Are you old enough to remember when a television set was a large, heavy and unwieldy bulk, fitted with something called a cathode-ray tube?

If so, you will surely have welcomed its replacement by a flat-screen TV that uses a liquid-crystal display and is easy to move around the home.

Are you old enough to remember when batteries had comparatively short life-spans?

Nowadays your batteries are likely to have much longer charge-storage times, thanks to the development of lithium-ion technology. Both these innovations — the flat-screen TV and the lithium battery — owe much to the inventive genius of Professor Mino Green, who latterly held a specially created professorship at Imperial College London and who has died in his 96th year.

Mino Green was born in New York in 1927, the eldest child and only son of Alexander Grunberg, a jewellery and antiques dealer who served in the anti-communist White Russian army, and his wife Elizabeth née Gorodetsky, a seamstress.

His early years were spent between New York and Paris, where his two sisters were born. His parents were both Jewish refugees made stateless following the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia at the end of 1917.

For a time the Grunberg family endured a peripatetic existence. In France the young Green was trained as an artist. But the family eventually settled in London, where he was enrolled at Paddington Technical Institute, from which he progressed to Dulwich College, and then to Durham University.

At the age of 18, as an American citizen, he served in the US Navy and on demobilisation continued to pursue scientific studies at Harvard University, returning to Durham to complete a degree in chemistry and a doctorate in radio-chemistry. In 1964 he was awarded the DSc degree.

As a scientist, Green worked at the cutting edge of the interaction between physics and chemistry.

Appointed in 1951 to the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working specifically in the fields of electronics and semi-conductors, he accepted an invitation to teach and research at Imperial College London, moving from there to join the prestigious Zenith Radio Corporation in Chicago.

In 1962 he returned to England, specifically to head the Zenith electronics research laboratory at Stanmore. In 1972 he rejoined Imperial College, becoming in 1983 professor of electrical device science and in due course (1992) professor emeritus. In 2015 he was awarded the Imperial College Medal.

A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Mino Green died at his home in London.
His wife Diana,née Allen, a former medical secretary, predeceased him in 2012.

He is survived by their daughter Penny, an art therapist, their son David, an economist who is vice-chancellor of the University of Worcester, and four grandchildren.


Mino Green: born March 20, 1927. Died October 13, 2022