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Inside Dean Kamen's Seceded Island of Geekery
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?"
C'mon folks, if you're gonna pretend to be geeks, at least get it right - it's Stirling technology, not Sterling.
Actually, the best new water purification device comes from Seldon Technology. It uses carbon nanotubes and doesn't need electricity.
It's not just you, I suspect someone is playing with the stylesheets.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
You seem to have left out his first significant invention: the portable infusion pump that is now bolted to every iv stand in the industrialized world. Leaving him in a financial position where I don't think he much cares how impressed you are with his subsequent efforts.