Replacing wired connections with wireless ones is not a new idea. It dates back to the discovery of radio waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1888, and was first made practical by Guglielmo Marconi when he enabled telegraph signals to be transmitted through the air. Just prior to World War I, Nikola Tesla built a huge tower and power station out on the edge of Long Island with the intention of broadcasting free wireless electric power for all. In the 1950s, the first TV remote controls were physically wired before infrared (IR) and radio frequency (RF) technologies allowed the connecting cable to disappear. In the 1970s, landline telephones became cordless, and a decade later wireless cellular phones appeared. In the 1990s, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth appeared, untethering personal computers from the internet, headphones from music playback devices, printers from PCs, etc., etc., etc.
Each one of these wired-to-wireless advances radically altered society. And we are now on the verge of the next such “cableless” revolution: ubiquitous wireless power.
Read the rest of this report here at Digital Technology Consulting’s Digital Riff.
