SWEETWATER, Tex. — The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.
The current system uses two electrodes encased in fabric to send an electrical signal through the human body between 500 KHz and 3 MHz. According to the patent the electrode doesn’t have to be touching the body, but must be very close to it, such as in a pocket or on a belt clip. A signal travels through the user’s skin and is transmitted to another electrode on the headset, which then plays the audio signal as any pair of wired headphones would. The patent describes the device as:
A transmitter for generating [an] electric field by transmitting a potential difference signal corresponding to transmission data from a transmitting electrode; and a receiver for receiving the data by reading the potential difference signal in [an] electric field by a receiving electrode.