A question about a charging base

Factual Questions
1

I have a doodad for my face that is cordless, and thus rechargeable. The other day, I dropped the base on the floor, and upon picking it up, gave it a once over to make sure that I hadn’t broken anything. Looking at the spot where the appliance would make contact with the charger, I realized that it there was only a small plastic nipple (for lack of a better word) but no metal contact. Looking at the underside of the doodad, there appears to be a small screw type contact that makes contact with the nipply bit. (Such technical explanations before my coffee). At first I wondered how it charged it all, given there is no metal-on-metal contact, but didn’t waste much time thinking about it. Something in my brain was whispering some hoo-hah about magnets, but I didn’t really give it any notice. At any rate, I went to replug it in, and decided to do a quick experiment. Lowering the doodad slowly onto the charging base, the charging light came on about 1/8 of an inch before it had actually made contact with anything at all - it was charging through the air.

How?

(If at all possible, explain to the same precise degree of technicality as the preceding. :wink: )

2

Well, the plastic nipply whatchamajig has a metal hoodjamaflip inside, as you suspected. What’s going on is induction. The charger has some wire coil wrapped around an iron core, and an AC current is passed through the wire. This produces an oscillating magnetic field thingummy which in turn generates an AC current in a similar coil in your face doodad. This is then probably converted into a DC current inside the doodad, thus providing usable doodad power.

3

Beautiful - that made perfect sense! (And, my brain was actually right. How about that!)