morph999 said:
No one has heard about Intel developing this technology? I don't know how they do it but apparently it's possible. Does anyone have one of those Soniccare electric toothbrushes? Somehow, the charger is all plastic and so is the toothbrush but I put the toothbrush in the charger and it charges up despite the lack of visible metal prongs anywhere. I don't know how it charges it. The electricity must be traveling through the air somehow? I know it sounds crazy. What if electricity could travel through the air like radio waves? Then it would definitely be possible.
It *does* travel thru the air *as* radio waves. Not necessarily at radio frequencies, but it is the same thing--induction.
That's how inductive heating stoves work, and it's how any inductive charger works.
But those are all close-proximity devices, as the power loss increases exponentially with distance, IIRC. In general those types of chargers are also not focused, so they will scatter power across a wide path, making them even less efficient.
In order to actively run an ebike from such a thing farther away than you could practically run an extension cord, you would most likely require more power input to the transmitter than you could get into the house wiring in the first place.
If you beamed that power using microwave (radio waves, basically) transmission for better efficiency and ease of controlling it's direction, then you could cook things with the beam that were between the bike and the source.
So sure, you *could* do it, but not safely, not inside a city.
EDIT (ADDED): FWIW, I built a tricorder prop similar to the ones on Star Trek TNG back around the late 80's or early 90's (can't remember exactly when anymore), and built an inductive charger for the NiCd cells I used to run it's blinky lights. It worked pretty well until one day I guess I didn't put it on the charger right, and it induced heating into the batteries and exploded them. The previous version of it had exploded because I used a two-prong charger for it and accidentally reversed it (I forgot to install a protection diode).
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