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How Manufacturing Water Works · Stuff You Should Know

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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
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Speaker 1: from House stuff works dot Com brought to you by
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Speaker 1: Consumer Guidet Automotive We make carbine easier. Hi, and welcome
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Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here
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Speaker 1: at how Stuff works dot Com. With me is arguably
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Speaker 1: the greatest writer at the entire site. Mr Charles Bryant,
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Speaker 1: are you Chuck and I am great and I am
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Speaker 1: a great writer? Yes, thank you. Heads off to your
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Speaker 1: self confidence. They're chuckings. So check. We have a huge problem,
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Speaker 1: and by we I mean you and I and the
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Speaker 1: rest of the human population on the planet right now.
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Speaker 1: We do. We are having trouble with water, with safe,
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Speaker 1: clean drinking water. The United Nations published a report a
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Speaker 1: year or two back, and they found that in the
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Speaker 1: global population doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Uh
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Speaker 1: and they may have like a river nearby, but it
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Speaker 1: could be polluted. China, China's got a big problem with
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Speaker 1: e waste right now in high levels of lead and mercury.
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Speaker 1: Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk to a tenth of
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Speaker 1: its size in the last like forty years. So water
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Speaker 1: is running out and it's actually becoming a problem in
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Speaker 1: the developed nations as well. Um, why with with this
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Speaker 1: problem of of water and water being such a simple
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Speaker 1: compound of just oxygen and hydrogen, why don't we just
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Speaker 1: make it right? And that's a great idea. And you
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Speaker 1: would think that, you know, with all the technology we
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Speaker 1: have today, we could just kind of throw it in
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Speaker 1: a big kitchen aid and mix it up and you know,
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Speaker 1: have a spicket at the other end. But it's really
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Speaker 1: it's it's not as easy as that. You can't just
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Speaker 1: mix them up. Um. In order to combine these two
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Speaker 1: uh compounds, compounds, molecules molecules close, Yeah, you you have
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Speaker 1: to have a big burst of energy and that you
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Speaker 1: know potentially could be really dangerous. Well yeah, it causes
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Speaker 1: an explosion. You have to entangle their the orbits of
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Speaker 1: their electrons, and yeah, it can be, like you said,
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Speaker 1: very dangerous. Uh So I don't think it's so dangerous
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Speaker 1: that it could never happen. I mean, we humans are
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Speaker 1: pretty in g enius, but we can't do it right
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Speaker 1: now now. But you know there's other solutions there. There
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Speaker 1: are I know when you were researching you found these
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Speaker 1: other inventions that people have been able to pull water
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Speaker 1: from the atmosphere pretty much, water right out of thin air, right,
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Speaker 1: kind of like a big humidifier. Yeah, which you said
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Speaker 1: that you do you use the de humidifier in your
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Speaker 1: basement water your plan? I do. I have it hooked
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Speaker 1: up to a hose. And you know here in Atlanta
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Speaker 1: we're under a drought, so we uh, we use our
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Speaker 1: water to water our house plants. We need to get
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Speaker 1: you some birkin stocks. Yeah, that's a great idea. So
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Speaker 1: you want to talk about Aqua Magic their chuck, which
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Speaker 1: I gotta say, I can't tell which one of these
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Speaker 1: two inventions I like more. Yeah, you know, I like
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Speaker 1: the other one better, But I'll tell you about Aqua Magic.
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Speaker 1: Aqua Magic is these two guys invented this. Uh. It's
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Speaker 1: it's you tow it behind a car like a trailer,
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Speaker 1: and it basically just pulls all the water uh from
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Speaker 1: the atmosphere. And um, how much does it make per hour?
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Speaker 1: It makes dred and twenty gallons of purified drinking water
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Speaker 1: in twenty four hours twenty four hours, which is pretty
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Speaker 1: good but significant. Yeah, the problem is that it runs
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Speaker 1: on fuel. Yeah, twelve gallons of diesel fuel for and emissions,
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Speaker 1: and so it's not exactly the best solution, but the
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Speaker 1: thing is it's portable. They debuted this thing um at
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Speaker 1: a relief site after Hurricane Katrina, right, and you know, really,
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Speaker 1: once your house is under ten twelve feet of water,
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Speaker 1: you really don't care about the CEO two emissions exactly.
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Speaker 1: You just want the clean drinking water. So it definitely
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Speaker 1: has its benefits. Uh. The other invention that I came
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Speaker 1: up with when I was researching this is the Whissen windmill. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: this one's really cool. Yeah. Um, it's named what is it? Uh, Well,
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Speaker 1: he named it max Water, which you know all inventors have,
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Speaker 1: they're cute little names, and that is a cute one too,
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Speaker 1: it is. So this thing, uh is kind of similar,
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Speaker 1: except it has the advantage of being totally green. It
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Speaker 1: doesn't use any fossil fuels. They painted it green. No, No,
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Speaker 1: it's like the the real kind of the new hip green. Yeah. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: the eco friendly Macy's one day sale get a free
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Speaker 1: toepag green that kind of green. Um. So the whole
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Speaker 1: thing runs exclusively on wind power, and um, basically it
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Speaker 1: uses a refrigerant to cool the blades of the windmill,
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Speaker 1: which causes the water and the air to condense. It
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Speaker 1: collects it and there you have it, and it actually
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Speaker 1: produces a lot more um. I think something like gallons
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Speaker 1: per day, per day. Um. The problem is we have
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Speaker 1: no idea what the impact would be on the water cycle,
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Speaker 1: you know, the rain cycle. Um if we started using
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Speaker 1: these widespread across the globe to address drinking water, right,
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Speaker 1: and I don't know how they could really project what
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Speaker 1: could happen. We can't, We can't, which is kind of
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Speaker 1: seen in that that British project from nineteen fifty two
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Speaker 1: that you know about, right, Yeah, the air cloud seating, Yeah,
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Speaker 1: Operation Cumulus. Yeah, that's crazy, and it was I think
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Speaker 1: post World War two. They found out if they flew
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Speaker 1: above the clouds and threw a bunch of silver iodied
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Speaker 1: and dryce and salt, it would actually make make it rain. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: They were trying to rain out and front right, and
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Speaker 1: it worked really really well. It worked a little too well,
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Speaker 1: didn't it. Yeah. So basically this poor place called North Devon,
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Speaker 1: which was near the site of the cloud seating, experience
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Speaker 1: two fifty times the normal amount of rain. That's not
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Speaker 1: in two weeks um thirty five people died. Damn's broke
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Speaker 1: bowlers and that was the end of the experiment. That's
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Speaker 1: sadly yes, it's a testimony to how humans really shouldn't
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Speaker 1: tamper with nature exactly. If you want to find out
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Speaker 1: more about nature and manufacturing water in the like, read
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Speaker 1: why can't we manufacture water on how stuff works dot
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