America's Biggest Tech Failure You've Never Heard Of

In 1972, Exxon, the biggest oil company in the world, built the first rechargeable lithium battery in a lab in New Jersey. Stanley Whittingham's invention was the start of the lithium-ion battery that now powers every phone, laptop and electric car. Then oil got cheap, and Exxon threw it away. An American scientist, John Goodenough, made the lithium-ion battery twice as good and never made a dime from it, even after he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Washington gave A123 Systems, America's best battery company, $249 million, and it went bankrupt and was sold to China. Today CATL, a company from a small fishing town in China, makes almost four out of every ten electric car batteries on earth. It's worth more than Ford and GM put together, and Ford is paying it for the right to build EV batteries in Marshall, Michigan. This is the story of how America invented the battery that runs the modern world, and how China came to dominate EV batteries, lithium-ion manufacturing and the electric car supply chain. It's America vs China, told through Exxon, CATL, BYD, Tesla and Ford. In 1972, Exxon invented the lithium-ion battery and threw it away. Here is how that mistake built China’s EV dominance. Exxon’s lab in New Jersey created the first rechargeable lithium-ion battery, but when oil prices dropped, the company abandoned the technology. While American scientists like John Goodenough advanced the science, the manufacturing shifted overseas. This story tracks the movement of capital and expertise from American labs to the factories of the East. Today, the electric car supply chain is centered in China, where companies like CATL now dominate the global market. From the bankruptcy of American firms like A123 Systems to Ford’s current partnerships for battery production, this is the history of how the modern world’s energy foundation was outsourced. We look at the shift in EV manufacturing and the corporate decisions that defined the current landscape. Subscribe for weekly industrial history breakdowns, and let us know in the comments: should America have kept the patents?