read a thirty-page primer on the patent portfolio drafted for the lab by Ralph Brodd, who at eighty years old was probably the country’s preeminent private consultant on lithium-ion batteries. Brodd’s paper singled out the lab’s NMC formulation as a particularly attractive property. Still, the invention only truly captured Chamberlain’s attention when, around industry conferences, he kept hearing the representatives of major Asian companies boast about their ingenious adaptations of NMC to suit consumer desires like durability and safety. Chamberlain felt he was “opening a box and finding gold.” But what he did not hear was any of these companies taking note of Argonne’s
patent
for the chemistry.

The lab’s problem was that it lacked international patents for the invention. Seeking foreign rights could raise patent application fees to well over $100,000, especially if you filed in China, Japan, or South Korea, the places where, because of serious competition or thievery, one required protection. Much of that was legal fees, since the patent application was certain to be challenged on the first go-around. The patent team would not agree to international protection for every invention—it would be too expensive. So to save money on the NMC, the intellectual property unit had filed only for the American patent.

The simplest explanation for the lapse was that the patent team was not fully attuned to the coming international frenzy over batteries—the lawyers simply did not and perhaps could not know how big the market might become and just how unique the NMC could be within it. For the same reasons, Thackeray himself had not urged international filing.

Thackeray regretted it. You could detect the unhappiness in the battery group. In their view, it was one of those spectacularly shortsighted blunders that you could avert only by patenting everything, everywhere. Now the stuff was in the hands of numerous Asian companies that were either licensing a competing cathode manufactured by 3M, which held international patents, or, in most cases, simply availing of the NMC for free. Argonne—like John Goodenough with both of his big inventions—had not earned a dime.

Chamberlain was determined to corral back some of the lost payoff. It would not be simple, since no company would easily pay to license a product that it currently used for free, and those were the companies he was going after—those brazenly using the NMC with no license from anyone. One approach, of course, was a simple appeal to honor—Chamberlain could try to persuade one or more of the Asian players to buy a license out of fairness to Argonne. If that succeeded, other companies would probably take notice and, in order to avoid a potential lawsuit, pay for a license, too. But he doubted the strategy would work—what is fair in Asia, which seemed to him the most cutthroat business environment on the planet?

Here is where Chamberlain’s industry experience came in handy: he decided to create an artificial shortage of the NMC. The idea was to offer the sale of two—and just two—worldwide licenses to make the NMC. If anyone outside the United States wished to use Argonne’s NMC in their products, they would have to buy it from one of the lucky pair of companies, which, on purchasing the rights from the lab at a price to be set in a negotiation, would divide worldwide, non-American privileges to manufacture the material between themselves. Once those were dispensed, there would be no more such licenses. The result, he hoped, would be a suddenly excited market for the technology. It was a devilishly misleading strategy, since Argonne did not own international rights. Chamberlain thought it might just work. Anyone could gamble and manufacture an NMC-equipped battery technology without a license. But if they did, they could be assuming a big risk—one or both of these license holders were likely to sue.