Just so there is NO argument about who submitted this brilliant idea to the Mythbusters, I just sent this in!
Title: No-Cost Power From Electrical Transmission Lines
Myth: Can a homeowner living adjacent to high-voltage electrical transmission lines harvest enough ambient EM energy from the transmission lines to power their home?
Background: Harvesting small amounts of energy in the presence of electrical devices is a known. In theory, with a large enough gathering array, a person could harvest significant energy in proximity to a large electro-magnetic source. I talked to a very experienced building contractor once who posited that a person living along a right-of-way under a high voltage line could lay out a very long linear harvesting array and gather reasonable quantities of power. How big would the array have to be to power a home? Or a TV set? Or a refrigerator?
How might we create learning experiences that look more like Mythbusters and less like the sit-and-get science classes I took when I was in high school?
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