A device that can charge gadgets from a tree.

Five minutes, frowning forehead, decided in which blog to write this note - "humor", "gadgets" or maybe in the "future is near"? And the essence of the note is that the topic of using the difference of potentials between a living organism, in this case tree and earth, has surfaced again. And to be more precise, just attention, the "energy of the tree" ...


I cite the whole text without any changes:

Zaporozhye schoolboy has invented a device that can charge a mobile phone from a tree.
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Ninth-grader Alexey Strelyaev invented a unique device that works on the energy of plant growth and produces four times more voltage than a regular outlet!

Marina LUCHER (“KP” - Zaporizhia ”). Photo by the author.

You can charge a mobile phone in the middle of the forest and even listen to a tape recorder!

Size - with a palm, assembled from plates and nuts. It looks more like a toy turret from a designer than a useful device. And it is really useful! The novelty has already managed to win at the All-Ukrainian competition of young inventors and rationalizers, in the jury of which were eminent professors from domestic universities.

“I called him a collar, and for good reason - it hurts like a dog accessory,” the guy “introduced” us with a wonderful recharge. - It can generate a voltage of about 900 volts. The device can be useful during outdoor recreation, because from the collar you can fully charge the phone in 4 hours and listen to the music. At the same time, the amount of energy that it generates does not depend at all on the type of tree or its age.

The device only needs to be put on a tree, wait for about half an hour, then plug the plug from the wire of a mobile phone, radio tape recorder, into the built-in socket on it (the list goes on), and they will work! The “collar” itself extracts energy from the tree and transfers it to the connected equipment. The “wooden” voltage of 900 volts equates to 220 volts in one electric point, so a glass of water will heat up “from the tree” for the same amount of time as from a normal network.

The physicist worked on his unique invention for about six months. Mostly at night, because in the afternoon - the school, the lessons, I was preparing for the Olympiads. Yes, and with friends wanted to walk.

Now the guy is working on a new - improved - model of the device. He replaced the plates and nuts with a rubber strap. After all, the tighter it is to tighten around the trunk, the more energy it can extract. And Alexey will patent the first device so that no one borrows his idea.

Source: Komsomolskaya Pravda, Ukraine

I will also quote one of the comments from the page of the source article:

13:27 March 27, 2009 SAS

The company MagCap Engineering from Massachusetts joined forces with inventor Gordon W. Wadle from Illinois to implement a very extravagant project. Lagadinos believes that anyone can reproduce a simple experience: “Stick an aluminum rod through the bark into the trunk of a living tree; make a copper tube and immerse it 17 centimeters in the ground. Take a voltmeter and make sure that there is a potential of 0.8 to 1.2 volts DC between the rod in the barrel and the buried tube. ”

In the experiments performed, neither the consumption of the electrode material, nor the dependence of the voltage on the tree height was observed (which would confirm the version of the wave detector).
MagCap tested two experimental circuits: in one, three capacitors were connected in parallel. When they are charged from a tree to 0.7 volts, the circuit switches them to a serial connection, thus increasing the voltage to 2.1 volts, from which the LED works perfectly for a while. The second version of the device includes a filter-voltage regulator, so that it becomes possible to charge a small nickel-cadmium battery.

They claim that during the year they will be able to improve the technique of removing electricity from a tree, bringing the voltage to 12 volts at a current of 1 ampere. So, we are offered 12 watts of wood. Not so little, given the round-the-clock work and the ability to accumulate this energy in batteries.

Already were, the tree-energetics)

So it turns out, given that the invention was considered at a competition of young inventors (underlined in paragraph 4 of the article), then it seems to be not humor.

But it sounds so unusual that you can't believe it.

What do you think?