Katie Hall was shocked the second
she saw it: a light-bulb glowing in the middle of a room with no wires
attached.
Looking back, it was a crude
experiment, she remembers: a tiny room filled with gigantic copper refrigerator
coils -- the kind you'd see if you cracked open the back of your freezer.
She walked in and out between the
coils and the bulb -- and still the bulb glowed.
"I said: 'Let's work on this.
This is the future.'"
What's the trick?
"We're going to transfer power
without any kind of wires," says Dr Hall, now Chief Technology Officer at
WiTricity -- a start-up developing wireless "resonance" technology.
"But, we're not actually
putting electricity in the air. What we're doing is putting a magnetic field in
the air."
It works like this: WiTricity build
a "Source Resonator" -- a coil of electrical wire that generates a
magnetic field when power is attached.
If another coil is brought close, an
electrical charge can be generated in it. No wires required.
"When you bring a device into
that magnetic field, it induces a current in the device, and by that you're
able to transfer power," explains Dr Hall.
And like that, the bulb lights up.
Wireless homes
Don't worry about getting zapped:
Hall assures that the magnetic fields used to transfer energy are
"perfectly safe" -- in fact, they are the same kind of fields used in
Wi-Fi routers.
In the house of the future,
wire-free energy transfer could be as easy as wireless internet.
If all goes to WiTricity's plans,
smartphones will charge in your pocket as you wander around, televisions will
flicker with no wires attached, and electric cars will refuel while sitting on
the driveway.
WiTricity have already demonstrated
their ability to power laptops, cell-phones, and TVs by attaching resonator
coils to batteries -- and an electric car refueller is reportedly in the works.
Hall sees a bright future for the
family without wires:
"We just don't think about it
anymore: I'm going to drive my car home and I'm never going to have to go to
the gas station and I'm never going to have to plug it in.
"I can't even imagine how
things will change when we live like that."
World outside
Beyond these effort-saving
applications, Hall sees more revolutionary steps.
When Hall first saw the wireless
bulb, she immediately thought of medical technology -- seeing that devices
transplanted beneath the skin could be charged non-intrusively.
WiTricity is now working with a
medical company to recharge a left-ventricular assist device -- "a
heart-pump essentially."
The technology opens the door to any
number of mobile electronic devices which have so far been held back by limited
battery lives.
"The idea of eliminating cables
would allow us to re-design things in ways that we haven't yet thought of,
that's just going to make our devices and everything that we interact with,
that much more efficient, more practical and maybe even give brand new
functionality."
What's next?
The challenge now is increasing the
distance that power can be transferred efficiently. This distance -- Hall
explains -- is linked to the size of the coil, and WiTricity wants to perfect
the same long-distance transfers to today's small-scale devices.
For this reason, the team have high
hopes for their new creation: AA-sized wirelessly rechargeable batteries.
For Hall, the applications are
endless: "I always say kids will say: 'Why is it called wireless?'"
"The kids that are growing up
in a couple of years will never have to plug anything in again to charge
it."
It's great to see so much discussion
of this technology on social media and the comments thread.
There seems to be a lot of interest
in the contribution of Nikola Tesla's experiments to the development of this
technology. Dr Hall discussed Tesla briefly in her interview with Nick Glass:
Nick Glass: Given that Tesla and others realized all this over a
Century ago, why's it taken so long?
Dr Hall: I don't
think they realized exactly what we've done. They were certainly dreaming of
wireless power -- there's no question about that. In those days, it was a
different problem, because they were really thinking about: how do they get the
power from where it's generated to where it's used. And in that case they might
have been thinking about Niagara Falls generating the power and getting it to
New York City -- and that's a long distance. We're not proposing that the
technology we have here at WiTricity would be used for that kind of application.
When we came around, power's already being transferred by wires to homes and
rooms and things of that nature, so we had a much different problem, which was
really just this much shorter distance.
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