For one reason or another during finals week in the fall of 2005 I decided to spend my time looking into wireless power and its inventor Nikola Tesla, the Austrian scientist who invented electricity. Ever since then I have eagerly anticipated any technological developments related to wireless power.
A quick side note: Thomas Edison, who is widely cited as the inventor of electricity, invented direct current (DC) electricity while Tesla invented actuating current (AC) electricity, the more common kind of electricity that now flows through power lines (that box on your laptop charger is a power converter that converts the AC that comes from the wall to DC). Also, suspiciously, Edison's invention came shortly after he fired Tesla who initially came to the United States to work with Edison.
Tesla succeeded in transmitting power wirelessly (radio waves have enough energy to light a small light bulb) he never figured out how to transmit it efficiently. The energy lost in the process doomed any potential commercial applications.
This problem may have been overcome by Marin Soljačić, a professor at MIT.
Soljačić landed on the phenomenon of resonant coupling, in which two objects tuned to the same frequency exchange energy strongly but interact only weakly with other objects. A classic example is a set of wine glasses, each filled to a different level so that it vibrates at a different sound frequency. If a singer hits a pitch that matches the frequency of one glass, the glass might absorb so much acoustic energy that it will shatter; the other glasses will remain unaffected. (You can read more about this evolving technology in this article from the MIT Technology Review.
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The implications of this technology are endless. I am personally looking forward to the day when I can walk around my house carrying a lamp like it was a torch in one hand with a battery-free home computer in the other hand while my cell phone charges in the pocket of my glowing electric pants.
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