Inside Dean Kamen's Seceded Island of Geekery 187
mattnyc99 writes "The new issue of Esquire has a long, in-depth, intricate profile of Dean Kamen and his quest to invent a better world. Earlier this month, we discussed Kamen's Sterling-electric car, but this piece goes into much more detail about how that engine works — he got the original idea from the upmodded Henry Ford artifact in the basement of his insane island lab — and about how his inventions often go overlooked, including the Slingshot water purifier that Stephen Colbert made famous but that no one has actually bought yet. Quoting: 'To get the Slingshot to the 20 percent of the world that doesn't have electricity, Kamen came up with the idea of splitting it in half. Leaving the Stirling aside, he would try to develop a market for his distiller in parts of the developing world that have electricity but not reliable clean water. "There are five hundred thousand little stores in Mexico," he says. "If we can put one of these in 10 percent of them, that's enough to put it in production." That may be the killer app for the distiller.' So, is this guy all hype with overpriced devices, or is time for someone to take his genius (Segway aside) to the mass market?"
Sterling != Stirling (Score:5, Informative)
C'mon folks, if you're gonna pretend to be geeks, at least get it right - it's Stirling technology, not Sterling.
Better water purification (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the best new water purification device comes from Seldon Technology. It uses carbon nanotubes and doesn't need electricity.
Re:Something completely different.. (Score:1, Informative)
It's not just you, I suspect someone [slashdot.org] is [slashdot.org] playing [slashdot.org] with [slashdot.org] the [slashdot.org] stylesheets [slashdot.org].
Re:Something completely different.. (Score:1, Informative)
FYI, Firehose also looks like crap when using Safari 3 on Mac OS X on a 1280x1024 display, so the problem isn't your laptop nor Firefox.
Re:Better water purification (Score:3, Informative)
I've not actually cracked one of these yet (saving them for a real emergency), but I do get the principle by which it works:
first layer: particle filtration
second layer: germ filtration
third layer: chemical filtration
is basically it. So, using common, all-garden kitchen equipment, and a glass tube out of a barometer, you can build a gravity-fed system using nothing more than a couple coffee filter papers or percolator mesh in a funnel for large particle filtration, a top layer of sand for smaller particles and large monocellular organisms (ie amoebae), crushed charcoal for general germ filtration and mix bed ion exchange resin (available from good camping stores and water treatment specialists; also electrodialysis membrane can be used but that makes life a little more complicated) for finishing and chemical purification. Such a basic system works, doesn't cost a mortgage to set up or operate and *requires no electricity*. Depending on how dirty the water is to begin with, you can reuse filters x number of times before you either have to replace the column substrates or occasionally you can backwash them using distilled water (providing you're anywhere near a source!) and use them again as if from new.
Commercial water filters such as the Brita range uses only mix bed IER. You can tell the difference if you live in a hard water area as the filter substrate does in fact work to remove base metals (and chlorine!) from solution. I have a filter I bought from ASDA two years ago; it uses the same cartridge it came with, I've never seen the need to replace it as a backwash of distilled water once a month whether it needs it or not is all it takes to refresh the resin and have it working like new again.
Re:But is his water-maker better? Cheaper? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but capacity isn't the only dimension on which a water purification system has to "scale". How long it can operate it without resupplying filters is a relevant factor.
One of the reasons that poor people are poor is that they have to buy things in more expensive packages. We in the US have fabulously expensive infrastructure that that allows us to "buy" a teaspoon of clean water by turning the tap. Water filtration is a much more expensive, but it doesn't take the millions of dollars of investment a city water supply would. It may well be a cheaper solution in situations where people share a well and carry their cooking and drinking water home. Not cheaper per gallon, just a cheaper way to get people the minimum amount of clean water needed for health.
The sticking point, as far as I can see, is there isn't enough money dedicated to any kind of solution, whether the fabulously expensive to build but cheap per gallon first world solution, or the relatively cheap to install but expensive per gallon approach of water filtration.
If there is a place for Kamen's invention, it would be in a world that is willing to invest up front in some kind of filtration system for everybody. We do not, I suspect, live in such a world, but if we did we might be interested in ways of reducing the cost per gallon of filtered water, say by installing a system like this with solar panels.
Use your arms (Score:3, Informative)
People who camp often use hand-pumped versions of this to make creek water drinkable. The advantage is that you can use the muscles in your arm to pump the water instead of sucking on a straw until your face implodes.
Re:not impressed (Score:4, Informative)