TEXT ON SCREEN:
IN A WIRELESS WORLD, ONE CORD STILL BINDS US.

ARCHIVAL (CELLULAR, 2004):
MAN: My battery is about to die. Do you have a charger?

TEXT ON SCREEN:
SOME TECH COMPANIES ARE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO REPLACE THE POWER CORD WITH WIRELESS POWER.

MICHAEL LEABMAN (C.T.O. AND FOUNDER, ENERGOUS): You can create radio waves to send power from one spot to the other through the air.

And this is completely mobile so as you walk around the room, this tracking is constantly happening and finding where your mobile device is so it knows exactly where to send the power.

I kind of envision it a lot like a Wi-Fi that, wherever you happen to go, you have that connectivity.  In this case you have power connectivity.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
IT SEEMS CUTTING-EDGE, BUT WIRELESS POWER WAS PIONEERED OVER 100 YEARS AGO.

IN THE 1890s, INVENTOR NIKOLA TESLA WOWED ENGINEERS  BY ILLUMINATING A BULB WIRELESSLY.

MICHAEL LEABMAN: What Tesla did is, he basically understood that if you – call it the Tesla coil –  if you take this coil and you put current through this coil, it creates a magnetic field, and that magnetic field propagates through space.  If you put a coil on the other side, it goes into the coil and then creates current on the other side.  That concept as whole is something that certainly was revolutionary.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
TESLA’S DREAM WAS TO SEND WIRELESS POWER OVER GREAT DISTANCES.

IN 1901, HE BUILT A TOWER ON LONG ISLAND TO DO THIS.

JANE ALCORN (PRESIDENT, TESLA SCIENCE CENTER AT WARDENCLYFFE): His tower would have loomed over the landscape for miles. It was 187 feet high. The purpose of the tower essentially was to be able to tap into the energy that Tesla believed was in the earth, that he thought he would be able to transmit to people around the world as wireless electricity.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
TESLA NEVER ACHIEVED THIS DREAM.

HIS TOWER WAS TORN DOWN IN 1917.

AND FOR 100 YEARS, WE KEPT PLUGGING IN.

MICHAEL LEABMAN: I think, looking at Tesla, you realize that he was really ahead of his time, but I think innovation is always coupled with the need, and is technology ready for it.

One hundred years ago, there wasn’t cellphones, you know, there weren’t wearables. Technology has caught up and really enabled us to go back and say – look, these really can apply today.  And being able to take their vision and morph it today’s world is very exciting. It just opens up a host of opportunities that people haven’t even thought of yet.

(END)