[Red Badger]

Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Manos Tentzeris holds a sensor (left) and an ultra-broadband spiral antenna for wearable energy-scavenging applications. Both were printed on paper using inkjet technology. (Credit: Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)

[muir_redwoods]

Who is John Galt?

[EGPWS]

"There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us,

Duh...

but nobody has been able to tap into it,"

Yeah, as soon as we do we can open up gifts to humanity such as electricity and atomic power.

Some day perhaps....some day.

[Tucker39]

I’m as big a geek as the next guy.....and I LUV anything mega-geeky like what THIS claims to be. But until I actually see one in operation I’ll classify it in the same category as the “3-D Printer” that has been making the rounds recently. If that thing is for real, I’m an eskimo brain surgeon! My Mama named me THOMAS, and I’ll believe BOTH of those crocks when I SEE them!

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

Nikola is smiling!

[Gadsden1st]

Over 60 years ago I built a crystal radio. The only thing that powered it was ambient electromagnetic energy. I understand you could do the same with High Power lines, but it is illegal.

[sam_paine]

"There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it,"

A crystal radio receiver, also called a crystal set or cat's whisker receiver, is a very simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no battery or power source and runs on the power received from radio waves by a long wire antenna. It gets its name from its most important component, known as a crystal detector, originally made with a piece of crystalline mineral such as galena.[1] This component is now called a diode.Contents [hide]

Crystal radios are the simplest type of radio receiver,[2] and can be handmade with a few inexpensive parts, like an antenna wire, tuning coil of copper wire, crystal detector and earphones.[3] They are distinct from ordinary radios because they are passive receivers, while other radios use a separate source of electric power such as a battery or the mains power to amplify the weak radio signal from the antenna so it is louder. Thus crystal sets produce rather weak sound and must be listened to with earphones, and can only pick up stations within a limited range.[4] The rectifying property of crystals was discovered in 1874 by Karl Ferdinand Braun,[5][6][7] and crystal detectors were developed and applied to radio receivers between 1894 and 1906 by Jagadish Chandra Bose,[8][9] G. W. Pickard[10] and others.

[thefactor]

Is that the same guy from Italy who invented cold fusion?

[Lazamataz]

Problem is, if you harvest, that means you are likely DRAINING someone else's power. That means you are stealing.

Kinda like when you draft someone on a highway, you are stealing their gas.

[wxgesr]

Tesla rediscovered.....

[KarlInOhio]

What happens when I put one of these in the near field of my power line before the electric meter?

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Hmmm....seems like Tesla was right all along.

[C210N]

Its been done before...

[Captain Beyond]

bflr

[GOPJ]

...Tentzeris, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is leading the research...

Georgia Tech? That's good enough for me - this story's for real'.

[FrankR]

The timing on this caught my attention as just a couple days ago I was telling some friends that I had a 5th grade teacher who predicted (to the class) that someday in the future electricty would be "broadcast" like radio waves and we'd pick it up on antenna's to power our homes.

But that was around 1956 or so, we also thought everyone would have flying cars by now, too.

[PATRIOT1876]

Cool!

I know of ham radio operators that sometimes have a little led attached to their antennas that lights up from the electricity in the air.

I’m still amazed after 30 years of building crystal radios that I can receive a station three hundred miles away and the radio is powered by the electricity coming from that station.

[SatinDoll]

The Earth has been likened to an electrical generator.

The Earth possesses a molten metal core and spins on its axis, and as the solar wind’s electrically charged particles flow against the planet, this plasma interacts with the planet’s magnetic field lines extending from pole to pole and streams out into space.

Too bad we haven’t figured out how to exploit that energy source for near-earth space propulsion.

[bvw]

The tech is cool. The function however is THEFT.

No different than a banking system hacker who catches the round-down of fractional cents. It’s still stealing.

I remember a chicken farmers who buried some parasitic lines under a hi voltage transmission line running through his farm. He used the power to heat the chicken coops. IIRC, he was arrested, fined and had to pay for the power he took.

That farmer was doing the same kind of thing as this Professor.

[Paradox]

Ever since I built my first crystal radio at age 6, I have had this idea. Recently, they have come out with those charging pads that do something similar, but I always thought that for micro-powered devices, you could take it straight from the air. There is tons of stuff going on all over the spectrum, from 60hz up through the gigahertz, no reason we can’t take some of that and do something with it.

[SpaceBar]

Here is a small electronic device that is powered entirely by capturing ambient electromagnetic energy, and has been around for about a century.