Cableless Power

Recently read in a Russian publication called Technical Practice a report that by 1985 (significant date), power will be delivered to homes in all large towns and cities in Russia through a transmission network that will employ neither cables nor wire. Starting in 1965, the magazine says, special reception transformers about the size of a watthour meter will start going into new housing in the Moscow suburbs.

The Russians are apparently going to hang onto conventional interior wiring for the time being, with the so-called reception transformer picking up the power for a house or a whole building. Later on, the plan seems to be to dispense with wiring and fit out sockets with miniature receiver units.

This development has apparently been going on for about six years in the Soviet Union. Significance seems to me that millions of tons of copper will be saved by setting up such a central transmission system for utility power, and that the electronics industry will get a boost into an area not hitherto explored.

Do you know of any similar work being done in the U. S.? I should think the electric utilities would be busy developing such a system.

E. O. FEENEY

HATFIELD, HERTS.
ENGLAND

Our World News service has kept us informed about this Soviet engineering development, which was apparently first disclosed in 1955. At that time, the Russians themselves washed the experiment out as a failure, according to Swedish observers. The idea has been bandied about in the U. S. ever since Tesla, but there are several points to be weighed. At frequencies best suited for efficient power transmission, antenna systems are tremendous and expensive. Efficient antennas in the vlf and l-f portions of the spectrum, for instance, could hardly be put inside a conventional watthour meter, although recent advances in the ferrite technology make it more feasible to design smaller low-frequency antennas.

At higher frequencies — in the h-f, vhf, uhf, shf or microwave regions — cheap and efficient antenna systems are more readily engineered, but other considerations intervene. Absorption in the atmosphere becomes a problem. And the biological hazards of large r-f fields become serious whenever the human body is a significant portion of the wavelength.