At the start of the 20th century, electric cars were more common on American roads than gasoline vehicles.
In 1900, many drivers relied on lead-acid batteries, including ones developed by Thomas Edison.
These batteries were expensive and could power a car for only about 30 miles. Edison believed he had a better solution: the nickel-iron battery.
He promised longer life, about 100 miles of range, and a recharge time of seven hours—which was fast for that era.
But the technology never fully delivered, and improvements in gasoline engines soon pushed electric cars aside.
More than a century later, scientists are revisiting Edison’s idea with modern tools. An international research team co-led by UCLA has redesigned the nickel-iron battery using nanotechnology and inspiration from nature.
Their prototype can recharge in seconds instead of hours and has survived more than 12,000 charge and discharge cycles. That’s equivalent to over 30 years of daily use.
The new design uses tiny clusters of nickel and iron, each smaller than five nanometers.
To put that in perspective, it would take roughly 10,000 to 20,000 of these clusters lined up side by side to equal the width of a human hair. The researchers even detected single atoms of metal in the electrodes.
To create these clusters, the team turned to biology. In nature, proteins help form bones and shells by acting as scaffolds that guide minerals into place. Inspired by this process, the researchers used proteins—byproducts from beef production—as templates. The folded shapes of the proteins limited how large the metal clusters could grow, keeping them extremely small and evenly distributed.
These protein-metal structures were combined with graphene oxide, a two-dimensional carbon material just one atom thick. After being heated in water and baked at high temperatures, the proteins transformed into carbon, oxygen was removed from the graphene oxide, and the tiny metal clusters became embedded within a lightweight structure known as an aerogel. This aerogel is about 99% air, making it highly porous.
The key advantage of this design is surface area. When materials are broken down into extremely tiny pieces, their exposed surface increases dramatically. More surface area means more space for the chemical reactions that allow a battery to charge and discharge. Because the metal clusters are so small, nearly every atom can take part in the reaction. This leads to very fast charging and strong performance.
While this battery does not yet match the energy storage capacity of today’s lithium-ion batteries—making it less suitable for powering long-range electric cars—it has other promising uses. Its rapid charging and long lifespan make it a strong candidate for storing renewable energy, such as excess electricity produced by solar farms during the day.
It could also provide reliable backup power for data centers and other critical infrastructure.
Researchers are now exploring ways to use different metals and more abundant natural materials to make the technology easier and cheaper to scale up. By blending Edison’s original vision with modern science, they may have opened a new chapter for a once-forgotten battery design.
