Scalability

There's a documentary on Netflix called "Slingshot". It needs editing into a short film, maybe 20 minutes from the nearly two hours it currently runs. It is about an inventor, the guy who created the Segway, a famously useless toy for people who live in flat places and are too lazy to walk. Dean Kamen is a weirdo, but his electronics and machinery are interesting, although expensive. He invented the major patent for my insulin pump, which is good. It works great. Most of his successes are with medical technology. The segway started as a powered wheelchair that can stand up and balance on two wheels, and climb stairs. That's a great invention... but why aren't those everywhere? Weight and cost. The was one of the problems with the Segway. It was $5K. That's a lot of money for a 10 mph electric toy that can't navigate slopes and is illegal on the sidewalks in most cities and an obstacle to traffic when on the road. Useless, despite being clever in other ways. There's already a solution in place for this kind of use, and its both healthy and cheap, called a bicycle. Kamen invented something that is both more expensive and less useful.

So Dean Kamen built a relatively efficient water distiller. Its not revolutionary. He called it the same energy drag as a hair dryer, which he doesn't mention is one of the highest energy drains in the household. And since the people he made this for, poor Africans, don't have the energy grid to run something like that, his solution doesn't work. I could see these getting used out on the California coast, for isolated mansions, distilling drinking water from sea water. It still takes a lot of energy to run, and a mansion uses a lot more water than a regular house. If you run a co-generation plant you could certainly use the waste heat for this process, which would be fine, but then you need to produce even more water, and this solution doesn't scale up well. Its not revolutionary.

Also, the hand slapping thing? That's really annoying. That says "CRAZY!!" with the two exclamation points. I suspect Dean Kamen was a very spoiled child, and that's why he grew up to be a spoiled weirdo of an adult with a helicopter in his living room. He constantly compares himself to Einstein and Newton and Galileo, but he's just good with electronics and owns a machine shop. That's not genius. That's hard work.