Did electric engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla lose his mind at the Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island, NY, while striving to demonstrate that long-range wireless electricity transmission could be possible? While Tesla did live with mental health issues tied to obsessive-compulsive disorder, he didn’t seem to be wrong about wireless power transmission.
His main problem was that investor J.P. Morgan stopped funding the “Tesla Tower” experiments, and the project had to be shut down in 1906. The tower was later demolished in 1917. The ending of the test project happened about five years into developing the revolutionary technology — that would have freed up countries around the world from having to lay down the costly and laborious electric power grids on land with wired power stations, substations, and endless utility poles. Tesla discovered magnetic resonant coupling – the ability to wirelessly transmit electricity by creating a magnetic field between two circuits, a transmitter and a receiver.
While it’s yet to be taken as seriously as the current electric vehicle charging infrastructure that’s rolling out, the dream of seeing wireless electric vehicle (EV) charging hasn’t gone away. It is seeing something of an uptick lately. These days, inductive (wireless) charging has become the norm for everything from smartphones and laptops to kitchen appliances. Why not EVs?
Jon LeSage 
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