They're calling it WiTricity (pronounced WHYtricitiy, as in Wi-Fi, and no, I don't much like it either) and the potential applications are interesting. So far, both the distance and the amount of power are small (and safe, so far as we know), but already enough to make sense for our brave new world of mobile electronic devices. The initial tests provide enough power to keep the typical laptop running without batteries. The idea is to make the system slightly smaller and more efficient (right now it requires a pair of 30-cm-wide copper coils), and expand the range so that a single, omnidirectional power source could wirelessly charge all devices in the room.

The procedural details get a little complicated, but the technology is actually based on principles that have been around for a century or so. It has to do with the idea of electromagnetic induction, which typically only works over very short distances. The MIT guys have managed to expand that distance, allowing two matching coils to resonate within a matter of meters rather than millimeters. I'd need some charts and graphs, and about five more hours, to get into it properly. Suffice it to say, Tesla would be proud.

Of course, he was interested in ranges of 100s of kilometers, but that's another story. Tesla was famously fascinated with the idea of wireless power transmission. Most historians agree that he came up with several new ways of achieving it, too, though specifics on this count are endlessly debated in scientific history circles. The old man typically had seven or eight groundbreaking projects going on at once, and was sloppy about taking notes. I just finished editing some of his papers regarding distributed high-Q helical resonators, actually. Fascinating stuff, but his penmanship has set back progress many decades. Let that be a lesson to you young people.

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