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Sunday, December 18, 2005

It Turns Wine Into Water… Really!

Dean Kamen, inventor of the [mocked but actually very innovative and significant] Segway scooter, has been below the media radar for the past several years. There’s word now of what the scientific Wonka has been working on: a portable water distillation device. The unit is described as about the size of a dorm room refrigerator, and it uses actual distillation-filtration technology, previously the demesne of large water production plants, to turn any liquid into chemically perfect water. Says Kamen, “Any bottled water you have has far more minerals and other contamination. Our machine literally makes pure distilled water. It really doesn’t matter what the input was, the only thing that comes out is pure water. It’s not like a tablet that people will use chlorine or something to disinfect it or make it biologically inactive.”

To prove this, Kamen obviously needed to drink his own urine. He did. ‘Twas good.

This is a significant development. As the report linked above mentions, a good sixth of the world is without reliably potable water. This portable machine creates drink from dirt, and it does that using 2% of the electricity normally required by distillation units. It makes municipal plants, which are expensive, targeted by vandals, and infrastructure-dependent, unnecessary. The device is being produced by DEKA Research, and thirty prototypes now exist. Kamen is looking at massive distribution in the third world.

Posted on December 18, 2005 09:13 AM. Permalink