A few years ago I submitted a patent application for a desalination device. I received a call from the USPTO in December saying that the application has been officially abandoned. The patent was abandoned sue to a snafu in changing my mailing address. Now, after 3+ years and a couple hundred bucks, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) wants me to send them additional money to revive the application process. Unfortunately, I’m broke. To further lessen my initiative, I don’t really care about patenting an idea that isn't going to make money. The only reason that I applied for a patent in the first place was so that someone else couldn’t patent my idea and charge a whole bunch of money for it. So I am going to release the idea using a GPL license. The idea I sent to the USPTO is for a very simple, cheap, and durable design that provides fresh water to a very small niche market, namely farmers and farmland located in coastal regions. I’m not even sure how well it will work because I haven’t had the money to run any real tests. Although, I have run a small test with decent results.

Back in 2001 I was sitting on my couch thinking about why there wasn't enough food in some places of the earth. I ran through the usual suspects of quandaries that face developing and usually less fertile nations. The last sentence sums up two big difficulties nicely. Countries with food shortages are often not very fertile countries, often the soil type in not overly conducive to Western farming techniques; but more often there is a simple lack of fresh water. Secondly, developing countries do not have a lot of money.

The lack of water can be solved using desalination techniques, seeing as almost every country in the world has some access to the ocean or salt water. However, water desalination is not cheap. Projects can cost in the 500 million dollar range and often require the establishment of very high output power systems such as nuclear power plants. These are needed to generate the heat needed to vaporize enough water to properly support all water needs of the populace. This paradigm keeps fresh water from irrigating fields in developing countries.

So, I thought to myself "what if they did something like this". Thus my idea for a cost efficient system of pipe which desalinates water was born. Read the now publicly available patent application in html, an rtf file is available as well as .tiff files of the drawings for your downloading pleasure.

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