Back as a student at Brooklyn Tech, and then as a freshman at Northeastern University, I was talking about the this weird idea – based on the old WW2 razor blade radio: Harness the radio waves, put them through a rectifier circuit, and, then us the resulting power to power a logic circuit.
Of course, back then (in 1960-1963), individual transistors were the size of three or four stacked dimes, resistors about as long as a dime is wide, and logic circuits were huge. Computers still used vacuum tubes and occupied full floors in Wall Street buildings. The wiring alone was a million dollars, and the computers were less powerful than the average new cell phone today. IBM Punch cards were used to program the computers – in many cases were the programs, and accompanying data … all fed in to the card readers at the same time.
Now we have this report on Science Daily, “Wireless Power for the Price of a Penny”:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120810083720.htm
About seven or eight years ago, when my Harvard daughter told me her new boy friend was studying computer circuits at Harvard, I laid out the rectifier idea… and told her to have him to check it out.
Oh, isn’t nice to be fifty years ahead of events.
Now, what happens, next month, when Saint Paul’s Joke is published, and the world is told what Saul of Tarsus had in mind when he spoke of Faith and Grace? And, what happens when they learn the Vatican received two requested copies of the book – LAST MONTH?
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