A Wirelessly Powered Lightbulb

this sounds a lot like something called
Evanescent wave coupling from an article
found in wikipedia. Maybe there are some
detail differences that I don't see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer

This project is a dungheap.

First off, it runs at 10 MHz, which is forbidden by FCC rules because it is a reserved time standard frequency used by NIST.  Should have used the unlicensed 13.56 MHz ISM band instead.  You can talk about near fields and evanescent waves all you want.  This thing is still a magnetic dipole, and it still radiates some energy, too much at this power level.  Did anyone tune a shortwave receiver to 10 MHz and walk around the experiment with it? Or would that be too obvious?

45% efficiency is nothing to crow about.  It's lousy, requiring 133 watts to drive a 60 watt bulb.  On top of that, I bet that number is coil in to coil out efficiency, not wall socket to light bulb.  A simple power cord will be at least 99% efficient, socket to bulb, more if you use a fatter cord.  That's why we use wires, dummy.

Having this thing running all the time is the electromagnetic equivalent of turning on the fire sprinklers, so that whenever you are thirsty, all you have to do is hold out your cup.

And patents?  Ludicrous...  Undercoupled tuned transformers are as old as radio itself, obvious to those skilled in the art, and have long since been used for power transfer.  Check old issues of Popular Electronics.  I believe there was an article back in the 1960s for a crystal radio that tuned to any strong AM station to get enough power to drive a small amplifier for the weak ones.  Sure, it's farfield not nearfield, but the difference is trivial.  Tuned nearfield induction has been applied to RFID tags and in many other ways over the years.

Look at the diameter of the coils and their spacing.  Want greater distance?  No sweat, just scale the coil diameters proportionately.  Who wants coils that big for distances that small?  And as an EM expert, I know that there is no magic to be uncovered in playing with the coil configuration.  Sure, there is some improvement moving from a solenoid to a pancake winding, but nothing to write home about.  Wanna see a pancake winding at play?  A lot of museum Tesla coils use them for the primary winding, and Tesla coils are (brace yourself) less then unity coupled, resonant inductors.

I'm embarrased for the undergrads who are hyping this thing.  It's an experiment that could have been done in a high school electronics class.  But, to the young everything is new, and therefore has obviously never been thought of before.  Wow, how dumb we have all been to have overlooked this magnetic miracle.  Including, apparently, Tesla, Marconi, DeForest...

Exciting.This could by extension light some villages in Africa that are enclaved since cost would have been tremendously cut down by eliminating poles,transformers,labour,time etc...wonderful!

I recently acquired a pacemaker. The instructions that came with it say "NO MRI". Somewhere in the circuits in my device there is sure to be a loop that could resonate to any frequency being used to transmit power - maybe even in the case enclosing the device. This is a fact that Bell Labs learned a long time ago. This proposal scared the heck out of me.

Well, I bow to the "greater minds" at MIT, but exactly what is new and revolutionary about inductively coupling circuits consisting of self-resonant air-wound coils?  I believe I did exactly that as a kid while studying for my novice amateur radio license some 35 years ago (at the time, the underlying theory and practical applications were already 60 years old). That aside, do these students have any comprehension of the adverse effects of stray coupling with unintentional resonant circuits commly found outside of a laboratory environment?  Household wiring and appliances make wonderful resonant circuits and antennas, coupling with and re-radiating RF energy with very unpredictable results.  As one of the previous poster's noted, experimentation at 10Mhz would appear to be improper.  But again, I'll defer to those novel researchers who "discovered" this 100-year old technology.  

Would wireless despinning of an asteroid move its
trajectory enough to miss the earth?

New? This technology was invented by Nikola Tesla more than 100 years ago. Time to recognize his work.

I’m told that the normal progression of new science is someting like: 1) What a stupid idea, they’re idiots 2) It will never work, they’re idiots, 3) Someone thought of that long ago, they’re idiots, and finally, 4) I thought of it first.

If I were to be a better person than that, I’d point out that there really are surprising and newsworthy results here, that there is a selectivity in tuning suggested by the helix shapes that we know nothing about, that the AC carrier is delivering way more DC power densities than we’d expect, and that Tesla’s nonlinear resonance has never been explained in a way that experts agree upon.  Certainly increased understandings of surprising results usually leads to huge leaps in efficacy, so the applications of running light bulbs and charging lap-tops are symbolic baby steps.  Consider that the electric automobile operated from wires embedded in the roadway, powering electric motors in cars, if made to work, are 20 times more efficient than gas autos, (fully-loaded, measured from crude-in-the-ground through transportation-at-the-pavement), making a 700 mile-per-gallon automobile equivalent, from coal, using not a drop of foreign oil, not a drop of petroleum chemistry.  It’s not problem-free, but it’s problems are suddenly 20 times less in magnitude.  Societies change with less than this.

Even these thoughts are primitive. 

IMHO, that this has a huge potential is confirmed by the universal negativity of the comments offered.

I believe this was done, about 100 years ago or so. In the book "Tesla: Master of Lightning" there is a photograph of a lit light bulb inside a series of coiled wires. A caption from a Century Magazine article about Telsa read, "The coil shown in the photograph has its lower end or terminal connected to the ground, and is exactly attuned to the vibrations of a distant electrical oscillator." (June 1900)

I once loved this publication but -- as the reviews on this piece show -- the Review has fallen on hard times.  Even a lay person such as myself knows that the tech. for this wirelessly powered lightbulb is not anything like new.  Frequently the pieces published are neither about technology nor new.  Too bad, too bad.

Agreed, this is very close, if not identical to reinventing the wheel, but I had a bizarre experience when a corporate belch put me in a group developing a microwave powered lightbulb. Although there is nothing wrong with such a thing,(it does exist, for strong UV sources), and the science was seemingly ok, all the other stuff, like dumping hundreds of watts of unshielded gigahertz into peoples living rooms somehow was of no concern. The concept that the shielding would have to be mostly opaque didn't bother management; it was just an engineering detail.  Many millions were spent on this project. 

What is it with this society and claiming old ideas as new?  This reminds me of the "new" hard drive technology recently of putting bits vertically through the platter.  Turns out to be 1970s technology.  Nice to see old ideas get used, but claiming them as new?  I don't think so.

Knock, Knock!  1965 or 1966 monthly project I built to light a bulb via radio-waves, not even needing to be near the source.

Stop wasting money on experimenting, and spend more time reading through old consumer magazines.

Thanks for your positive input about wireless power transmission. I agree with you regarding potential use that will add much greater distances to plug in hybrid and all electric vehicles.

regards,
darcylars
http://www.lyco.co.uk/