Battery Potential

William Howard is a veteran electrochemical engineer with over five decades of experience developing primary and rechargeable battery technologies for industrial and biomedical applications. He started at Gould National Batteries in the 1960s, working with fuel cells, metal-air systems, and early carbon fluorination. Through the early 1970s he evaluated Leclanché cells from around the world and gained his first exposure to lithium technology, followed by lithium-sulfur and molten-salt systems tied to Argonne National Laboratory.

He then moved to Medtronic, where he spent the heart of his career developing batteries for implantable medical devices. He touched nearly every major lithium primary chemistry of the era, from lithium-iodine to lithium silver vanadium oxide, before transitioning in the 1990s to rechargeable lithium-ion systems with the unique performance and safety constraints that implantable applications demand. (Episode S1E7)