Eureka! The latest domestic Utopia is electricity without wires. No more cat’s cradles to trip over. No more sockets for infants to stick pencils into. No more crawling underneath the sofa to plug into a recalcitrant port. No more DIY with perversely multicoloured dream wires. No more sparks, fuses, smoke and bangs. We hope.

Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have invented wireless power transfer for civilian purposes. WiTricity uses coupled resonant objects to transfer power wirelessly to lights, washing machines, fridges, cell phones, laptops and the other old-fashioned electrical appliances that 21st-century civilisation is heir to.

At last the great plug debate will be economically, if belatedly, settled. When electricity was introduced for domestic purposes, the rest of the world chose not to follow America’s ungrounded plug with two parallel prongs. It is an absurdity that there are now 13 different plugs in use. In Australia the plug has a grounding pin and two flat prongs forming a V-shape. India prefers three round pins in a triangular pattern. France has a male pin in the socket. There is no standard mains voltage throughout the world, and the frequency (the number of times the current changes direction every second) varies. The consequence is adaptors, local plugs and explosions in front of the shaving mirror for travellers.

No invention comes without some shock. Will neighbours syphon off our wireless electricity? Can WiTricity electrify the zips on our clothes? Sparks will give the answer that Michael Faraday gave to William Gladstone, when asked what the use of electricity was: “Why, sir, there is every possibility that you will soon be able to tax it.”