ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

I could hardly wait to catch up with (Dr.) Ken (Corum) the morning after MIT's spectacular announcement this past week. I had to ask him: is this what Tesla was doing with his wireless power experiments?

The answer is: not really. Tesla was interested in using the Earth as the conductor, not the air. According to the Daily Mail article linked above, the MIT experiment uses a different method:

"Rather than sending power from a transmitter to a receiver as a conventional electromagnetic wave - the same form of radiation as light, radio waves and microwaves - he could use the transmitter to fill a room with a 'non-radiative' electromagnetic field. Most objects in the room - such as people, desks and carpets - would be unaffected by the electromagnetic field. But any objects designed to resonate with the electromagnetic field would absorb the energy."

No matter what your method, I wonder if this will ever be available during my lifetime or the lifetime of my daughter. It seems to me that at least one of the hurdles that Tesla faced would apply here. Not technical hurdles, but economic ones. What entity would pay to develop a technology that could prove difficult/impossible to meter and charge for?