“Scientists have sounded the death knell for the plug and power lead,” David Derbyshire reports for The Daily Mail.
“In a breakthrough that sounds like something out of Star Trek, they have discovered a way of ‘beaming’ power across a room into a light bulb, mobile phone or laptop computer without wires or cables,” Derbyshire reports. “In the first successful trial of its kind, the team was able to illuminate a 60-watt light bulb 7ft away.”
“The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who call their invention ‘WiTricity’, believe it could change the way we use electricity and do away with the tangle of cables, plugs and chargers that clutter modern homes,” Derbyshire reports. “It could also allow the use of laptops and mobile phones without batteries.”
Lead researcher, Dr. Marin Soljacic, designed a method “to fill a room with a ‘non-radiative’ electromagnetic field,” Derbyshire reports. “Most objects in the room – such as people, desks and carpets – would be unaffected by the electromagnetic field. But any objects designed to resonate with the electromagnetic field would absorb the energy.”
“The scientists say the technique works only over distances of up to 9ft. However, they believe it could be used to charge up a battery within a few yards of the power source connected to a receiving coil,” Derbyshire reports. “Placing one source in each room could provide enough power for an entire house.”
“Professor Peter Fisher, another of the researchers, said: ‘As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of wireless power, it would charge automatically without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside such a room.’ The researchers believe there is little to worry about on safety grounds, saying that magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms and are unlikely to have any serious side effects,” Derbyshire reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
That’s really amazing.
Hmmm….Wireless Power…. this sounds strangely like something Nikola Tesla did almost one hundred years ago. Glad to see that modern science is starting to catch up with him.
I was wondering about this technology a few weeks ago. I am not convinced about its relative safety.
Dr. Marin Soljacic also stated, “We are quite certain there are no safety issues. I’ve been keeping my three eyes on the data we’ve compiled. I can count the number of studies we’ve had indicating no safety risk on my finger–twelve studies total!”
Solijacic also stated he has great confidence in the commercial value of the invention, particularly now that he can see three years into the future.
I want my teleporting/cloning machine next.
This idea is very old. A transformer works on this very idea. This idea has also been done with inductive power. Many underwater pumps work off inductive power.
The idea is a bummer, because of the massive lose of power. On the order of 50% or more.
You could put a large electromagnet on both sides of your house and have the poles switch rapidly causing the fields to switch rapidly, too. Now, every device could get its power from the changing fields.
Yes, you too can have no wires in your house, but we double your power for free.
Sounds to me like a 9 foot power cord would be cheaper and less of a health risk.
Or we could all wear tinfoil hats.
Yeah, it’s called lightining…
har har
Yay, third nipples for everyone! Muta-tricity is here!
The method requires the transmitter and receiver to aligned. If they are out of alignment, this limits the transmission of power even more.
Hmm ok, now we need to stay on topic, ok?
This is a Mac website, ok? Other technologies are not acceptable, hmm ok?
You see children, Windows is bad, ok?
Apple is good, Microsoft, Microsoft is bad
Hmmm ok?
http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/southpark/
Tesla invented this… luckely edison is dead or otherwise he would have stolen that also..
i asked my stepfather, who is now dead, when i was 9 or 10 how important something like this would be.
this is gonna be a really big deal, imagine electric cars on highways equipped with a beamed electricity grid on roadways…adios OPEC.
As others have noted, get ready for the Wardenclyffe towers… or perhaps the DeKalb antennas from Heinlein’s “Waldo.” And you thought the screaming frequencies of your CPU were the only reason you had to wear lead undies.
If you wear a pacemaker, is this going to be a good idea?
Bloody shocking that is.
Soon someone will invent the “electrocute yourself ring” to wear…
@7over, et.al.
You know it isn’t about who invents it, good inventions get to market because somebody knows how to market those good inventions.
I’m not totally convinced of the safetly either, but we live on top of a giant magnetic field all of our lives – gravity. As it is a significant fraction of the population lives near enough to high power lines and cellular towers that they are already getting higher continuous concentrations of radio wave and emi radiation than this technology would induce in a given space over time, so from the outset I think the real negative potential is relative at best. (Don’t forget that a regular power cord emits potentially harmful radiation at a given distance over time).
I think people with electronic implants like pace maker, etc. would have to be very cautious about technology like this – probably at the level of being cautious around microwave ovens and cellular devices for instance.
Maybe someday superconductivity will be a commercially viable technology which, among many other things, will allow everthing that requires the use of conductive and inductive technologies to be run at much lower powers helping to create a world with less extemporaneous radiation and less overall power consumption.
It’s a Parlor trick.
You can get the same effect standing under high tension power lines when they run too low to the ground.
It’s also not healthy
Nothing to see…move along, quickly now!
Tesla was doing this over MILES over 75 years ago. Big deal
nothing is safe when you wear a pacemaker…clearly pacemaker wearers should spend the rest of their life living in a bubble…seeing as everywhere they go they are constantly reminded about how unsafe it is for them to be there.
First “WiFi”, now “WiTricity”. Don’t these people realize the “wi” comes from the “wire” part of “wireless’??
P.S. They shoulda taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and called it AirTricity.
I too am not impressed. Tesla did this years and years ago. Saturating the room with electromagnetic radiation is not a good idea for anyone’s health. I think we have enough artificial radiation to keep us worrying about our health without adding anything else to the mix. I’d like to see some longitudinal studies, gentlemen.