Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us From Wires
wired.com
wired.com
To date, the only proposed approach to this problem is time division multiplexing (TDM) on each device and/or adaptive frequency tuning at the transmitter (which has regulatory issues). AFAIK, this is the same problem plaguing the other resonant wireless power transfer companies (eg. Witricity).
[I played around with a bit of this stuff during grad school. Specifically, I used non-resonant magnetic coupling to wirelessly power a swarm of robots: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2008/10/07/wirelessly-powering-sw... ]
Edison is a poor example anyway, since he was basically a patent troll in this case (found guilty of patent infringment in a UK court) and was only able to work because he had ignored a UK patent (Swan's). Had he been abided by it, he could have made no contribution (Shock! He 'stole' the idea!). He improved on Swans design, but at the same time Swan also improved on his design. When Edison had his breakthrough, Swan had already installed electric lighting in a number of houses and when the two finally collaborated, the joint company used Swans newer design which was the better of the two. Wikipedia has this to say:
"In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them more efficient. Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light, and started an advertising campaign that claimed that he was the real inventor. Swan, who was less interested in making money from the invention, agreed that Edison could sell the lights in America while he retained the rights in Britain." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan
Oxymoron title.
Like the Earths magnetic field, our microwaves, the sun, all those "scary" things cause cancer too. How about we hold off on the crazy talk until we have something to empirically test.
It's important to note that the energy per packet rather than the number of packets that matters. It's similar to how I could fire a thousand ping-pong balls at you and you'd be fine, but one bullet would be a completely different story.
X-Rays are very short wavelength and have a relatively high probability of ionizing atoms in your body. UV light is longer in wavelength, but is still just barely ionizing. The lights in your home are probably pretty safe. WiFi is substantially longer wavelength (and lower energy per packet) than visible light, so it's even less likely to give you cancer.
Put simply, if you're worried about getting cancer from ionizing radiation you should go live in the dark in a cave as far underground as you can get before worrying about what's coming out of your cell-phone or router.