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Wireless Power Demonstrated
Necroloth and other readers sent in the story of Witricity's latest demo at the TED Global conference in Oxford, UK. The company is developing a system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires. The idea is not new — electrical pioneers Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla assumed that power would be delivered wirelessly. The BBC quotes the inventor behind Witricity's tech as saying that Tesla and Edison "...couldn't imagine dragging this vast infrastructure of metallic wires across every continent." eWeek Europe notes some hurdles the technology must overcome: "The 2007 experiment it is based on had an efficiency of only around 45 percent, but [Witricity's CEO] promised power delivered wirelessly would start out 15 percent more expensive than wires, and improve on that." Intel has also demonstrated wireless charging.
A wireless Taser?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Resonant transfer is great stuff, but what we need even more is a standard interface so that all our rechargable devices can recharge at the same source.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Electrical pioneer my ass, he just got lucky once and was able to afford to hire good talent ( like Nikola ). But i totally agree that Tesla proved it was possible ( and WAS a pioneer ). But he also proved that it takes more then tech to make such a project work, it also needs funding. As brilliant as he was, a businessman he wasn't, and we were set decades behind on projects such as this.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Mmmm; I'm under the impression that the problem with contact-free power is a significant loss in efficiency. So, if I have to use 25% more power (for example) to charge all my devices just so I don't need to connect a wire, that sounds like a great way to make stuff cost more due to increased electricity demand.
If I were building power plants, of course, this would sound like fantastic news.
I don't know about Edison but Tesla certainly carried out experiments proving that wireless energy transfer is possible.
Turns out the strong EMF fields created by the technology also have the bonus side effect of microwaving tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists skulls.
I, on the other hand, always thought the problem with contact-free power was cancer.
Blasting large amounts of EMI solely to avoid the need to put a battery in something is stupid. Right now EM radiation is controlled to the lowest levels it can practically be in order to achieve some transfer of information between two or more points. Any power transfer system is going to muck up what's already in the air. It's called Shannon's Law -- and no matter how you sex up the technology, the fact is you're raising the noise floor doing this.
Bad engineer. No cookie for you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Here's a company that's had wireless power tech since 2007:
http://www.powercastco.com/
They even won a best of CES 2007 award from CNET:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12760_7-9673092-5.html
They released working wirelessly powered Christmas tree lights in December 2007 as a consumer product!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9793204-1.html
So this type of wireless power tech has been available in consumer products since 2007 and it appears that there has not been a lot of interest. I am really mystified as why nobody cares. Is it because they mistake this technology for some other kind of well known technology? I can't figure out the psychology here.
Yay!!!
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'd like to be the first to complain that resonant power transfer has nothing to do with quantum entanglement.
You'll be getting a memo from the Tesla Death Ray department shortly; Not observing it won't save you.
Thinkgeek has sold wireless extension cords for a long time. I wonder if Witricity has solved the issue about domestic cats getting in between the source and destination...
Tesla actually demonstrated it. He just never got the chance to scale it up. So.. before going around and saying that this has just been invented, go check Tesla's patents.
Something is deeply wrong with the bbc; You can witness it yourself in their radio broadcasts and tv shows. They make a great show of having some leading expert explain something to their listeners then rudely cut the expert of mid-sentence with some half-assed 'thank you for explaiiiiiiiiiinning all of that' just so that they are able to maintain their fucking pre-determined schedule. What the fuck? Maybe if they could pretend more effectively that they gave a shit what some guy had taken time out of his day to explain, the general public would feel that the taxation imposed by the bbc, almost as an arm of the fucking government, would be worth it, rather than just a sink-hole for middle-class arts graduates who feel it is beneath them to try to understand HOW THE WORLD WORKS ?
<rant>
Does it cause cancer yet? If it doesn't, it will because somebody will figure out some way to claim it happens.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It says Tesla assumed it would be delivered wirelessly, meaning he didn't think we'd build amazingly expensive and ugly power lines all over the world. But you're right, Tesla did demonstrate it. That just wasn't the point of the sentence.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
Full disclosure: I know Prof. Soljacic at MIT, who founded WiTricity, although I personally have no financial interest in the company; all of the above information is public and published, however.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
any reference that he demonstrated this? ....besides his patents
Not that you'd learn it from this non-technical news report, but the energy transfer in WiTricity is non-radiative for this and other reasons. Indiscriminately radiating power not only will interfere with other devices (and violate FCC regulations), but also wastes power by dumping it into the environment, not to mention that people tend to dislike the idea that power is being dumped into their brains. See my other post below.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
... at least in good weather during the day.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
A company I visited as an FAE back as far (actually is it far?) as 2003 (Splashpower, Cambridge, UK) demonstrated a pad that with specially adapted battery packs would recharge any handheld electronics placed upon it, without wires. I know they didn't survive. I wonder what happened to them, anyone know? I do remember their chief engineer was one of the Atari Jaguar 2 designers, so he must have been fairly used to canned projects.. Yes that's right, the Jaguar 2!
So this type of wireless power tech has been available in consumer products since 2007 and it appears that there has not been a lot of interest. I am really mystified as why nobody cares. Is it because they mistake this technology for some other kind of well known technology? I can't figure out the psychology here.
I'm going to place a guess that it involves price, and possibly obscurity.
Admittedly, I am just going by the $400 pricetag on that tree from 2007, but most people that would be preparing and setting up a christmas tree today, have been doing so for awhile already and in most all cases don't see a drawback to the wires. They have wired things up before, so the process is pretty well understood and worked around.
Now, as a geek I would love to have these, but for me it would be specifically for the reason that they are wireless lights.
To non-geeks, the primary function of christmas lights is to pretty up the tree (well, or 'tradition' maybe), and both wired and wireless lights would do that job. I can see lack of wires helping it be more attractive for sure, but these days most christmas tree wires are green colored to blend in and hide, and due to the fact everyone they know would have the same setup, it's not like you are the odd guy out with some weird freak setup.
Compare a $10 string of lights (Or $1-2 from discount/dollar stores) to $400 for wireless, when both perform the primary function identically, many will go for the cheapest option. Especially considering some people have no problems paying under $20/year for new strands of wires, just to avoid having to untangle them or replace bulbs. It isn't exactly a long term investment item ;}
Clearly the wireless light tree is an investment, but that still goes back to the fact not many people are in the mindset to invest in one.
Then there is the problem of obscurity.
Even I had no idea this product was on the market until you pointed it out. And I think it is awesome and would like something like this!
Most non-geeks have no such desire, thus wouldn't go looking for it, and are less likely to run across it being mentioned (such as I just did on a tech site, from another fellow geek)
I hate to say "If I didn't know about it being a geek, how would any non-geek know?" but it really feels like that.
I dunno, just thinking out loud. Those are my guesses anyway. :D
PS, thanks for the links!
To quote John Dvorak: "My toothbrush has been doing this for years."
(ducks)
But then, many devices also want their own USB cable interface...
Twinstiq, game news
Disgusting.
Why be content with a wireless light bulb when you can have wireless vehicles?
Here's a demo of wireless power transmission providing the motive power for the 'Tesla Roadster' built by Nevada Lightning Laboratory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuAkdynoMuM
Inefficient use of an energy resource is NOT what is needed. Even if it cost as little as wire, it delivers energy less efficiently and puts more demands on resources to deliver the energy. And, no, it will never be efficient because of the square law.
Our problem isn't the energy consumed, it's that through inefficiency we waste resources.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Wireless power using magnetic coupling is relatively weak; lighting a bulb with magnetic wireless systems is touted as a major achievement.
Tesla's original scheme using electric coupling is far more potent, as can be seen in this video where an electric-coupled wireless system powers a human-driven electric cart, over a considerable distance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuAkdynoMuM
If it's only 45% efficient, and powering a 20W light bulb (guessed), and apparently doesn't radiate or heat people...
Where is it dumping the remaining 55% (11W)? Does the transmitter just get hot safely?
Wireless Power gives everyone a warm fuzzy feeling... oh, wait...
Edison??? Really?? Puhleeze........!
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
"Wireless power system shown off" [article title]
Well, that's one state necessary for a fully functional system, but I'd be far more impressed if it was shown on.
Who's going to lug around the transmitter and receiving unit (if not internal to the device) when they can stuff a thin wire in their pocket?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Heh, I wish I could mod you up.
> Resonant transfer is great stuff
Yeah, especially if you're living in an apartment, you get to borrow your neighbour's power (and vice versa).
Do you get arrested if you keep forgetting to turn on your "power sender", but leave your "power receiver" on?
If it's non directional, does not get blocked by most materials and has a range of a few meters, how well would it work if in apartments where you and your neighbours tried to use the tech?
;)
I can see a few potential problems with that
First came free internet now comes free power.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Subsidy Farming.
Huh - isn't solar power really a Wireless power? I mean, as far as as I know, there is no wire between the Sun and solar cell in my calculator. This is classic example of how money is wasted on BS research.
Scotty is right. This idea is ludicrous. Sending power as magnetic fields is a major fail. The near-field which they're touting as a panacea, it inevitably falls off as the cube of the distance. So you need a sending coil about as big across as the distance. You want to hang a 10-foot coil on the ceiling to power your laptop in a 10 ft radius?
And there won't be a single standards body that will approve pumping many watts of 30m waves into living spaces.
"electrical pioneers Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla"
That should be:
"electrical pioneers Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison"
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The Stock ticker is merely a different telegraph. The Quadruplex telegraph was based on J. B. Stearns duplex telegraph. The incandescent lamp was invented by Swan. The phonograph was probably the only thing major invention in that list that he made a major contribution to.
The improved stock ticker.
Edison's improved stock ticker included his key contributions to printing telegraphy. His most significant improvement was a mechanism that enabled all of the tickers on a line to be synchronized so that they printed the same information. Because the printers frequently fell behind the transmitter by one or more letters, exchange companies had to send employees to the offices where printers were running out of "unison" to reset them.
One of the most effective and longest used devices was Edison's screw-thread unison. With Edison's device the transmitting operator could bring all the printers on a line into unison by sending electrical impulses to turn the shaft of each machine until a peg sitting in a screw-thread on the typewheel hit a stop. Edison also designed an improved typewheel-shifting mechanism and a paper feed so that his ticker required much less battery power. Edison also devised a transmitter for his stock ticker that used a keyboard like that of a typewriter. Edison's ticker was used on the stock exchange for several years before being replaced, but it continued to be used until about 1960 for many other purposes, including the transmission of sports scores. Stock Ticker
The improved stock ticker netted Edison $40,000.
Quadaplex telegraphy.
While working on duplex telegraphs, Edison realized that he could send four messages simultaneously by combining the duplex with a diplex for sending two messages in the same direction. The common approach to diplex was the use of weak and strong batteries to produce signals of different strengths, with relays at the receiving end designed to respond to one or the other signal. However, it proved difficult in practice to prevent the sensitive weak-signal relay from responding to the stronger signal current. In essence, Edison used a cascade of electromagnets to bridge over the time during which the reversed current regenerated the magnetic field in the main relay magnet. This solution represented an important approach that Edison often took when confronted by particularly intractable problems - rather than completely eliminate a defect he found a way to use its own effects to obviate the problem. The quadruplex continued to be used into the twentieth century. Quadruplex Telegraph
The incandescent lamp
In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting." History of the light bulb
The common thread in these stories is Edison's ability to see the problem as a whole - and deliver a commercially viable solution to the problem as a whole.
If you consider the whole system, it's more expensive, less efficient, bulkier, less reliable, harder to understand. Everyone gets that touching copper to copper = connection. Not too many people get that wireless power falls off with the cube of distance.
Nobody wants their electric bill to double just so they can save a few seconds a day of plugging things in. For cellphones it might not be a big deal, but for an electric car the difference between a connector and an inductor will be hundreds of dollars a year in utility bills.