Friday, August 22, 2008

One way to find out

Wireless is wonderful. Cords are an awful, often frustrating mess. Cordless handsets, cell phones, wireless mice? All terrific.

But if you really want to find out if 1 watt cell phones cause cancer, put 60 watts through space to run a lamp or charge your laptop.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Um, been there done that, have the t-shirt. It's callesd a Tesla coil people. Look it up. It only been around for over 100 years.

Anonymous said...

Don't worry about cancer. This is not RF energy, like what your cell phone radiates. It's a changing magnetic field created by running alternating current through a coil.
Yes, Tesla coils have been around for a long time, but 90% efficiency for charging is pretty damn impressive , especially across 3 feet of distance. I've done some projects in this area involving charging systems that are literally wrapped around power lines, and getting the efficiency up is hard.

Anonymous said...

It's not only a Tesla coil, it was Tesla's proposal for distributing electricity, rather than running wires from pole to pole. Edison wanted wires. Whether he thought it was safer or not, he played on people's concerns about sending juice through the air to get his system of distribution adopted. I tend to believe he really thought it was safer. He pitched for his own DC power over Tesla's AC; I'm sure there was a good measure of ego in there, but he pushed for DC, and lost, in large part because he felt DC was a lot safer. So we wound up with Edison's complicated, messy distribution system, and Tesla's indeed rather lethal current.

Tesla and Edison were quite competitive, though, doing very similar work at the same time. Tesla was a decade younger, and sort of stuck in Edison's craw as the youthful upstart who didn't know his place. But Tesla was probably equally important motivating Edison as he was in his own work. (They were, however, both American. Tesla was just born in eastern Europe. A lot of people seem to think it was an American vs. Europe competition; I think they cross it up with the Italian Marconi, who was really of another generation, and a lot of that really was an American vs. European ingenuity thing.)

Anonymous said...

No, its not a radio signal but it is still an electromagnetic wave that penetrates your body just like cell phone signals and the magnetic waves near power lines. I don't want to be exposed to any more electromagnetic waves than I have to. I'll keep my cord.

lovable liberal said...

What's the frequency? No, you don't have to be named Kenneth to answer.