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Electricity broadcast through the air?

m-dogg said:
Not sure if this has been posted yet, but I thought it was pretty cool. From CNN:

cutting the cord

I'd like to see Apple integrate this into their products...
Click to expand...

Apparently some dude (Tesla?) did this in the early 20th century. His tech was killed, however, by the king of copper (kinda the way the oil companies supposedly smoosh any kind of energy efficient device...). Now we are stuck with wires.

I don't know if I just made that up. I read it somewhere a long time ago... :eek:
 
Diatribe said:
Well, in order to use it for laptops they would have to become more efficient. But with LED screens and new processors, etc. this might even become a reality.
Click to expand...

Yup. Near the end of the article they say it isn't quite ready for laptops until the improvements you mention develop further.

But it sounds like it is much closer to being ready for smaller devices such as phones, iPods, keyboards, mice, etc...

I'd love to have one of these in my car so I could just have my cell phone/iPod/GPS in the car and they'd charge without so many annoying wires...they don't actually say anything about cars though, so I don't know if the different voltage would be an issue.
 
So, I write this with knowing nothing about electricity.

In what ways is this a fundamentally horrid idea? I mean ... it sounds ok ... converting radio waves into electricity. But ... I'm distrustful. So, in what ways is this likely to kill me, make me sick, or otherwise piss me off? Besides the fact that it apparently only works at a distance of 3 feet or closer?
 
Kingsly said:
Apparently some dude (Tesla?) did this in the early 20th century. His tech was killed, however, by the king of copper (kinda the way the oil companies supposedly smoosh any kind of energy efficient device...). Now we are stuck with wires.

I don't know if I just made that up. I read it somewhere a long time ago... :eek:
Click to expand...

That Telsa dude also invented the flying car in the early-1900s -- a flying machine of about 800 pounds that would rise from a garage or a roof, and sell for $1,000. Unfortunately, Tesla never had the money to build a prototype.

td_fintow01.jpg

Telsa's world wide wireless system was a concept a bit ahead of its time in 1901... but so were his experiments with radio... robots... as well as the concept of transmitting electric power without wires
 
Kingsly said:
Apparently some dude (Tesla?) did this in the early 20th century.
Click to expand...
Tesla had heavy duty power transmission in mind, which does have some practical worries to it (and he knew about those, one of his alternative uses was weaponry).

For the lower power stuff via radio, it's been in use all along, from simple crystal radio receivers to modern passive RFID transponders. The interesting bit in the CNN article is that it's being taken one extra step, to battery storage.
 
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