It’s been said that humanity’s current slide towards moral and environmental destruction will soon cause, among other things, the disappearance of potable water. Inventor extraordinaire Dean Kamen (he invented the miracle-of-balance, two-wheeled Segway) also thinks so: “In your lifetime, my lifetime, we will see water be a really scarce, valuable commodity,” he says.
Kamen is obsessed with time. But as brilliant as his mind is, he knows he can’t invent a time machine like the one H.G. Wells and “Back to the Future” imagined—punch in a date, go there, come back.
Therefore, because he can’t extend time, he’s in a race against it, to invent something that saves people and the planet. Is that perhaps grandiose? Not in the least.
Getting to Know Dean
It gives one pause to see the work-output of someone obsessively aware that time is slipping away. Kamen’s house alone—a New Hampshire-based wooden wonder—is festooned with handmade, highly complex clocks, secret passageways, and a gigantic cast-iron steamboat engine in his living room. It’s a kid’s dream-house come to life.
How It Began
Dean was not a popular child; no kids liked him at camp. He once wrote his parents that he'd like to come home now and queried as to whether they could also provide him with three secretaries (three) to help him handle all the work he was going to do. He signed off as “Your woeful and outcast son, me. Have to go to volleyball now.”What it is
The Slingshot is a “vapor compression distiller” situated between two tanks, connected by hoses. One tank contains bad water, the other good water. Using solar energy, it boils, distills, and vaporizes the bad gunk, turns it into perfect, clear water, and only uses a tiny amount of electricity. It took him 10 years to build it; now it’s ready for Ghana and other developing countries.One Slingshot purifies 1,000 liters of water a day, which supports, for the same amount of time, the comprehensive hydration, cooking, and hygienic needs of around 100 people. It purifies a million liters in three years.
More than 3.5 million people die every year from water-related diseases, and almost 900 million lack access to a safe water supply.
Clean Water for Everyone
As Kamen says, “I only start on projects typically when enough people tell me, ‘you’re nuts.’ Because then you know there must be a problem.”Water in the past has been regulated by big, top-down government municipal plants, where huge amounts of water get filtered and then sent out through old pipelines with eroding infrastructure, to rural areas.
Things Go Better With Coke
But there’s a problem. Each Slingshot costs a few hundred thousand dollars to build. He’s jokingly labeled metallic components with names like “Expensium,” “Unobtainium,” and “Unreliabilium.”Kamen realized he needed marketing and distribution, and so he decided to partner with companies that could distribute Slingshots globally. But first, some more engineering work was needed to lower production costs—$2,000 per machine would be nice.
The Coca-Cola Company decided to help Kamen spread Slingshot technology with its so-called Ekocenters, which are sort of little 7-Elevens that sell beverages (like ... Coke) and snacks but also feature free, clean water.
Results
What millions of African children are used to is their mothers’ arduous marches to rivers and boreholes, and classic, long African treks home, balancing gigantic water containers on top of their heads. Not to mention the boiling, the waiting overnight for the biomass to settle, and the abundant use of chlorine tablets.In “Slingshot,” we get to see some of the initial testing of Kamen’s masterpiece in rural parts of Ghana. Seeing young children turn on a tap for the first time in their lives, and get clean, running water does the heart good; it’s miraculous to them. Much of the rest of the world has been fortunate enough to take everything having to do with water for granted.
Kamen says people in developing regions of the world need the Slingshot as soon as possible. He’s also pretty sure the world’s water pollution problem will quickly spread beyond small villages in developing countries.
California’s droughts are no joke. The crisis isn’t just “over there” anymore. It’s in our backyard, and if we don’t pay attention to this, we'll soon be in a fairly desperate situation regarding water. “SlingShot,” the documentary, should have had as wide a distribution as possible in 2015, but it opened at exactly one New York venue.
