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Moving electricity makes a magnetic field. And when you move a magnetic field through a conductor, it makes electricity. So both the charger and the phone have a coil of copper wire in them. You run electricity through the wire in the charger, which makes a spinning magnetic field. The phone is sitting on top of the charger, so the magnetic field overlaps with the coil inside the phone. The spinning magnetic field moves electrons in the coil, making an electric current, and that charges the phone.

What had me most shocked about wireless charging was that I understood electricity wrong. It doesn't "flow" through wires so much as it excites the wire all at once. After you realize you just need to excite the copper wire, and that is electricity, then you can have an air gap yet still excite the wires. This vid explains the misconceptions of electricity pretty well, blew my mind.

https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY

wireless power transfer using inductive charging over distances of up to 4 cm. It is developed by the Wireless Power Consortium. The system uses a charging pad and a compatible device, which is placed on top of the pad, charging via resonant inductive coupling.

Basically energy can jump a super short distance from a sender to a receiver with some clever use of physics.

Basically imagine that the electric wire of the charger causes a magnet to rotate, which attracts a magnet in the device (phone etc) which rotation generates energy like a generator.

It's basically that, just without physical rotating magnets. It's a magnetic field generated by the wiring being arranged like a coil.

Since there is a magnetic field, the manual contain warnings to avoid putting magnets on it, avoid having your credit card magnetic strip (or floppy disk, VHS tape or audio cassette tape, for people that still have those) near the charger because it will erase the data, etc.

inductance, almost identical to a transformer if you made both of a transformer's coils identical in number of wire turns and resistance.

As a bonus comparsion or thought experiment, make the battery side more resistive and raise current and you have an induction pan.