THE MOST COMMON REQUEST colleagues make in our shared office space is to borrow my phone charger. Two Nokia chargers have walked away from my desk so I've only a laptop-to-phone cable now and it works fine. Within a few years, I hope to be able to wirelessly reharge mobile phones, MP3 players and digital camera. MIT has shown it's possible to light a 60w bulb wirelessly, while the bulb sits two meters away from a power source. The remarkably simple setup--basically consisting of two metal coils--provides low wattage power across a cubicle. At CES, untethered lighting, audio speakers and digital picture frames will be featured in a wireless power mode. Some experts believe wireless electricity--dubbed WiTricity by some--could do for battery life what wifi has done for the internet. In my case, I could convert my deskspace into an electricity hotspot, effectively recharging devices without them needing a mains socket.
Powerbeam is one of the companies with patented wireless electricity. David Graham, the co-founder of Powerbeam, told the Observer: "We're going to delete the word 'recharge' from the English dictionary. If your cellphone is recharging on your desk all day, you won't be thinking about it."
In June 2007, the Science Express published research from MIT that showed resonant coupling being used to power light bulbs. In the MIT experiment, coils resonate at a frequency of 10 megahertz. When the electrical current flows through the first coil, it produces a 10-megahertz magnetic field; since the second coil resonates at this same frequency, it's able to pick up on the field, even from relatively far away. If the second coil resonated at a different frequency, the energy from the first coil would have been ignored.
I'm happy thinking that if I have a recharging zone in the house, I'll never have to worry about having a flat battery in my phone in the morning. That alone makes me hope WiTricity soon becomes a commercial possibility.
Kate Green -- "A wirelessly powered light bulb" in Technology Review, 8 June 2007.
David Smith -- "Wireless Power spells end for cables" in The Observer, 4 January 2009.
