Looking back, it was a crude experiment, she remembers: a tiny room filled with gigantic cooper 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.
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My gut tells me this is what the ancient people used to power their civilizations. Magnetic fields are every where, and all you need is the right kind of coil to harvest the energy.
