Posted by
Gray Ghost on Monday, March 02, 2009 1:42:20 PM
For over a hundred years, electrical engineers (myself included) have tried to duplicate Nickola Tesla's "shipping" of electricity through the air without the use or need of wires. The reports of Tesla's experiment are available and have been studied by the "giants" of the engineering field, including Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, and others. But no one, and I repeat this again, no one has been able to redo what Tesla first did.
That is until just recently. In April of 2009, several systems are about to be placed on the market that will allow electricity to be "shipped" within your house, without the use of wiring. So far the following two systems are slated to be on the market:
1. Inductive Coupling ("Shipping" range of a few inches)
2. Radio Frequency Harvesting ("Shipping" range of up to 85 feet)
But perhaps the most promising method (Magnetically Coupled Resonance) is still at least 18 months away from hitting the "shelves". This technique uses two coils (one powered and one not) and depends on so-called magnetic resonance. Like acoustical resonance, which allows an opera singer to break a glass across the room by vibrating it with the correct frequency of her voice's sound waves, magnetic resonance can launch an energetic response in something far away. In this case, the response is the flow of electricity out of the receiving coil and into the device to which it's connected. The only caveat is that receiving coil must be properly "tuned" to match the powered coil, in the way that plucking a D string on any tuned piano will set all the D strings to vibrating, but leave all other notes still and silent. (Magnetically coupled resonance technology was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Martin Soljacic.)
In the picture below a wirelessly lit lightbulb is held 3 inches above its power source using magnetically coupled resonance technology.
The possibilities of all three systems are nothing less than amazing. The following article is also well worth reading: