I ran across an article this evening titled, "The end of the plug? Scientists invent wireless device that beams electricity through your home."
While this is a novel invention, this is hardly a new idea. People such as Heinrich Hertz and Nikola Tesla have worked on wireless energy transfer many, many years before. From Wikipedia:
Another means of wireless energy transfer is by electromagnetic radiation. In 1864 James Clark Maxwell mathematically modeled the behavior of electromagnetic radiation. Some early work in the area of wireless transmission via radio waves was done in 1888 by Heinrich Hertz who performed experiments that validated Maxwell’s mathematical model. Hertz’s apparatus for generating electromagnetic waves is generally acknowledged as the first radio transmitter. A few years later Guglielmo Marconi worked with a modified form of the Hertz-wave transmitter, the main improvement being the addition of an elevated conductor and a ground connection. Both of these elements can be traced back to the 1749 work of Benjamin Franklin and that of Mahlon Loomas in 1864.
Nikola Tesla also investigated radio transmission and reception but unlike Marconi, Tesla designed his own transmitter — one with power-processing capability some five orders-of-magnitude greater than those of its predecessors. He would use this same coupled-tuned-circuit oscillator to implement his conduction-based wireless energy transmission method as well. Both of these wireless methods employ a minimum of four tuned circuits, two at the transmitter and two at the receiver.
A cool idea? Hell yeah. A new invention? Hardly. I'm rather tick off Hertz and Tesla get no credit in the aforementioned article.
If you're in the mood for a little reading, why not read up on the discoveries and accomplishments of Nikola Tesla? While you're at it, read up on Nathan Stubblefield, he's the man behind the wireless phone. If you want to get really whacked out, read about the earth battery. In the immortal words of Doc Brown, "....you're gonna see some serious shit."