This article was taken from the August 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
At the end of 2004, Nilang Patel had a problem.
The chief of Coca-Cola's research laboratory at the company's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, Patel needed to find a way of bringing the soda fountain into the 21st century. Despite the place of the statuesque Coke bottle in the company iconography, the drink had reached its first customers, in the bars of Atlanta drugstores in 1886, as a thick syrup diluted into individual glasses with soda water.
Even after the introduction of vending machines in the early 1920s, the method -- updated to use syrup dispensed at the push of a button from 19-litre plastic bags, mixed with water, carbon dioxide and high-fructose corn syrup -- remained the foundation of the company's business.
But by the time of the drink's 125th-birthday celebrations, Coca-Cola's customers demanded a dizzying amount of choice. When it fell to Patel to devise a vending machine capable of dispensing a larger sample of Coca-Cola's constellation of over 100 products -- from caffeine-free Coke Zero to Diet Coke with Lime -- he called Dean Kamen.
Kamen was far from an obvious choice. In his 30-year career, the then 63-year-old engineer had become a multimillionaire from his patents on medical devices, yet remained best known as the inventor of the Segway Personal Transporter. But Patel knew that much of Kamen's most innovative medical work lay in the finely calibrated delivery of liquids; his expertise in engineering pumps and valves precise enough to dilute concentrated drugs for injection into human beings would surely be useful in building a machine to fill a paper cup with 475ml of Fanta.
"That was a pretty straightforward project," Kamen says now. "I had [the technology] in my back pocket."
Yet Kamen was keen for the Coke Freestyle machine to impress his new corporate clients. Because, soon after he took the call from Patel, the inventor became convinced that Coca-Cola was the only company on Earth that could help him achieve a dream he had by then nursed for more than ten years -- to extinguish the world's biggest health problem, using a machine he had built to make pure drinking water out of anything wet.
As Kamen marches through the car park of a river-side Victorian mill complex in Manchester, New Hampshire, he admits with a smile: "Almost every project we do starts out with most people thinking we are nuts." Yet he's made an enviable career out of proving such doubters wrong. Gesturing down the long row of hulking brick buildings along the waterfront, he explains how he began to buy up these buildings 20 years ago, when they had been derelict since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and now owns them all. He currently has tenants including Texas Instruments, Autodesk and the University of New Hampshire's engineering school; with three of the buildings (and part of a fourth) taken up by his company DEKA Research & Development Corporation (the DE from Dean, the KA from Kamen) and its 400 employees, including engineers, physicists, mathematicians and the like, Kamen is dean and landlord of his own campus of high technology.
He leads the way into a concrete-floored basement that echoes with a sucking of pumps and the clicking of solenoids, where the first of his water machines are undergoing final testing. "These units are just getting ready to go," he says; in the next few weeks, Kamen's device -- named the Slingshot -- will begin shipping to Paraguay, South Africa and Mexico. Kamen had promised Coke that by the end of this year, he'd have deployed the machines in no fewer than five countries. But then Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent surprised him at the end of last year by announcing that it was his intention to get Slingshots into 15 countries in 2013 -- and to make a billion litres of clean water. Kamen's eyes shine in anticipation of the challenge. "We're up for that," he says. "We'll do it."
The statistics of the global water problem are startling: 783 million people around the world don't have access to clean water, Kamen will tell you; diarrhoea is the second-largest killer of children worldwide, and lack of safe water is the primary reason that globally 3,000 children under the age of five die every day. Yet Kamen admits that he is an unlikely saviour. His background, he explains, is "at the other end of the spectrum, building exotic, sophisticated medical products for the world that can afford them."
His career began when he was still at school, tinkering with electronics in the basement of his parents' Long Island home. When the older of his two brothers -- at the time studying for a medical degree at Harvard -- described the difficulty of administering measured doses of chemotherapy drugs to babies, Dean set out to design a drug-infusion pump to do the job. The pump proved so successful that he dropped out of college to concentrate on the new company, AutoSyringe, and in 1982, aged just 30, he sold it to Baxter Healthcare for a sum rumoured to be around £20 million.
Today, he has patents on more than 150 devices, and medical products remain the core of Kamen's business.
The most famous product of DEKA's in-house R&D may be the Segway, but it's also the least representative. Built in military secrecy and publicised as a miraculous device that would change the future of humanity, when it was finally launched, the electric scooter was met with ridicule, and is now remembered more as an example of the toxic confluence of hubris and hype than as a means of transport.
Yet from the moment he left college, Kamen has tried to focus his work on improving the lives of others. "Life is short," he says, "and when I look back, I don't want to think I wasted some of this life doing nonsense."
[pullquote source="Dean Kamen]
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His most transformative inventions since then have largely been medical devices. The one topic about which he's most passionate is FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, the charity and annual competition he devised to encourage students to be as excited about science as they are about athletics. Indeed, the Segway was only made possible by gyroscopic technology Kamen had developed to build the iBot, a wheelchair that can climb stairs and which makes it possible for users to conduct eye-to-eye conversations with others -- an invention he sold to Johnson & Johnson long before the Segway ever went into production. Kamen's water machine, too, began with medical engineering of the most advanced kind. In the late 80s, he and the engineers at DEKA had been approached by Baxter Healthcare to develop a portable device that would let kidney patients treat themselves at home, cleaning their blood using a technique called peritoneal dialysis. This involves flushing a sterile saline solution through the abdominal cavity, using the perineal membrane to filter the toxins out of the body by osmosis. Kamen came up with HomeChoice, a compact box housing a disposable cartridge of sterile plumbing connections, thrown away at the end of each treatment: "A little machine the size of a VCR -- it was beautiful," he says.
When HomeChoice took off, Kamen began looking at ways of solving the problems caused by the dialysate liquid itself. Each daily treatment required the patient to flush between ten and 20 litres of saline solution through their bodies; they took delivery of the sterile bags of dialysate in bulk once a month. He wanted to know why it wasn't possible to modify the HomeChoice machine to purge and recycle each litre bag of solution during each treatment, so the patient would need only one or two litres. Kamen asked the biochemical scientists at Baxter if they could clean the solution of toxins using solvents and filters, but they told him it was impossible. "They pretty much said, 'Dean, you idiot, we're trying to pull out urea and ammonia -- it's not like we're pulling chicken soup out of somebody and straining it.'"
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Undiscouraged, Kamen spent a year or so looking for answers elsewhere, concluding, "I'll just build a distiller to boil water, How hard can that be?" But distillation also requires water to evaporate into steam before then condensing back into a liquid, and Kamen wanted to do it at a rate of ten litres an hour. "It turns out it would take 25kW of continuous input power," he says. "Your electric bill would be $50 a night." Instead, Kamen realised that, if he could recover the energy usually lost as radiated heat when the steam condensed back into water, he could use it to help warm more cold water as it entered the system, drastically reducing the amount of power the system required. Kamen knew he could do this with vapour-compression distillers, which put water under pressure to increase its boiling point, then use a heat exchanger to flash-warm the supply so it enters the system at 100 degrees celsius. These have long been used on US Navy ships to purify seawater for drinking on an industrial scale.
But Kamen needed to miniaturise this technology to fit into an area not much bigger than a shoebox, then figure out how to combine it with a mechanism to make purified water back into dialysate. And to keep power consumption within the limits of a domestic supply.
He needed to develop a heat exchanger that could function with more than 95 per cent efficiency. The last part alone took years -- "You could fill a room with all the ideas we tried," Kamen says.
Nonetheless, by 2000, Kamen had a collection of tiny components connected together on a bench at DEKA that could do what he wanted and would fit in a small box. But since he had started work on the project, the management at Baxter had changed, and Kamen's plan to alter the face of home dialysis fell out of favour.
He had spent several hundred thousand dollars of his own money on development -- and now had no client. But Kamen had also begun to look at the device in a new way. He recognised that the machine could remove contaminants from water and purify it. In seeking an improvement to a medical practice necessary for a few thousand people worldwide, he realised he may have stumbled upon a way of saving millions of lives. "It could make clean water for billions of people," he says, "on a very attractive basis."
Yet Kamen remained almost entirely ignorant of the practicalities of providing water to remote communities in the developing world. So he dispatched a team from DEKA to report on the state of the art. Their findings were frustrating: the NGO approach to getting clean water to people was to target whatever was locally wrong with the liquid. If it was polluted with bacteria or sewage, water was treated with chlorine tablets; if there was heavy metal contamination, charcoal filters would be used, and so on. Yet to discover which method would work, engineers had to conduct advance testing, followed by constant monitoring.
Maintaining supplies of filters and equipment could be problematic; and the resulting water would often look and taste just as unpalatable as before.
By contrast, Kamen believed the device he had built for cleaning a few litres of dialysate in a day could be used simply and successfully in any circumstances. "The entire instruction manual is the following," he says. "Your black box has two hoses on it.
You take the one with the big end and stick it in anything that looks wet: the ocean; a latrine; a chemical-waste site; a well. Out of the other comes the purest water you will ever see." Convinced that this was a means of saving the world, Kamen began looking for commercial partners to help him build and distribute the machine.
But medical-equipment manufacturers weren't interested in the poorest and most deprived markets in the world, and the likes of the UN and World Health Organisation told him they weren't in the manufacturing business.
In the meantime, anticipation had been building to a hysterical pitch around some of his other work: in December 2001, Kamen unveiled the Segway on live TV; the anticlimax was crushing. Seeing the machine, Good Morning America host Diane Sawyer simply asked, "Is that it?"
I n the wake of the Segway debacle, Kamen returned to Manchester and picked up where he had left off. While his engineers continued to tinker with the specifications of the water machine, Kamen also worked on providing the device with an independent power source to ensure that it could be used almost anywhere on Earth. For this, he resurrected the Stirling engine, first conceived in 1816 by Scottish engineer Robert Stirling. Generations of engineers had nonetheless proved unable to find a practical application for this well-known curiosity of theoretical physics. Yet by 2007, Kamen and his team had produced a series of prototype Stirlings that could turn almost any combustible fuel, from aviation spirit to cow dung, into electricity with remarkable efficiency. At the same time, the water machine -- now christened Slingshot by Kamen, in a reference to the tale of David and Goliath -- had been scaled up to the size and shape of an office photocopier, and encased in a thick foam block that provided thermal insulation and shock protection.
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In 2008, Kamen pressed ahead with field trials of both devices, shipping a Slingshot prototype off to a village in rural Guatemala, and installing a Stirling engine in a settlement in Bangladesh. The tests were a success -- the Stirling, powered by methane generated in a pit filled with cow dung, brought electric light to the entire village for six months. But Kamen still found it impossible to attract any backers prepared to put the machines into production.
By his estimates, Kamen had already sunk $30-40 million (£20-27m) of his own money into the Stirling project alone.
[Quote"]I'll just build a distiller to boil water, he thought. How hard can that be?[/pullquote]
By then, Kamen and a team at DEKA had also spent three years working on the new soda-fountain machine for Coca-Cola -- where, in April 2009, Muhtar Kent completed a four-decade rise through the company's global hierarchy with his appointment as chairman of the board. Under Kent, water conservation moved very quickly and publicly to the centre of the corporation's priorities, and he announced that he wanted the company to become the "water stewards of the world", committing to projects to replenish 100 per cent of the water Coke uses in drink production. This was both good for business -- for every litre of beverage it manufactures and sells, Coke says it uses almost two-and-a-half litres of water, and managing that will save money -- and as part of an eco-friendly PR strategy. For his part, Kamen had realised that Coca-Cola -- with its web of international bottling franchises bringing their products to every country on Earth (with the exception of North Korea and Iran), and a distribution network that enabled them to deliver bottles of Coke into the most remote communities -- might be the one organisation that could help him with Slingshot. "To me, Coca-Cola is not a soft-drinks company. Coca-Cola is the largest,
most efficient logistics operation ever put on this planet," Kamen says. "Coca-Cola can take their product and cost-effectively get it anywhere -- and the poorest people in the world get access to it."
Kamen invited Kent to attend the FIRST competition finals in St Louis, and took the opportunity to try to sell him -- as he had with so many executives before -- on sponsoring the event, and on his water machine.
This time, he was finally in luck. In 2010, Kent agreed to visit DEKA to see the Slingshot in action, and afterwards told Kamen he'd be welcome to present it at the biennial gathering of all the Coca-Cola bottling franchise holders from around the world, to be held that year in Monte Carlo. Kamen scrambled to build a display machine, flew it across the Atlantic, and then spent three days explaining how it worked to delegates from India, Africa and South America. When the conference was over, Kent agreed to a trial programme in Ghana with 15 machines; Kamen and his technicians hand-built each one at a cost of around $200,000 a unit. Coca-Cola picked up the tab. "They worked beautifully," he says.
Kamen's Slingshots were installed at the end of 2011 in five schools around Accra, the Ghanaian capital. In four months, they produced 140,000 litres of clean water in communities that had previously relied on a nearby river or buying plastic bags of water delivered by truck. Afterwards, Muhtar Kent took Kamen to a dinner with the Coca-Cola board of directors in Atlanta, where he screened a video of the machines in action. When it finished, Kent called for questions. "Pretty much," Kamen recalls, "they were, 'How can we move faster?'"
He returned to Manchester and -- at last -- prepared to put the Slingshot into production. For the first manufacturing run of 50 Slingshot machines, Kamen has created tooling to make the devices more robust than ever before. They have plastic parts that won't corrode, and each one is equipped with a phone chip to send remote monitoring data regularly back to DEKA. He expects they'll require no expert maintenance for as long as five years. According to Derk Hendriksen, who manages the DEKA project for Coke, the company intends to make this first generation of Slingshots a core element of its EKOCENTER plan, in which full-size shipping containers -- outfitted with a shop, a water machine, solar power, a phone-charging station, TV and an internet connection -- will provide what he calls a "downtown in a box" in even the most remote communities. Hendriksen plans to deliver "thousands of units in two or three years".
Back in the clattering basement room in Manchester, Kamen ambles down a row of 18 Slingshots that will shortly be installed in clinics and schools in South America and Africa, branded with the DEKA and Coke names, and the words Clean Water (For All). Each of the machines is constantly cycling through its purification process, taking water from a test reservoir, and distilling it into 189-litre plastic drums. "Each one of these machines will fill one of those in an eight-hour shift," Kamen says. These are the final mechanical trials before shipping. The most important appraisal -- third-party testing of the machine's ability to purify water -- has already been completed, and Kamen has a story he likes to tell about this. At first the technicians reported that the Slingshot was faulty. But it was fine -- it was removing contaminants so effectively from the water that they could no longer be detected by conventional testing. "It doesn't just make water potable," kamen says. "It has the potential to make medical-grade water, dialysate, in remote, small hospitals."
After all the time and money he had invested in his project, Kamen is giddy with the possibility of being able to finally deliver. "The irony is that the one company that took the chance to be able to say, 'We are the biggest healthcare provider on this planet' was Coca-Cola."
And Kamen's original client is interested again: executives at Baxter are keen to see what his water machine can do in the field of medical devices. "In less than 15 years," he says, "I'll have an overnight success."
Adam Higginbotham wrote about Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic in issue 03.13
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
