We moved one step closer to a world where plugging in your laptop, cell phone, iPod, and even a lamp for power is no longer required. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a wireless electricity called "WiTricity" that can transmit electricity wirelessly.
In a proof of concept demonstration of the technology MIT researchers were able to light a 60W light bulb from a power source seven feet away with no physical connection between the source and the lamp.
In this image the coil on the left is transmitting electricity to the coil on the right powering a 60W light bulb. Members of the team that performed the experiment are obstructing the direct line of sight between the coils.
MIT work is featured at the online ScienceXpress section of Science magazine's Web site (paid subscription required to view complete article).
According to research published on MIT's Web site wireless power transmission that could light a lamp has been theoretically possible for some time. However, the technology up until now has been hamstrung by issues such as line of site requirements between source and destination. As MIT puts it: "One can envision using directed electromagnetic radiation, such as lasers, but this is not very practical and can even be dangerous."
MIT has broken the line-of-site requirements. Researchers explain: "WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects."
Oh, now I get it.
Check here for a more in-depth description of the breakthrough.
Glancing at the snake pit of wires beside my PC I can't wait for a more wire-free world.
Didn't Nick Tesla already do this, albeit on a bigger scale?
Tesla did it 100 years ago - so??
The government has been sitting on his documents since he died... that's why it's taken so long to realize technology like this.
Nicolai Tesla's work 100 years ago, despite showing great promise, was derided and scoffed at during his lifetime, especially by those whose science was entwined with AC Power transmission's high profits. Now MIT announces a "new" breakthrough technology! Unfair -- maybe, but not unexpected.
C'mon MIT- How about some credit to the man who did it over a hundred years ago? They didn't use any of his theories?
"After paying off his investors, Tesla spent his remaining funds on his other inventions and culminated his efforts in a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs by transmitting 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and ran one electric motor! With this souped up version of his Tesla coil, Tesla claimed that only 5% of the transmitted energy was lost in the process. But broke of funds again, he looked for investors to back his project of broadcasting electric power in almost unlimited amounts to any point on the globe. The method he would use to produce this wireless power was to employ the earth's own resonance with its specific vibrational frequency to conduct AC electricity via a large electric oscillator."
http://www.mind-course.com/wireless.html
Tesla showed the same thing on a large scale for power transmission. The commercial failure if his design was no one knew had to BILL for the electricity sent without wires.
But my real personal two cents on this is: In high school I had a physics teacher that was a self ascribed ?Tesla FANatic.? He had rig set up with two dopey looking coils just like these MIT guys. He also lit a light bulb from a distance; specifically sitting on the front row of desks with a generator on his front lab bench. So Tesla did it large scale 100 years ago and my AP Physics teacher did it small scale 20 years ago.
I don't see what you idiots think a poorly contrived Sacramento rock band with hits like "Bust a Nut" has to do with MIT's breakthrough.
why does MIT get to label ideas as their own? ima go to walmart buy a microwave rip off all tags paint the inside black, call it focused beam technology patent it and sell it at walmart. To think I was saving my money so that my son could go there to learn how to rippoff technology.
why does MIT get to label ideas as their own? ima go to walmart buy a microwave rip off all tags paint the inside black, call it focused beam technology patent it and sell it at walmart. Thats like saying bill gates stold microsoft from harvard. Did he?
This is such crap. Few years back in my chem class we thought about this idea, then my teacher explained that it was done before. And now these guys claim it as new technology?
Man time for me to go buy a refrigerator, relabel it, repaint it, call it a local freezing device and start reselling it as a technological breakthrough.
None of you guys get it, do you? If you go back and reread the article (slowly, so as not to hurt yourselves), you'll see that they found a way to wirelessly transmit power WITHOUT LINE-OF-SIGHT RESTRICTIONS. Tesla never accomplished that, all of his experiments required a direct line of sight. What MIT has done is entirely different, and has a much greater and more practical potential.
MIT is an overpriced high school that steals technology and calls it their own....
Tesla didnt have the "WITHOUT LINE-OF-SIGHT RESTRICTIONS" problem either. He wasnt shooting laser rays, also resonance.
"Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects."
Wow, what a breakthrough! You mean, for example, we could have radio and TV stations that would transmit energy on a particular frequency and then receivers could be tuned to the same frequency so they could efficiently receive the energy from that station only while rejecting all the others? What an exciting world we live in now!
Tesla's papers were stolen from his hotel room where he was found dead - probably by Edison. With wireless electricity. Westinghouse and Edison Electric (now GE) would have gone down the tubes. Tesla was also working on Laser before anyone, and those papers were confiscated by the FBI as a threat to national security because they thought he was developing a weapon for Italy or Germany.
McAllister
I don't mean to burst any bubbles or anything, but using electromagnetic resonance to transmit power is a far reach from Tesla's approach of using the innate conductivity of air. MIT has been publishing this data fairly routinely for the last year and is just now showing practical examples. In Tesla's approach the amount of current being trasmitted was huge, but you being a better conductor of electricity than the ambient air better get out of the way when it was kicked on. What is known as the "Tesla effect" is still used today by the military in many of the new focused power weaponry being deployed.
Tesla's coil failed for three very good reasons:
1. People were, and still are, afraid of being exposed to powerful magnetic fields. Remember the cell phones that cause brain cancer and impotence?
2. Tesla's coil creates a magnetic field that permeates space in all directions, an obviously inefficient system for a world where power is only needed at discreet points.
3. The inverse square law necessitated a coil so huge that nobody, not even the government, could afford to build it. Honestly, if Tesla's coil was so great, and failed only due our shortsighted capitalist government's insistence on having a way to charge for power, why didn't the Soviets build it?
Tesla is very misunderstood - he was a genius far superior to Edison et al - he literally transformed our world. Every generator, every electric motor, every thing that uses alternating current owes it's very being to Tesla.
Tesla did indeed transmit power wirelessly if you'd care to read up a bit on it, you'd see it was a resonant frequency apparatus he used. It is thought that the Dept. of the Navy stole his research papers after his death. HARP is a Tesla based project, who knows how many classifed projects Tesla contributed to posthumously?
Tesla claimed with enough power and the proper resonant frequency he could split the entire earth - every bit of matter has a resonant frequency - Tesla researched this area very thoroughly. He was prepared to transmit power world wide - he was old fashioned he thought the universe was the property of humanity to be shared by all, not the providence of General Electric or Exxon.
Truly Power to the People!!
Sorry, Tom Spring. At the end of your piece on MIT's "discovery" of wireless power transmission, you offer the lame comment, "Oh, now I get it." No, you don't. Instead, you condescend to science with a sophomoric wink of mock amazement. So much for pride of authorship and credibility. Of course electromagnetic resonance isn't a concept you comprehend. Nor, it seems, is science history. Let me recommend to you "Tesla - Master of Lightning" by Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, from Metrobooks. It is a short-but-engaging account of Nikola Tesla's brilliant, dogged pursuit of science against overwhelming odds - including Thomas Edison's underhanded conspiracy to discredit him by - among other things - electrocuting an elephant with alternating current. You may have trouble grasping the book's presentation of basic electricity, but you may enjoy it anyway. It is illustrated.
May I humbly suggest that before calling this a ripoff of Tesla you read the article in Science. A short piece by a journalist on this website should not be your reference point for criticizing this research. Ripoff research would not get published, and you will find that due credit is given to Tesla's contributions to wireless transmission of power. All great science is built off the contributions of the past.
I can't help but think that if Tesla hadn't had to come up with a profit motive for his work this "break-through" would have occurred a long time ago.
Oh and don't worry, this tech won't go anywhere since, as Tesla's investors knew all those years ago, there's no money in it. How do you charge for stuff that comes through the air?
And we all know that nothing happens without a profit motive.
All this aside, it's seriously sad that this article nor the other coverage I've read reporting on this story mentions Nikola Tesla. Whether you agree that Tesla did this exact same thing a century ago or not, Tesla did experiment with this exact same idea and deserves credit as someone else who has done research in this field previously.
It's frightening how Tesla is almost completely ignored by the media and by schools. All I was tought in my physics class was that Tesla invented the Tesla coil. Is it a conspiracy? Or are our teachers and media just bone-stupid?
I worry about the statement that biological entities are only weakly interactive with coupled resonance transmissions. Before this technology is put to general use I would hope that ample amount of testing proves that statement for long term use. The body is not homogenous and, I would think, contains a host of magnetically resonant cavities of different frequencies.
It's not just the journalist omitting Tesla.
From the linked article from MIT:
"WiTricity is rooted in such well-known laws of physics that it makes one wonder why no one thought of it before...."
You would think that MIT would have heard of Tesla before.
Why don't we learn about Tesla?
Honestly, because Edison was American and Tesla wasn't.
I had two thoughts. First, there is a problem with assuring that wireless transmitted power is properly billed for. Given a choice between advertising and taxes to pay the bill, I would choose the latter for no particular reason. I am sure electric meters will be with us for a while, as has been pointed out, there are other problems to be solved.
Second, a 60watt light bulb make a nice demonstration but having another distribution channel may shift the cost basis but doesn't produce any more power. Aren't we trying to conserve? Five watts of LED lighting produces an much useful light and uses a fraction of the power.
Third (yes, I know I can't keep count), I think the amount of power we are likely to see in the near-term would have to stretch for just the year-old laptop I am using now, PDA, phones, mice. remote controls - no batteries - a big deal really. I don't think we'll see (or need) wireless stoves or washing machines soon.
I've been studying Nikola Tesla's inventions, lectures, letters for the last 3 years now. What tesla did was use a little bit of electricity as leverage to produce milions of volts of electricity like a fulcrum. This electricity was conducted through the earth, with a small portion of it making the return link through the air. In a world expo in chicago he demonstated his principles by providing some amazing light shows without wires. I hope the MIT folks do make good progress on this, but we should be looking at using his resonace theories to get free energy in small scale to power the home and automobiles rather than to feed the grid that drains our pocketbooks. on resonance and it's effects on the body... Royal Rife invented a microscope in the 1930s that was capable of using resonance to see viruses live at 40000x, then used resonance to kill cancer cells with an argon gas filled bulb and the right frequency and waveform. 100% cure rate, no damage to other tisses, unlike chemo.
I've been studying Nikola Tesla's inventions, lectures, letters for the last 3 years now. What tesla did was use a little bit of electricity as leverage to produce milions of volts of electricity like a fulcrum. This electricity was conducted through the earth, with a small portion of it making the return link through the air. In a world expo in chicago he demonstated his principles by providing some amazing light shows without wires. I hope the MIT folks do make good progress on this, but we should be looking at using his resonace theories to get free energy in small scale to power the home and automobiles rather than to feed the grid that drains our pocketbooks. on resonance and it's effects on the body... Royal Rife invented a microscope in the 1930s that was capable of using resonance to see viruses live at 40000x, then used resonance to kill cancer cells with an argon gas filled bulb and the right frequency and waveform. 100% cure rate, no damage to other tisses, unlike chemo.
Can you imagine all the possibilities? Perhaps this can wean us from oil.An automobile using an AC motor? That would really be something huh?
This could be one of the greatest discoveries of our time.Too bad I am too old to see it through.
The title of the story should be "MIT team revives 100 YO technology". Oh what could have been if Tesla had been allowed to implement his ideas we'd probably be flying air cars by now.
As soon as I finished reading this, I knew the Tesla groupies would be coming from the woodwork. In fact, Tesla was vexed by the same problems this team described regarding line-of-sight transmissions and the inherent dangersof frying anything that crosses it.
The drill here is to transmit the energy in a form that is not dangerous to the environment and the only way to do this is to transform your electricity into another form of energy, transmit it and then rectify it on the receiving end. Tesla knew this but so far as I am aware, never succeeded. He did however... according to legend, cook a Ford Trimotor once in mid flight...
I checked the MIT News - they don't mention Tesla.
It is unconscionable for a scientific research facility such as MIT not to honor Tesla's work when lauding their successes with wireless current transfer. There can be no doubt the MIT researchers involved were familiar with Tesla's work in this field; what rational person would claim that Tesla's work did not inspire and contribute to their research.
I wonder if their request to secure funding for this research project used Tesla's work as part of the supporting argument?
Someone once said "we stand on the shoulders of giants" and then sombody else said " yeah but there is no honor among thieves so it's all good".
Amazingly the Inquirer has it right!
"MIT dusts off Tesla promise"
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40187
I challenge the Telsa lovers to name on technological breakthrough that was not based on some other's breakthrough or work. Innovation is just as important as invention. I'm sure there are groups around the world all doing something like this because the time is right, so these guys got the press, who cares, at least its something to look forward to. I can't wait until they find a real innovating application, like charging up an electric cars power-cells while driving, by lining a road with the transformers. How cool would that be?
You are right, most inventions are the result of improving on the work of others that have investigated before them. But unlike Tesla, some folks ommit making any reference to the previous work that inspired the breakthrough. Tesla's patent protections have expired a long time ago by now but his work on Inductive coupling, resonance and high frequency currents is seen in almost everything we use. TENS units in the medical field are based on his findings. Radio and television tuners are also based on his resonance experiments. Almost all A/C electric motors and generators are his designs. From ceiling fans to washer and dryer. If the industry had followed his advice to use small, efficient gasoline engines to produce electricity and use electricity to power a vehicle's motor we wouldn't have as much of a pollution problem. If we could get them to do more to investigate his plans for a bladeless boundry disk turbine, we would increase combustion efficiency to around 70% instead of 35%.
Articles that quote some of the MIT team behind this Witricity do credit Tesla. The news and web articles range from open-eyed wonder to vacuous.
The links on this page lead to some more realistic science and some better pictures of the MIT demonstration with the 60 watt incandescent.
http://www.i4u.com/article9417.html
I'm not clear on the difference between the MIT effort and the eCoupled devices from Fulton that are also mentioned.
They both seem to be based on coupling between two high Q resonant circuits via the magnetic fields. It looks like Fulton is has already reduced the concept to practice.
(BTW. This is not the old rf Tesla Coil used to light up fluorescents ploy. :) )
I have read all the posts and it appears that the folks who are defending the MIT team don?t understand what Tesla accomplished. Consider the following:
1. Tesla?s experiment did not depend on coupling or conduction with air. In fact, his method of power transmission works in a vacuum.
2. Tesla?s method was not restricted by line-of-sight. He could easily send power through a group of students.
3. Tesla?s experiments involved lighting banks of incandescent bulbs just like MIT, not neon tubes.
4. By using resonance, Tesla could selectively direct his power to different receiving points.
I want to be fair about this, but I still fail to see anything new in the research conducted at MIT.
Witricity News, Experimental Videos And Information:
http://www.witricitynet.com