What is the most important scarce good in the world? Drinking water. In America, we don’t have to think much about water. The vast majority of us get clean and safe water from our taps. We bathe in clean water every day. In some areas of the United States, tap water is a problem, so people have to buy bottled water. But at least that is available.

In many developing countries, clean water is not available. But people have to drink water to survive, so they drink water from polluted rivers. Each year, more than 3.5 million people die from water-related diseases.

A company is working to combat this problem. Dean Kamen and his company, DEKA Research, have been working on a water purification system for over 10 years. It’s called a Slingshot and it works. It can extract clean drinking water from ocean water, polluted river water, and even raw sewage. It is small and consumes very little electricity. A Slingshot machine can produce 250 gallons of water a day. DEKA recently tested two machines in a small town in Honduras. The test lasted a month and everything worked as expected.

They have solved most of the problems with making clean water from dirty water, but the Slingshot is not yet available for purchase. There is one more big problem to solve. Right now, each Slingshot machine costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. Until they can lower the price of production, it will not be affordable for anyone, much less for the poorest people who need it most.

Will Dean Kamen be able to produce this filtration system at a reasonable cost to be practical? Well, he has done it before. He is the inventor of the Segway.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *