Wireless power explained in Science News

In the early 1900s, long before the power grid made electricity widely available, electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla devised a grand scheme to transfer large amounts of power over long distances from a tower 20 stories tall, to be built on Long Island in New York. To this day, historians puzzle over how Tesla's system was supposed to work, or whether it could have worked at all, says Bernard Carlson, a historian of science at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who is writing a biography of the great engineer. "We can't even begin to understand what he was doing with this power stuff," Carlson says.

The project died when Tesla's financial backers pulled the plug, possibly because Tesla seemed unclear as to how to bill customers receiving wireless power. Ironically, Tesla also invented the alternating current (AC) system of power production, transmission, and distribution that would become the standard for the modern grid.

But electromagnetic radiation can indeed carry energy through air or empty space and over large distances.