Three cheers for Tesla
The wireless charger in your iPhone owes a great deal to the inventor Nikola Tesla, whose 1897 steam-powered oscillator demonstrated that you could indeed use electromagnetism to transmit power without wires. According to reports, the oscillator shook Tesla’s laboratory so much that the neighbours thought they were experiencing an earthquake.
In 1902, Tesla started on his grandest experiment: the Wardenclyffe Tower, a giant electrical transmitter that Tesla hoped would be the foundation of a worldwide power delivery system. Tesla believed that by injecting electric current into the Earth, he could amplify the Earth’s own electrical charge and create waves that could charge anything anywhere as well as enable global wireless communications; he even envisaged sending images to devices without wires. Sadly the project was a grand failure, spiralling into debt after lighting up the sky with flashes of electricity for a few evenings in 1903 and never apparently operating again.