…and who knows where it’ll go from here? And who knows where it already is behind closed doors…
I suppose 18 years is well past the statue of limitations on being signified over such unrelenting confidence, but still…how could he say this “True broadcast power would involve incredible waste and probably kill everybody besides.” without realizing he was typing his column on a device that would have been deemed even more fantastic 100 years prior?
Maybe this old news here…I’m only posting because I was looking into the details of the technology and came across both articles…always been a fan of the straight dope…good stuff maynard!
Death of the cell phone charger
A Pennsylvania entrepreneur has developed technology that gives you all the battery juice you need directly from the air. Business 2.0 reports.
By Melanie Haiken, Business 2.0 Magazine
March 30 2007: 7:08 AM EDT
It may sound futuristic, but Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio–and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device’s battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.
Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can it get? “The sky’s the limit,” says John Shearer, Powercast’s founder and CEO. He estimates shipping “many millions of units” by the end of 2008.
For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn’t be done. “If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, ‘Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?’” says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips (Charts). “But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power.”
Niceties past, did you notice that the levels of power they are sending are miniscule (enough to eventually charge a cell phone battery), the distance trivial (one meter or less), and no mention is made of how much power the transmitter is using compared with the amount of work being done (that’s the waste Cecil talks about)? Compare that with what Cecil (and people going back to Tesla) meant by “broadcast power”–vast amounts of juice (enough to power a large and energy-hungry country) sent out across the country to be converted from radio waves into 120VAC to power our appliances.
Think about it: WKRP-AM’s transmitter shoots out 50,000 watts* of rock and roll excitement. That power is spreading out in an expanding bubble (well, not exactly, with directional transmitters, but the principle is the same) so that Johnny Fever can cook a frozen burrito a meter away, pick up the signal on his fillings a kilometer away (but, because of the inverse square law**, his teeth are getting shook by only an itsty-bitsy amount of power compared with what was used to defrost the burrito), and 100 kilometers away there is barely enough power to excite the atoms in his car antenna. And what happens to all of the energy that doesn’t hit someone’s antenna, which is the stupidly large percentage of the passing bubble? It just keeps going until it fades away to nothingness. In other words, the lion’s share is wasted, like Cecil said…
You will notice that the battery charger in that article stops working a meter away. The inverse square law has reduced the amount of power the receiver picks up to less than what is needed to operate the receiver. The claims are overblown and the guy from Phillips is an idiot who has just hung a huge “FIRE ME!” sign around his neck for all his more technical bosses to see.
Sounds like a lot but it’s only 21 amps at 120VAC, which is only a couple houses or several apartments of electricity–my vacuum cleaner draws nearly an amp by itself. Same with my amplifier, so I can’t run both on the same circuit. ETA: And it’s only 67 horsepower, and I have never owned a car with that few HP. (76HP was the closest).
** - Power, in this case, is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the power source. Whatever power Johnny’s fillings feel 1km from the source is decreased to one-quarter as much 2km away, one-ninth as much 3km away, and so on.
Don’t know about all the spooky electrical stuff, but in that column Cecil wrong “hairbrained” so, in fact, Cecil is wrong. Somebody should go back in and fix that thing. That’s just embarrassing.
well duh…but only 35 years ago people dropped their jaw playing Pong…
Nah, not saying cecil was wrong, just not really thinking ahead of the game at the time in obvious ways…especially considering his bravado in lambasting the idea.
Admit it: We’ve ALL thought that, one time or another, and cold reality comes up and slaps us silly. It isn’t the Unca Cece is perfect, it’s just that he researches this shit thoroughly and the sum of his references is damned close to perfect. THAT is what separates him from the average newbie, and it is what the rest of us have, hopefully, learned to do, because it can be awfully embarrassing to have one of us slap you around. Happened to us all–me multiple times–so welcome to THAT club, too, One Hit Wonder (can’t believe that name hasn’t been used before).
Oh, and I wasn’t all that impressed seeing my first Pong machine. It was an obvious outcome from the advances in technology. My wife, OTOH, laughed at her grandmother (died 1975) when she said she she should invest in Intel because soon everybody would want to own a computer.
Go back to my post, look at the part about the differing definitions, and how the inverse square law completely screws up things once you get beyond a trivial distance, and THINK ABOUT IT, and THEN try justifying “that’s 100% wrong.” I have been drinking, am a “broadcast power newbie” who would’ve named my firstborn son, if I had one, Nicola, and for whom electricity borders on magic, yet who has figured all this out TONIGHT, and I, a relative and chemically-induced moron, can see how you are wrong. Study the science–hell, spend some time at Wikipedia–and come back and say, “Cecil is wrong.” It is YOU who is overly-optimistic.
And I, my friend, will go back to drinking while you research. And who said I (I was working, sober, until 11PM) don’t know how to enjoy a holiday weekend?.
Yes, it works, and Cecil DID NOT say otherwise, over extremely-short distances, but transmitting anything but trivial amounts of power over trivial distances falls apart as soon as the distance increases, and, even at the shortest distance and unless the antenna completely surrounds the transmitter, the waste is relatively ENORMOUS.
hahaaha, cheers! well it’s a good thing I wasn’t looking this stuff up a few nights ago or let’s just say there’d be a few more typos in my posts. I loves me some Cecil, but he is 100% wrong in this case. Increasing unreality? you’re both thinking within the box…follow me for a minute, and bare in mind that I’m a newtonian dunce but a logistical genius (I made the certificate myself) so I can only speak in layman’s terms…
I’d never argue the specifics of the science, but it’s Lego’s…apply a bunch of laws to push around the others until you get what you want. The law of inversed transaxle proctology has it that X is too big when Y is processing Z…so it’s just a matter of some MIT undergrad brainstorming how to make X smaller before his dissertation is due. Lightbulb! Lose the W! Why didn’t anybody think of that before?!? Because that’s how things go. People work with eachother’s successes and failures. Nobody stranded on a deserted island could build a flare gun…but if they got to work building a flare gun factory, maybe the next people stranded on the island could. Or maybe they’d use the walls of the factory to build a boat instead.
So you and cecil suggest it’s a matter of efficiency…that’s one of the easiest hardware obstacles to overcome. People can make tesla coils in their garage if they want. Maybe if we could run down to Circle K and buy a can of plutonium to screw around with, some retired engineer would have stumbled on a way to build one that powers his lawnmower by now. Who would have thought that a little plutonium smeared on the speaker of a walkie talkie would turn the zinc particles in the air into an active long-range antenna! I think charging a cell phone from 3 feet away is pretty fuggin incredible…I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it until now…so simple is it that it made headlines thirty years ago, right? It’s only the beginning. I thought the future was supposed to start in 2000!
The article you linked to is over a year old. Can you find anything more recent? Or has this idea died a death like Dropzone implied it would?
It works in exactly the way Cecil says it does. Over short range, low power, with huge wastage. Given the increasing drive for more efficient electrical devices I’m a little doubtful that every company is going to get behind wasting power like this.
bleh…yeah, my eyes are getting sore…been on this dang machine too long today…so many tangents of interest…brushing up on my tesla history…
http://tinyurl.com/3ne8eq april of this year…wireless christmas tree lights…and they’re still only focusing on the small (wonder what’s in Hangar 51? *insert x-files theme…) Patented algorithms…greek to me…I swear I’m not selling stock in the company…somebody’s gonna come along and rip this idea off bigger and better soon enough.
One source says testing is reaching 90%…70% on what’s out there now. I wouldn’t say either is a huge waste. The earliest article I found on this specific idea is from 06…so all things considered, it’s a blip in the timeline of potential. Are you predicting it’s going to be impossible to make it more powerful and efficient? Wouldn’t that be as naive as Cecil’s response was? harhar…
I don’t see why the blanket skepticism simply based on stick-in-the-mud science…especially considering it’s being done as we speak. Were y’all the same about home computers? Think about yesterday’s vs. todays…same thing. “there ain’t no WAY you could fit a whole encyclopedia with pictures and video on a floppy disk”…whereas nowadays you could do it in every language ever known to man on a keychain ornament.
I’d be curious how Cecil would answer the question today.
You’re probably referring to this, right? Note it says, “a patented circuit design captures up to 70% of the theoretical maximum anywhere within the Powercaster’s range.” (my italics). I presume that means it captures 70% of the broadcast power impinging on the receiver, which would be only a small fraction of the power actually radiated.
Eh. It’s not skepticism of the underlying theory, it’s skepticism of whether this is actually a good idea. And that, of course, depends on your definition of a good idea. We’re talking about a wireless recharging device that’s horrendously inefficient. If you focus on “wireless recharging device,” it sounds cool. If you focus on “horrendously inefficient,” it sounds dumb.
We must be able to X because we were able to do Y is a basic fallacy.
If Y is not related to X you can’t say anything at all about it. It needs to be examined on its own merits.
And transmitting broadcast power in large quantities over long distances fails that test.
That’s all we’re saying. Not that its theoretically impossible, not that nobody has ever achieved it in the lab, not that induction or wireless applications don’t already exist.
In short, Tesla’s plans for commercial broadcast power were nonsense then, nonsense when Cecil wrote his column, and nonsense today. Will they be nonsense forever? In the form he wrote about, probably yes. No absolutes, but the odds are strongly against it.
What other pieces of science and technology we’re achieved are irrelevant to this discussion. And so is Powercast.
Cecil actually is wrong about many things. But this isn’t one of them.
Cecil said such a product would have significant waste. So give us the specifications of this device: how much wall current does it consume to produce one (1) charged battery? How much wall current is consumed by a battery charger? That’ll tell you how efficient this “broadcast power” thing is to actual, you know, wires. Last I checked, metal is a better conductor of electricity than air.
I think, One Hit Wonder, that you’re interpreting the responses as “defending Cecil.” In reality, they’re a mix of healthy scientific skepticism and pointing out that you’re comparing apples and cod.
Powercast’s Web site says they can capture 70% of the theoretical maximum power. They’re not really specific about the size of the receiver, but they call it a “chip,” so let’s assume it’s no bigger than one square centimeter.
At about a meter from the broadcast location, the power has been “beamed out” in a sphere. The surface area of a sphere 1m in diameter is roughly 12.5 meters, or 1,250 cm. So this receiver is capable of getting 1/1,250’th of the broadcast power. Factor in their 70%, and the receiver is picking up 0.00056 of the power coming out. If it’s drawing 1,000 watts, the receiver is producing about 1/2 watt.
In the meantime, you’re calling Cecil “pwned” is premature at best. It’s like if he said a particular chemical isn’t harmful in “normal quanities” and you pointed out that drinking 14 gallons a day would kill you. The only reasonable response would be “so?”
well then do away with the analogies and similies and metaphores and look at it for what it is…broadcast power, plain and simple. In it’s very early stages of development at that.
Like I said, the backyard brainstormer can’t just go get some plutonium to screw around with…and isn’t privy to the latest and greatest in technological achievements. As scientific as y’all wanna wax, you still only know a fraction of what is to be known about the whole science, let alone the technology. People who have studied their whole lives are grinding their brains 'round the clock on this stuff…and it took all of history to charge a 3 watt device from 3 feet away. Cecil was very wrong to say broadcast power is becoming increasingly unfeasible…insert predictable "those weren’t his exact words argument*…I’d say it was very unbecoming of his style to do so…that’s all. Sheeit, it’s technology…they’re having international holographic conferences using googles of terabytes of computer memory nowadays…it’s yesterday’s science fantasy come true. And they’re lighting christmas trees without wires.
Good idea? personally, I wouldn’t want to spend any prolonged period of time within ten feet of this gadget…but then again if I had my way I would’t be bombarded by all the wireless radio uhf morse all around me this very second either…maybe this laptop is a hallucination? maybe I’m pushing imaginary buttons on my knee under a bridge somewhere…
I think Nicola Tesla would disagree that we’re in the “very early stages.” After more than a century of work on the problem, someone’s achieved an efficiency of .0005% or so? I notice you haven’t disputed my math on that.
Hmmm. “All of history.” That meshes well with your “very early stages” comment. And generating that 3 watts takes only a few thousand watts of power, right?
It wasn’t even a halfway correct approximation of his words. He never stated nor implied that the feasability was decreasing.
Really? Cite, please?
Look, just get to the bottom line here:
There is technology to broadcast power for short distances. This isn’t news. Tesla worked out the fundamentals over 100 years ago. Cecil didn’t dispute it, and none of us here are disputing it.
It isn’t efficient and can’t be used over long distances. You haven’t disputed this, nor does Powercast.
So it sounds like you haven’t disagreed with anything Cecil said, and Powercast hasn’t either. How, precisely, does that “pwn” him?
aye caramba…is this a political forum? you’re one of “those”…I’ll humor this typical exchange…
and why would I? I surprised myself the other day just remembering how to multiply fractions. Yes, very early stages of a development. The copper coils in the capacitors, that’s old hat. The wall socket is old school too. The people that invented those are dead. Tesla’s dead, he’s not saying anything on the idea. How much energy does it take to charge the 3 watt device? That has nothing to do with what I’m saying. Obviously less than a stick of dynamite’s worth, otherwise top dogs at fortune 500 companies wouldn’t be investing hundreds of millions into the idea. I’m no fan of corporate shmoozing, but they don’t throw that kind of money around on a whim.
read the last paragraph of his article. You’re playing the exact-words game just like I predicted somebody would. Tesla’s ideas are still being toyed with everywhere, all the time. You have to know that much.
You caught me. I’m lying. I have every reason to lie about this, because it’s so important to me. Rather than dig through my history, why not hit the texts yourself.
a device exists that broadcasts power…you can buy one today. Cecil scoffed the idea from the beginning to the end of his article. He didn’t even humor what the kinetic sculptor guy might have built. I say he should have recognized the obvious potential for advancements. That’s called being PWNED.
