You know all of those cords and cables and wires that we use to connect our stuff to the electrical grid so they’ll, you know, work? Imagine a day when energy flies through the air like wifi, utterly cord-free. Well, imagine no more! That day is coming!
Hey, everybody, get this. We're coming probably to a city near you this year. We've got all of our shows scheduled and Chuck's gonna tell you about them right now.
That's right. We're gonna be in Medford, Massachusetts, Washington, DC, and New York City on May twenty, thirtieth and thirty first. Right then we're going to be going to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis on the seventh, eighth, and ninth of August. Yeah, and they're gonna wind it up in Durham, North Carolina on the fifth of September, and then Atlanta on the seventh.
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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just futzing around having fun doing what we do. You're on Stuff you Should Know that right tex Stuff Edition It is heads off to John Strickland, who's still doing it all these.
Years, we're all still doing it.
I know they won't let us stop.
My god, we're still doing it.
Yeah. I think he's in year fifteen now.
Uh I was, Yeah, he was like shortly after us, right.
Yeah, yeah, right out on the heels. I can always feel them breathing on our neck. It's really gross. He has a very humid breath.
Gross.
So yeah, the reason you said this is Tech Stuff Edition is because this is super tech. Ye, there's a lot of technical stuff that we're going to dance around. It's future facing m hm, and it's the kind of thing that everybody hopes will hurry up and come but probably doesn't know very much about. So here we go tech stuff.
Ahoy, everyone except me.
You don't want this.
I know. The whole time I was reading it, I was like, man, it just sounds like a lot of work to just not have to plug in your phone.
Yeah, it is a lot of word to just not have to plug in your phone. But I mean, haven't you ever like looked around your house and been like, these wires are just so stupid, Like I hate having chords and stuff you have to plug in. You have to like put something where the outlet is or else you have to use a drop cord. It's just it's a it's a little more of a pain if you stop and think about it, then it appears because we're used to it. We've lived under the tyranny of courts for so long. It's normal to us. But it's not normal, Chuck.
Oh, so you're thinking of future where nothing in your house is plugged in precisely? Oh no, sure, great, I.
Can't wait for that day. I cannot wait for that. And not only that, there's a there's the The last thing we're going to talk about is what I'm really jazzed about.
Uh Okay, I don't want to spoil.
It, so don't don't don't bring it up. But everybody, just stay with us through the end and you'll be rewarded.
Yeah, And what we're talking about is wireless electricity, or more appropriately, wireless power transfer. Because if you think about your your cell phone that you can just sit on a little pad and charge it wirelessly. That thing's plugged into the wall. So what you're doing is you're transferring power from one thing to another.
But imagine if that that charger, that pad that you lay your phone on is your house or no, it was like mounted on the ceiling of your of your room. Yeah, and when you walked into that room, immediately your phone just started charging in your pocket. You turned your TV on and it was going full blast, no problem. And then you look behind it and you faint dead away because it's not even plugged in, and you think there's a ghost in your house or God is messing with you.
I just I don't think it. Jazz is me, like it, Jazz is you.
That's fine.
I'm not going to try to convince I've never looked behind a TV on a wall to look for gable, so.
Oh, well, then you haven't.
But we can talk about the history of it, right, because this is not a new thing. People have been trying to do this basically since there was electricity.
Yeah, I would have traced it back to Tesla. Tesla was very, famously, very interested in trying to figure out how to create wireless electricity that he planned on sending through the Earth from one end to the other, basically a global wireless electrical network. Right. He didn't, as we'll see. But what I didn't realize is it predates him even.
Yeah, before him, there was a German physicist name Heinrich Hertz, who he was a guy who said, hey, manet, electromagnetic waves are a thing. I can prove it. And he was able to send energy in the form of radio as between two antennas in the eighteen eighties, which predated Tesla's little party trick that I think all of us probably saw in science or not saw but read about in science class, or saw on the prestige. Yeah, some point where he's like, I'm going to make this light bulb light up, Uncle Fester style, except I won't even put it in my mouth.
Right, And it was a different light bulb. It was the predecessor of the fluorescent light. So the gases, when they came into the presence of a either a magnetic field or electrical current, it would glow, it would light up. But he did actually demonstrate this. He showed that you can loved it, you can wirelessly power things. And yeah, this is still the nineteenth century. There's a legend that a lot of times is repeated as fact by a lot of legitimate sources, but supposedly there's no actual evidence of this happening. There's a legend that he lit up a crop of light bulbs, like I think twenty five miles away from his research station in Colorado, and that would be like the far and away the longest transmission of wireless power in history. No one's even come close to that here in the twenty first century. So they think that it probably didn't happen. But he was trying to do that, but he didn't actually do it.
I have a question, sure, will you remember what's it called when you say like a gaga lo geese or whatever? We did that short stuff on it whatever? You just said, a crop of light bulbs? Is that the term for a lot of light bulbs?
I say, I say it is? Sure?
Oh okay, I thought that.
Was a pronoun. Was it a collective pronoun?
I don't know. But did you just make that up? Or is that a thing?
I mean, it just came out of my mouth.
Okay, do you like it? Sure? Sounds like you're growing light bulbs out in the field or something.
By light bulbs. They'll say, you got a crop of light bulbs here I can buy.
I love it. I mean that's probably a use for crop. I just didn't know about.
I know, I will say, hey, man, clerk me a crop of light bulbs.
So Tesla's got his party tricks happening. May or may not have done this to a crop of light bulbs over a greater distance. World War two rolls around, and all of a sudden, we're using radar and we're learning how to generate like more improved and more directional and precise beams of microwaves and things like that. In nineteen sixty four, and you can watch this video on YouTube. It's kind of fun to watch a William Brown of Raytheon kept up a little sort of I mean, it's a helicopter, looks like it's made out of a rector set maybe yeah, about sixty feet off the ground for ten hours with no wires.
Yeah, And they could have gone longer, but the novelty wore off, so he just stopped after ten hours.
Yeah, He's like, all right, does everyone get it right?
Can we go home? Now?
Like? How many times in part to pass this hula hoop over it? Right?
Right? So that that was a huge, huge accomplishment, And I believe the same William Brown of Raytheon created another record that stood until from nineteen seventy five until from what I can tell, this past January, like a month ago. In nineteen seventy five, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab transmitted I think thirty five kilowatts of power, and like fifty percent of what they transmitted I think a quarter of a mile away or something like that, was received and lit up another crop of light bulbs. That's what people do, They light up crops of light bulbs when they're demonstrating what matters electrical.
Trans because they light up and everyone's like, ooh.
Yeah, and actually I'm sorry. It was more than a quarter mile. I think it was basically a slat mile. It was like one point five to four kilometers.
Wow.
Yeah, so that's a really long way. And it stood from nineteen seventy five till twenty twenty four, almost fifty years, and then I believe the Korean Space Agency just broke it by like three tenths of a kilometer. Really, it's not like we've jumped by leaps and bounds. And almost if I were William Brown would be like, really, you could just wait until you could beat it by like ten times that.
Yeah, it's not very sports have been.
Like no, it's like if you made the world's biggest bagel, right, and somebody made another world's biggest bagel by like ten more pounds. What's the point Are we really just gonna go back and forth year after year with a new world's biggest bagel? No, you need to really like double it up at least before you break somebody's record. It's just common courtesy.
You know, how to really get their goat. It's just drop one extra poppy seat on top o me has more mats.
Man, I would just start bleeding out of my ears.
So this can happen in a couple of ways, and who knows what the future holds. We are going to get to that stuff like you were talking about, Like you walk in and everything's just like charging the second U inner. But these days we have what's called nearfield and what I like to call further afield, but farfield wireless transfer. When you think of nearfield, you're already doing that. If you have an electric toothbrush, if you have a modern smartphone that can wirelessly charge. We'll talk about the two different ways those are happening, but those are examples of nearfield. And I think a lot of people like I was, are amazed to know that when you put that little electric toothbrush on its stand. Unless I'm wrong, That little nubbin is only there to keep that thing upright. It's not conducting electricity at all, is it?
As far as I know, No, because the whole thing's fully sealed, so the electricity is going from plastic to plastic via waves.
So it looks like a little like a charging stump. But you could just assume lay it down on top of that thing, right.
I don't know. I think for an electric toothbrush, what we're talking about at this point is called wireless in duction. In charging, it's the same kind of principle that you use for an induction cook top. Magnetic fields are generated that create an electric current that's passed to another coil on the other side that's received, and then that's attached to a battery that gets recharged. Right, And I think for something like a toothbrush, it has to be really precise, so the coils have to basically line up as close to one another as possible, but they don't have to physically touch, which is why you can encase it in plastic and seal it off and use it for an application that's around water, like an electric toothbrush. But I do think that has to be precise. I think you can get a little more jiggy with it with the resonant induction charging, where the coils are bigger or there's more coils. But they also have I don't know how they do this, but they make the frequencies that come out of one coil and go into received by the other perfectly in sync, so that the the coils are basically tuned to one another. So you can actually keep something a little further away and still get a charge out of it.
Okay, so I was wrong, then that stump serves the purpose of probably aligning it perfectly, probably, although it's not actually you know, like a charging stump. You probably could not just set your toothbrush down with a butt in near that stump, you know what I'm saying.
No, but if you're talking about like your phone on like a pad charger, you just kind of set it down. Sure, Sure it'll still charge, even though it's not like perfectly centered on the charger, depending on the type of charging station.
Yeah, and I have seen those to be fairly hit or miss through the years. Yes, the little charging pad sometimes they work. Sometimes you've got to move your phone around it and it makes more sense now than I know how it works why you may have to move your phone around. And it's also slower than like a wall charge, which you know is one of the the humps to get over that we'll get.
To it is, and they have basically gotten over that hump. So for a while I didn't realize this, but Nokia was the first to be like, hey, everybody, check out our wireless charge. Well back in twenty twelve, I had no idea. Yeah, and that set off like a whole stampede where every phone company wanted to create a wireless charging pad, right, and so everybody was coming up with different protocols, different structures on how to make this happen, and finally a group called the Wireless Power Consortium basically emerged with their cheese standard key like the Chinese traditional medicine concept of the life force that flows through.
Everything, Yeah, like gigong exactly.
Yeah, that's also associated with this wireless power transfer to where everybody builds it the exact same way. Right, So that's pretty cool. But it wasn't like you had to get it pretty much dead on to get a decent charge out of it, like you said it was. It transferred far less power, I think about five watts rather than the standard fifteen eighteen or more that you get from plugging your phone in. Yeah, so they came up with G two point zero and you know the new Apple Apple chargers that like snap onto the back of your your phone with a magnet.
No, oh, really, do you have my iPhone? I do?
Is it fairly new?
Uh? Let me see what I usually get, like every third or fourth version.
Okay, you may or may not have this. I don't know. I couldn't even tell you what if you told me the the which one it was, I'd be like, oh, actually I don't know. So I don't know why you've been asked to that. But the newer iPhones, yeah, that should have it. I think that's what I have too. Yeah, it is and it works. So there's a there's a type of charge you can get called a mag safe charger.
Yeah, yeah, I got that.
Okay, so then this you have what I'm talking about. It snaps into place, so like magnet, it holds the phone in place, right, Yeah, I got one of those in my car. Okay, So what that's doing is it's holding the coil to the coil, so that in addition to them being powerful and tuned to the same frequency, they're also precisely interlocked, so the transfer of power is way more efficient. And now they're reaching like power transfer like fifteen, eighteen, twenty watts, just like you would have with a traditional like pluging cord.
Yeah, and you know what, I'm not much of a what do you call it? Buzz marketer, but I have to say the car charger from Spiegel is what I like. The catalog I don't know, it's SPI E G E L. Is that spelled to save? Yeah, spell the same. I mean their charger. It's fifty bucks and it works flawlessly, and it looks good.
And it just says a pompadour.
Well it sticks on, you know, but the little stick on base is smaller than other ones I've seen, so if you know, sometimes your car you can't get it in like a great place or whatever. But anyway, I think it works great, and so I do actually use this technology very nice.
Okay, so make safe so you have that. But the thing is is we've actually kind of gone backwards in that sense where you're getting more power transfer again wirelessly, like you're not plugging your phone into anything. It's laying on something that is connected to a power source, but your phone's not plugged in, so it is wireless power transfer. But rather than making it easier to just toss your phone onto a pad or a table or something like that and it immediately starts charging, it has to be more precise. Hence the magnets. Sure, we want to be going in the opposite direction to where your phone doesn't even really have to be anywhere near that charging pad to get a charge, and that's where people are moving toward. But the cool thing about the sheet two point zero is that this protocol is it's spreading out so that if you had, say like an Android phone and iPhone, you would be able to use the same charger for both, which is brand new. That's a new thing, and that's a really great way for the industry to be going because it cuts out on packaging, cuts out a manufacturing, it cuts down on all sorts of stuff it costs. So it's a good direction to be going in.
Yeah, and divided houses can come together once again exactly this kind of charging. There is a future application that might be kind of cool. If you drive an electric car to where you pull in your garage and you just pull over charging Matt much like your telephone basically to where you wouldn't have to plug it in or whatever. Again, for me, it's like it's no trouble to plug something in, so it's not that big of a deal. But I imagine these little conveniences are a big deal to a lot of people for sure.
I think the one that I'm really excited about is like that plus application, which is putting those kind of coils that transmit electricity wirelessly to a receiver coil in your car in asphalt, so when you're driving on the highway, your car is actually charging. That would do it. That would do it for gas engine cars people, you would have to just be a total jerk to have like an internal combustion engine after that point, because that's the big problem with it. Like do you remember that stupid electric car that I rented in Seattle and drove to Portland and I had to sit for forty five minutes in this little town doing nothing but waiting for the stupid rental car to charge. That is no way to live. But if I had just been able to drive down what is that five? The five, and that what they call it.
I think that's a California think.
Okay, well, if I had just been able to drive down I five and my car's charging the whole time, perfect, there's no reason for any any fossil fuel car all.
Now, is the idea there that every road in America has is redone with charging capabilities underneath it.
What I would guess is they would you would probably just need to do one lane.
And then and then maybe only on expressways or something.
Right, So one lane on an expressway and you like, if your car has over some amount of charge, like the Cultural Folk Way would be, you don't go on that lane. You leave it open for people who really.
Need to charge the car. That'll go over well exactly in the United States. That'll that'll become the uh look at that jerk lane.
Exactly. Yeah, it'll be like the new driving slow in the fast lane thing.
I look forward to that day. I'm gonna be old and feeble and I just you can send me updates on how things are going from the road.
But that's but that's all. But you just need one lane like that on a stretch of highway, and I think that would do it, at least at first, all right, I we get this done like tomorrow, all.
Right, But in the meantime we should take a break, okay, because we're gonna have to buy some tools. Okay, all right, we'll be right back. All right, So we're back. Josh's boy. Look at the smile on your face thinking about driving untold miles without having to stop.
I mean, it's just going to change everything.
Peeing in a gatorade bottle. You're not stopping for.
Nothing, No, no way.
Just think of the cannonball run I have.
I'm just gonna take this opportunity, all right, But yes, the cannonball run would work really well with that. Yeah, if you I see this enough that I feel like this is worth mentioning. If you ever find yourself in an emergency situation where you have to pee into a water bottle or a mountain dew bottle or something like that, that's fine, that's fine. Like that is a thing you have to do sometimes. I never have, but people do it, and I get it. But you don't leave that on the side of the road for somebody else to pick up. That is yours to hang on to until you're able to dispose of it. In the trash where it belongs. Yeah, put the cap on, get it out of your way, make sure it doesn't spill or anything like that. But you do not set that outside of your car until it goes into the trash. That is, it's tied for first with throwing your dental floss stick down on the ground for someone else to pick up.
Yeah. The only time I will do that is camping. If it's rainy or really really cold, then I'm in my tent. I will have the forethought to bring an appropriate bottle smart so I can just get out of my sleeping bag and you know, and ppe in the bottle.
A big wide mouth bottle, Am I right?
And then I just leave it there in the woods.
No, no, of course not okay, okay, I was shocked.
All right. So we're back and we're getting started now on far field wireless transfer. Because your phone on your nightstand, that's great. Driving over a mat in your garage would be amazing, But you really are cooking with gas, as they say, ironically, not with gas. If you can start figuring out how to do this over longer and longer frequencies, and they are figuring that stuff out by ways of electromagnetic waves or which you know, what you do is you send it out as an electromagnetic wave, it transmits it as a beam, then it converts it to power or through laser beams.
Yes, so you can do laser you can do millimeter waves, you can do I think microwaves is are the big ones because they'll I mean they'll they're electromagnetic waves, so they're an energy carrier and all you need is a way to convert electricity to electromagnetic energy and then a way to convert it back on the other side, and then you've just transmitted power from a distance.
That's what they're possible already, right, They just absolutely haven't figured out a great consumer application because it's not efficient or great jeap.
That's the problem. It's not cheap and it's inefficient. So yes that I believe there are consumer products out there, just a handful of them that you can spend a lot of money on and be like, look, this thing's charging. It takes forty eight hours to get to five percent, but it's charging wirelessly. That's where we're at right now. But it is possible. People have figured it out. But just like with that CHI protocol, with like the charging pads that the industry is in the same place right now with figuring out a a common protocol for everybody to use now. So it's kind of the wild West any they're trying to figure out the best way to efficiently do it and also safely do it, as we'll see.
Yeah, in one application they can use it on today that does make sense. And Livia dug this up and helped out, and this one makes a lot of sense. With RFID tags radio frequency identification tags, and you've probably heard of these. There's all kinds of applications for these, but one of the big applications is if you have like a warehouse full of stuff, instead of having a barcode on every single thing that you have to walk up to with a bar code scanner like several inches away or whatever, you can track your inventory more efficiently because it can if you do it through RFID, you can group things together, you can scan a bunch of stuff at once, you can scan it from three, four or five feet away, maybe you don't have to be right there up on it. So using this technology to have little RFID tags that don't require batteries is a realistic application.
Yeah, and you just said a mouthful with that. They don't require batteries, because that's a big reason why you would want to use something like wireless power transfer is with the little RFID tags, they have an antenna in them, but they don't actually have any power. They're not internally powered. But when that radio wave hits it, it carries just enough energy to make contact with it, give it a little juice. There's a modulator inside that takes that radio wave and converts it back to shoot back out to the scanner with a little with its number associated with it. All without batteries. It just uses They figured out how to use the energy in that electromagnetic wave in the form of radio waves, and so we're already doing this again. It's just really inefficient. But they're onto something with that because you know, we've entered the Internet of Things. I think we did a whole episode on that way. I'll bet that needs so much updating.
Yeah, probably so.
But all the little like sensors in your refrigerator, all the little little gadgets, the thing that connects your refrigerator, the to Wi Fi. Now all of these things are like really tiny little components and the smaller the component. The harder it is to put a decent battery in there, and you also kind of want a rechargeable battery too, but some of them don't have batteries. They still are going to report that say like you're running it low on ketchup or something like that. Wireless energy would be able to do the same thing that we're doing with RFID tags, but with the little sensors and chargers that make up the Internet of things that make your home a smart home.
Yeah, or to not have to have a follow up surgeries to replace batteries in your pacemaker would be pretty.
Remarkable, Yeah, Because that's another like really big part of this, in addition to like the whole g whiz aspect of it and the no chords they which I'm really happy about. The bigger point in the near term is that it will do weigh with disposable batteries. All will have is rechargeable batteries. If we have any batteries at all. Some things won't need it, but things that do need a battery to keep going without a power source, those will be rechargeable and they'll be more easily replenished with wireless power transmission. So you can say goodbye to buying batteries at the store. They'll just be gone and the earth will breathe a deep, deep, happy sigh.
Yeah. Well that is, and now we're getting into sort of your utopia, which is these companies that are exploring initially probably like a room system and then eventually a whole home system to where what you described at the beginning of the show would be possible, where you can walk in your house the second you walk in, your phone is charging in your pocket. If you have a smart home and you have like powered blinds on your windows, those are always charged. They're not plugged in. If you have remote control for your TV and everything else in your home, they actually have a tiny battery made by the company. In this case, I mean, we can go back and talk about Guru, but there's a company called Oca inc Ossia, and they have a system called the Kota system Ota, and that's the idea is you have a unit in your house. It looks sort of like a well it's a little smaller than a board game and a little more square, and it's just a little transmitting stand and it shoots power across the room. It bounces it around and you have receivers that are attached to your devices, like your receiver would be built into your phone case in the case of a phone. Or they're making what they're calling forever batteries, which is a little double a battery that actually has a tiny receiver in it, so that remote control battery will never die and it essentially just makes any device in your house compatible with this transmitter. The one thing I wondered about, though, was like, well, when is duras El gonna buy them out and just shut it down?
Oh? Man, I hope we don't run into something like that. I mean, big battery is a major threat to democracy, true, but I don't know. I think I don't know. I think these other startups have some pretty good clout too.
Well, should we talk about Guru then, sure? Jumping back a little, Guru.
Got together with Motorola and two years ago they debuted basically a charger, an over the air charger, a wireless power charger that was very similar in design. It seems like to that Coda charger, and it can I think, charge four phones at once up to ten feet away with one hundred degree field of vision, which is pretty cool. It's still not out to market. I think people are like, yeah, but you guys didn't mention how efficient it is, like how many watts does it transfer? And motoroles like stop asking questions and they went back to the drawing board. But the code of stuff seems like it's so close it might actually already be available in some areas.
And didn't see it for sale yet, but I might be wrong.
They are touting their wireless power security camera, the archos AR.
Now that's a good use, yeah for sure. Yeah, because if you have a house where you didn't have like you if you have security cameras whatever, you didn't have them built in and wired initially, and you're just like, oh, I want to get a Nest cameras or any other brand, Like you got to plug those things in. Yeah, and if they're outdoor cameras, you're either running wire to an outdoor plug that someone could just unplug right or you're drilling holes in your wall. So I think this is a really realistic, like worthy application.
It's part of like my week to go around and connect the charger, the outdoor charger to the outdoor cameras and just top them off because they're not hardwired. So yeah, I agree with you. I think it's a great application. Now imagine that for your TV.
Although kind of make one complaint real quick about security cameras. Yeah, they're great to have. They can help out with different things and help out with neighbors. Hey I saw someone and them like breaking into my car. Your neighbor has a camera pointing, like we can all help. But in my experience in Atlanta, with car break ins and house break ins, I've had both, they don't help you catch anybody. They don't help stop anyone. So it's almost more like, hey, you want to watch some guys steal your stuff? Right, Yeah, police can't really do much with them, and it certainly doesn't keep anyone from doing anything. So I don't know it's good for more than just like break in security. I think there are a lot of if you have dogs and you're like, want to see what your dog's doing, is eating the wrong thing or throwing up or you know, it's beneficial for a lot of different reasons, but catching a bad guy at my experience, security cameras don't really help with that.
No, you're likelier to have some weird footage from your camera end up on the national news or America's funniest.
Toying exactly catch a UFO or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are likelier to catch a UFO than somebody stealing packages off of your porch with your security camera.
Sort of. The real deal here is like one day when they can come up with a system where it's built into Amtrak and subways and airports, so all of these sort of heavily used public spaces are just charging everyone's everything.
Yes, And the problems are the same with the wireless phone charging just across the board. Anytime we're talking about wireless power transfer, it's the inefficiency is what's the big stumbling block right now. Yeah, the further you get away from the charger, Yeah, the less power the receiver is getting. The most i've seen, I think that ar Chose security camera gets like less than a wt thirty feet away at its maximum distance, which is still I mean thirty feet is a decent.
Decent Is that enough to power it?
I think as long as it had you probably would have to charge it first, plug in when you first get it, and then if it had continuous contact it was constantly receiving it.
I don't know.
I would hope that they would design it so that it uses less energy than that can get it its maximum distance. I don't know, but that could be a challenge right now. That's the kind of inefficiency problems that it's running into. I think typically when you try to transmit electricity through an electromagnetic beam, you get about twenty percent on the other end of what you sent out. And that's even a step backwards from what the Jet Propulsion Lab did. They got forty nine percent across a mile. So I guess they just didn't tell anybody how to do what they did, because we're still catching up to what they did in nineteen seventy five. But so even if you're like, okay, we're getting twenty percent of the electricity that we are generating converting to an electromagnetic wave, transmitting to another receiver, and then converting back to electricity, we're losing eighty percent of that. That is ridiculously inefficient. And people in the industry, which is basically just nothing but startups and venture capitalists right now are saying, well, well, yes, that's true, that's ridiculously inefficient. But we're talking about replacing batteries right here, and the cost of the electricity that is wasted is like five thousand times less than the cost of a double a disposable battery. So really, if you look at it in terms like that, it's we're not that far off from it being cost effective if we can use it to replace batteries.
Yeah, And one of the cool pieces of or cool parts of this tech is let's say you have a room that's set up to charge everything in there. It's apparently with this OSA system, it is it's bouncing all over the room, pinging like one hundred times a second. So it's not like if you turn your back, it's not shooting waves through your body and we'll get to safety here after the break. But regardless of that, it bounces around you. If you have your phone up to your head, it will bounce around your head off the back wall to hit the back of that phone.
Oh really, the OSA system does.
That, Yeah, supposedly, and only delivers power like if something needs it, so it's not constantly on and supposedly we'll prioritize whatever's in the room that needs juice the.
Most smart Yeah, because just like RFI D tags that chargers constantly surveying the stuff in the room that has right a coder receiver attached to it and saying like, where are you at, what's your levels? You need some you need some juice. I got some for you. They're like, no, not right now. I'm good, okay, but I'm here if you need it kind of thing. Yeah, So I didn't know that it actually went around people, though, which is a big deal, because that's a genuine concern at this point. If you're beaming electricity throughout a home, if you're creating an electrical field that's just indiscriminately moving everywhere in a room, it's going to come in contact with things that are conductive. So, like someone one issue I've seen raised is the idea that you're just yeah, your pots and pants are going to get super hot just sitting in the drawer in your kitchen. Yeah, if you're using microwaves, if the microwave is powerful enough it can cook you from the inside out, that doesn't seem to be a threat. I mean, the people who are designing these things are like well aware of the dangers of microwaves cooking human beings. So the stuff they're they're like deliberately setting these things at levels that wouldn't be able to do that, but it just kind of goes to show like that's the stage that where i'd is like, that's still technically possible with what we're doing. Laser beams can still shoot you in the eye. They could still burn your skin.
Yeah, those are the ones that don't hang around the room. If it's laser base, then you have to have a direct line.
Yes, and supposedly if you get in between the laser and the receiver, it just automatically turns off. But you know, there's still that moment that singes your hair.
Yeah, or you could have the high tech mirrored system like any bank security in the movies, or I'm sorry, museum security. Probably, Oh yeah, like that, like shooting the lasers all around grid.
Yeah, for sure, that's awesome.
And then before you know it, Catherine Zada Jones is slinking underneath one of those things.
Yeah, and you're like, what are you doing in my kitchen?
You're too old to be slinking around like that lady. You know, pull a muscle.
So what else is there?
Well, we should take a break probably, oh yeah, yeah, and then we'll come back and bush up with the serious future right after this.
All right, Chuck, So we're talking about future applications that like, this is the real whiz bang stuff that I'm just really jazzed about because we're approaching that dream that Tesla had of fulfilling that dream of basically creating a world where everything's just getting wireless power all the time.
Yeah. So there's a group called the Persistent Optical. This is a plan the Persistent and we love our acronyms. Is one of the best assistant optical wireless energy relay. What does that spell?
Power? What have you got power?
It's a great one. I love it when it perfectly aligns like that. And that was proposed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which we all know is DARPA. And this is a situation where they could beam electricity from a web of aircraft flying above onto the ground into let's say, either you know Libya's aid a conflict zone, but maybe a disaster zone where there's no power on the ground anymore and people are dying. Potentially a web of aircraft above could shoot this stuff down to the ground.
Yes, but it does have immediate military applications because just like how you know, people were saying, like, wait a minute, we have twenty percent efficiency of the electricity where we're transmitting here. Yeah, the same thing is running into this problem too, Like there's a loss of efficiency. But even if there's a massive loss of efficiency, it's still more efficient than literally flying in tanks of oil and gasoline. Yeah, into a conflicts owner disaster area, filling up generators and then plugging into those. It'd be still much more efficient than that. And because it'd be more efficient, because it would just give such a ridiculous advantage on the battlefield. This is probably coming down the pike.
Yeah, but like you said, they have a leg up because it's so inefficient. The alternative that we've been using is that it doesn't have to be as efficient as like a home version that we're talking about for people to get on board, because that's one of the problems is people aren't gonna start buying this stuff up. Even that cool system we were talking about out for like one room, you'd have to be a really you have to have a lot of money and be a super into early tech adoption to just kind of show it off to friends. At this point, to make it mass marketed, they have to make it so everybody sees the benefit and can afford it, and that's not the case with these potential military applications.
No, but it's sad but true that the military research and development has trickled down to a lot of really important consumer items for short years too. And this could be the same exact thing.
Yeah.
Absolutely, there's another There's a group in New Zealand called EMROD and they are basically creating line of sight towers to where that just beams from one to the other, basically like those bonfire towers and Lord of the Rings. Yeah, it's just the same thing, but rather than like line of sight, you're transmitting electromagnetic waves carrying energy, and then at the other end, or probably at each of one of these transmitters, you're able to convert it to usable electricity and then you know, power up a disaster area, a rural area, whatever area you want to.
I don't remember that from Lord of the Rings. Is it just a signal over long distance? Yeah, like that, like a bit visually signal.
Yeah, from like mountaintop to mountain top. They had like a bomb fire and then at anybody else noticed it and they let their bombfire and it was like a transmission of information. That's what we're talking about in much the same way that Wi Fi transmits information. We're talking about the same exact thing, using the same essentially kind of electromagnetic spectrum, but instead to transmit energy rather than information.
Yeah. Absolutely, Like people don't freak out over a Wi Fi being being through their house and it's essentially the same thing.
Some people do, like Chuck McGill from Wood.
No, no, no, I haven't seen that, but I know there are people.
Yeah, So there's a really exciting application with that New Zealand structure where to tower. Yeah, the emrod one is they could you could transfer wind energy from remote places to an urban area that really needs that electricity, all those renewables. So it's like the fatal flaws like you they they're too far away from the grid. Nope, not any longer. You can transmit it wirelessly through New Zealand at least.
Well talking about being too far away, too far away. The think about being an outer space and having a web of satellites outfitted with these huge solar panels far above the Earth that could transmit energy down as microwaves. That is not out of the realm of possibility. In fact, it's even been done just last year in twenty twenty three, cal Tech, Yes, Caltech Space Power Project, they sent a detectable amount of energy from a satellite to Earth.
Wow.
You know, I don't think they were charging a car or anything like that, but they showed that it's possible.
Yeah, and get this, Chuck, I mean, aside from the infrastructure costs involved, that's free energy. You're just taking solar energy and transmitting it, even if it's just a little bit and there's a massive loss of efficiency. You're not burning coal to get that. You're just you just built a satellite that's harvesting it out and outer space, which is a huge advantage, you know.
Totally.
Yeah, that's like the first step toward a Dyson sphere. Really, if you think about it, I love it. That's the one I was jazz the most.
About the satellite one.
Yes, harvesting solar injury in space and transmitting it as a usable power down on Earth. That is jazz worthy for sure.
Totally.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else?
All right, Well, Chuck has nothing else. Neither do I. We'll just have to sit and wait and see what the future holds. And while we do that, let's say It's time for listener now.
This is an email again from our old buddy Mark Konts. Marking Gale counts in the Ohio area, longtime supporters and pals, and this is what Marcu has to say. And you might remember Mark. He's an art therapist, Hey guys, licensed art therapists and the director of mental health services at the Clark County Education Service Center in Springfield, Ohio. My team work extremely hard to provide Sources of Strength to as many students as we can in the state for free. Most people assume that suicide prevention work focuses on sad, shock and trauma, but we run a program in our schools called Sources of Strength, which capital s capital s by the way, which focuses on hope, help and strength. Sources of Strength is made possible to us through funding and support from the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation and Prevention First. Sources of Strength is more than just suicide preventions, an overall wellness program focusing on eight protective factors, some of them being positive friends, healthy activities, generosity, stuff like that. It is free to all Ohio students and can be started in the classroom as early skindergarten. Meanwhile, the junior high and high school students can work with adult advisors of the program to run school wide campaigns and events. Only skimming the surface here, guys, So if you live in Ohio, you should look up Sources of Strength Ohio dot org to learn more about it and become one of the mini schools participating. If you don't live in Ohio, you can still be a part of the movement that's taking place in the US, Canada and Australia about going to Sources of Strength dot org. And that is from our old buddy Mark Goods.
Well, thanks a lot for that. Mark. Good to hear from you as always. And if you want to be like Mark and talk about some amazing stuff you're doing so we can tell everybody else about it. We love that kind of thing. You can wrap it up and send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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