Free Republic

By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination. Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who...

(AP) CAMBRIDGE -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers made a 60-watt light bulb glow by sending it energy wirelessly -- from a device 7 feet away -- potentially heralding a future in which cell phones and other gadgets get their juice without having to be plugged in. The breakthrough, disclosed Thursday in Science Express, the online publication of the journal Science, is being called "WiTricity" by the scientists. The concept of sending power wirelessly isn't new, but it has been dismissed as inefficient because the electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device radiates in all directions. One advance was announced...

Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate. A team from MIT’s Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future. The team members are Andre Kurs, Aristeidis Karalis, Robert Moffatt, Prof. Peter Fisher, and Prof....

Scientists have sounded the death knell for the plug and power lead. In a breakthrough that sounds like something out of Star Trek, they have discovered a way of 'beaming' power across a room into a light bulb, mobile phone or laptop computer without wires or cables. In the first successful trial of its kind, the team was able to illuminate a 60-watt light bulb 7ft away. The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who call their invention 'WiTricity', believe it could change the way we use electricity and do away with the tangle of cables, plugs and chargers that...