Self-Charging Phones Are on the Way, Finally

By: Rachel Metz

Narrated by: Todd Mundt

The case that Will Zell slides onto his iPhone doesn't look that unusual, but it's doing something pretty out of the ordinary: capturing some of the radio waves that the phone transmits when connecting to cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone's battery. Zell is the CEO of Nikola Labs, a startup based in Columbus, Ohio, whose energy-harvesting technology was invented by Chi-Chih Chen, a research associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University. Like battery pack cases, the company's case plugs into the bottom of the iPhone; this way, Zell says, it can intermittently send power right to the battery.©Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)Massachusetts Institute of Technology