Out of Thin Air

The largest at the office is the AW120, a white metal box with the dimensions of a kitchen refrigerator but only half as tall. Its advertised output: at least 31 gallons per day. This AW120 is a display model. Plexiglas panels on one side reveal that it is split into an upper chamber where the water is created, and a lower chamber where it drains into a tank. An intake fan draws air into the upper chamber and blows it over refrigeration coils, producing condensation. The resulting water is circulated through a series of filters and exposed to ultraviolet light to kill bacteria. A small computer inside the unit monitors air temperature and humidity. "The biggest thing is the coils," Sablon says, "the angles that they're at, the coating on the coils, the air circulation, the internal fans. That makes a difference." But the best way to explain it, he adds, is to think of a cold can of Coke: "When you put it outside, water drops form on it."

Michael Zwebner, who maintains citizenship and residences in Israel, England, and Miami Beach, recounts that he first heard of tapping air for drinking water from a Chinese businessman during a trip to Vancouver. "I didn't believe him at first," he says of that February 2003 encounter. "I thought it was too hair-raising a story to be true. But I started doing a lot of research and I found that there was a lot on the Internet. If you go to Yahoo or Google and you type in öair to water' or öair water,' you get about ten million pages. It's incredible. There's a lot of stuff on it. The technology has been around for a long time but nobody's really put it to use or taken it to market."

Zwebner soon located James Reidy, a Massachusetts botanist, graphic designer, and inventor. Back in 1991, Reidy had begun exploring the possibilities of using dehumidifiers to produce drinking water. "My family has been drinking bottled water since further back than I can remember," he says. "The municipal water quality was fair to awful. So we just didn't drink it. And then one night at dinnertime my wife said, öGeez, we're out of water. I'm going to run to the store.' And while she was gone I went down into my cellar, where I just happened to have a brand-new dehumidifier. The container was full, so I went over to the sink and dumped out the container, and it looked crystal clear. It just hit me. I said, öSomething's wacky here. Here I'm pouring what looks like beautiful water down the drain, and my wife's out paying $1.50 a gallon for it. So I took a sip of it. You're not supposed to do that, but I did take a sip of it. And it tasted pretty good, and so I started thinking: How do you make this water safe to drink? You know, that's the whole key."

It took Reidy several years of tinkering but eventually he fleshed out his idea in enough detail to secure several patents. In 1996 he nearly sold the rights to a Phoenix high-tech firm, but it defaulted on a down payment. In 2001 he did sell them to Advanced Medical Technologies of Boca Raton. When the company "ran out of money," as Reidy describes it, the patent rights reverted to him. "People think that once they get the rights to this technology they can run out on the street and get all the money they want," he scoffs.

Zwebner says he paid Reidy $400,000 in 2003 for exclusive rights to four patents (and any future ones). Reidy clarifies that he received $100,000 cash and $300,000 worth of stock in Air Water's parent company, also headed by Zwebner. In addition Reidy was to receive a minimum monthly royalty payment of $10,000 starting in November 2003.

By the end of 2003 Zwebner had formed Air Water Corporation and contracted with an air-conditioner manufacturer on the outskirts of Jerusalem to produce the machines, which have a projected life span of 24 years (obviously a speculative figure). He also bought a Tel Aviv solar-energy company so Air Water could sell photovoltaic units to power the devices. And he signed a licensing agreement with a factory in China to make small residential models.

Initially Zwebner thought his principal market would be homeowners in the United States, but now he believes it lies in the Third World. "I'm not taking an ego trip here," he muses, "but when you think about it, it's the most incredible situation you could think of. We put a machine in the middle of nowhere, we run it on a generator. Eventually we could bring solar panels and power it from energy from the sun and be completely and utterly independent of any other form of energy. And we would then have energy from the sun, producing water from the air, for life-saving environments. That is incredible, I don't care what you say."