MIT Shows How To Cut The (Power) Cord

(CBS/AP)  In a perfect world, there'd be no wires. They clutter the view, get tangled behind desks and limit how far networks can reach. That's why the telegraph gave way to the radio. Cell phones unstrung telecommunications. Wi-Fi liberated computer data.

Now even the last knotty wire that seemed destined to remain — the power cord — could be on its way out.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers announced Thursday they had made a 60-watt light bulb glow by sending it energy wirelessly, potentially previewing a future in which cell phones and other gadgets get juice without having to be plugged in.

"If you had a mobile phone, you wouldn't need a charger. It would just charge automatically," commented British physicist Peter Main of the University of York.

The breakthrough, disclosed in Science Express, an online publication of the journal Science, is being called "WiTricity" by the scientists.

The concept of sending power wirelessly isn't new, but its wide-scale use has been dismissed as inefficient because electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device would radiate in all directions.

Last fall, though, MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic (pronounced soul-ya-CHEECH) explained how to do the power transfer with specially tuned waves. The key is to get the charging device and a gadget to resonate at the same frequency — allowing them to efficiently exchange energy.

It's similar to how an opera star can break a wine glass that happens to resonate at the same frequency as her voice. In fact, the concept is so basic in physics that inventor Nikola Tesla sought a century ago to build a huge tower on Long Island that would wirelessly beam power along with communications.

The new step described in Science was that the MIT team put the concept into action. The scientists lit a 60-watt bulb that was 7 feet away from the power-generating appliance.

"It was quite exciting," Soljacic said. The process is "very reproducible," he added. "We can just go to the lab and do it whenever we want."

The development raises the prospect that we might eliminate some of the clutter of cables in our ever-more electronic world. Is that necessarily a good thing? Soljacic acknowledged "that it's far from obvious how crucial people will find this."

But at least one benefit could be that if devices can get their power through the air, they might not need batteries and their attendant toxic chemicals.

Before that can happen, the technology has a ways to go.

The MIT system is about 40 percent to 45 percent efficient — meaning that most of the energy from the charging device doesn't make it to the light bulb. Soljacic believes it needs to become twice as efficient to be on par with the old-fashioned way portable gadgets get their batteries charged.

Also, the copper coils that relay the power are almost 2 feet wide for now — too big to be feasible for, say, laptops. And the 7-foot range of this wireless handoff could be increased — presumably so that one charging device could automatically power all the gadgets in a room.

Soljacic believes all those improvements are within reach. The next step is to fire up more than just light bulbs, perhaps a Roomba robotic vacuum or a laptop.

The MIT team stresses that the "magnetic coupling" process involved in WiTricity is safe on humans and other living things. And in the initial experiments on the light bulb, nothing bad happened to the cell phones, electronic equipment and credit cards in the room — though more research on that is needed.

The harmlessness apparently extends both ways: The researchers noted that putting people and other things between the coils — even when they block the line of sight — generally has no effect on the power transfer.

[kaiyo4u]

Hey CBS, this is ancient news by your standards... I read about it many days ago... I am also surprised as an electrician that grant money is being wasted by these experiments.
The news MIT came out with is as old as electrical theory. You can also levitate objects within that "electrical/magnetic" field. The real test for these MIT students and profs would be to use these principles to create an anti-gravity field to revolutionize travel....After all we're living on one giant magnet. Anything that contains iron has magnetic properties...

[pbarcher]

What a rip-off...

This is NOT "new", at all. Nikola Tesla proposed AND demonstrated this DECADES AGO! Westinghouse bought the idea and promptly shelved it--the business of erecting wired power transmission facilities and building appliances and homes that ran on Alternating Current (AC), (also invented by Nikola Tesla), was already quite lucrative.

There are many places to check this out...this was the first one I found:
http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm

[afinefolly]

it actually wasn't a spanking joke, but as it could be so determined: disclaimer to the joke i just tolt: kids five and under suffer 99 plus percent of spankings and are 99 plus percent more likely to suffer injury or death as a result of spankings and, therefore, it makes no sense to spank anybody against their will as the only people least likely to suffer or die can never physically recieve more than one percent of all spankings and therefore spanking them can only increase the number of spankings recieived by those most vulnerable

[afinefolly]

' ... energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transfered, and my parents are walking transmissions that can transfer that same energy time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time agin ... '

[afinefolly]

' ... fate is like a rail road, if you stay on the track, you'll get hit by the train ... eternity is like infinite numbers of rail roads all converging in each and every place at each and every moment ... so in theory you can go anywhere anytime if you can just convince yourself you're already there ... '

[afinefolly]

i've always wondered if maybe jupiter and saturn and / or the sun have these tentacles the lap us all over inside and out all day everyday and tinker with things like our genetics, and maybe sometimes the objects seeming to move by themselves... and if maybe there's a way to move objects without electricity

[amazedd]

Magenta?

[sevenveils]

No new science here. Applications using this principle have been in existence for more than a decade.

[poeticreator]

So as soon as we get this thing directed efficiently we can be powering cars going down the street? No batteries, no fuel? And we can pay with a "WiTricity" pay-as-you-go-card?
Then we wouldn't have to fight these middle eastern wars for their oil anymore!
How about pouring our war billions into a Kennedian-space-race push to the finish line on this one?

[lochlan-2009]

I guess this is what MIT has to offer now days, stolen ideas from Tesla (just kidding, being pessimistic).
Anyway when you're listening to music (particularly deep base), objects like your desk will vibrate. The energy to move the desk etc. is coming from the sound waves. So if you were to put a subwoofer in the corner of a room the energy waves would travel through the air to your desk across the room and make it vibrate. Energy is matter in motion, so if you were to hook that desk up to a generator, here you go, wireless energy. You just want your frequency and antena to be in tune.
This doesn't make any sense "The concept of sending power wirelessly isn't new, but its wide-scale use has been dismissed as inefficient because electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device would radiate in all directions," the military is using devices right now that can focus sound or microwaves on particular individuals from a distance for non-lethal riot (sheeple) control.