While touring the United States in 1790, President George
Washington was presented with a bottle of desalinated seawater by inventor
Jacob Isaacks while in Rhode Island. Isaacks offered two signed certificates of
leaders in the local Jewish community noting that the water in the bottle had,
in fact, originally been drawn from the briny water of the Atlantic and
purified through by Isaacks’s own means.
The Newport Herald
pronounced that Washington tasted the water and “was pleased to express himself
satisfied.” Isaacks stated that he had a secret mixture that acted as a
catalyst, purifying water along with a set of machinery, and the system would
be available to the United States government for a price. The method would certainly
be a boon to the US Navy as ships needed to put into port often to take on
fresh water, though that time could be stretched through grog: water mixed with
rum for an alcohol content to slow down the things growing in it.
Washington handed the matter off to his
scientifically-minded Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who was fascinated by
the possibilities. Jefferson brought Dr. Isaacks to Philadelphia together with
a panel of distinguished scholars, including President of the American Philosophical
Society David Rittenhouse and two academic chemists, Dr. Wistar and Dr.
Hutchinson. Through four days and a collective twenty hours of experimentation,
Jefferson and his fellow scientists determined that Isaacks’s methods did, in
fact, make seawater potable. Water collected three miles off the coast of
Delaware was mixed with Isaacks’s solution (revealed to be largely hydrofluoric
acid, a substance isolated by Swedish chemist and used by glass etchers for decades
before). It was then pushed through a filter of bone char by means of a hand
pump, producing drinkable and remarkably clear water.
While Isaacks largely came across the discovery by means of
alchemy, further chemical research in the nineteenth century proved its
chemical path, first from the mixture and then the bone char filter:
HF + NaCl → NaF + HCl
(net decrease in
specific energy of ~180 kJ mol−1)
CaCO3 +
HCl → H2O + CaCl2
(net decrease in
specific energy of ~100 kJ mol−1)
Even though the exact science had not yet been revealed,
Isaacks was named a national hero through Jefferson’s recommendation to
Congress. Isaacks was presented with the Magellanic Premium from the American
Philosophical Society as well as a post in the US Revenue Cutter Service, later
moved to the US Navy after it was established permanently in 1794. Crews noted
that, once generated, Isaacks water even stayed fresh longer than traditionally-gathered
water from land, which proved to be from the calcium chloride by-product, now
used as a food additive.
Jefferson, meanwhile, became infatuated with the
possibilities of naval expansion. His chief clerk’s father, Henry Remsen, was a
New York merchant who painted grand pictures of what American ships could do at
sea. Jefferson encouraged the Senate to implement ideas as the Navy grew during
his time as vice president, and as president, he used the Barbary Wars as
reason to swell the navy’s ranks. In 1804, along with the overland Corps of
Discovery Exploration led by Lewis and Clark, Jefferson launched the USS Discovery, which was to explore the
Pacific, ideally to make contact with Lewis and Clark on the far side of an
expected Northwest Passage. While the Discovery
only found increasingly impassable icy waters, it also strengthened America’s
claims to the western shores of North America, which would lead to squabbles
with the British in later generations until the western border of Canada was
ultimately drawn at the Continental Divide until 54°40’ N latitude.
Isaacks’s technique was a closely guarded secret for many
years until its ultimate re-creation by Britain as part of efforts to keep
ships at sea against Napoleon. Under Jefferson’s guidance, President James
Madison kept the US from being mixed up in a costly European war. Instead,
Madison continued pushing expeditions in the Pacific to find what Jefferson
called “unpeopled lands” to civilize. Meanwhile, the government-endorsed sealers,
largely New Englanders, pressed farther south than Captain Cook’s discoveries
of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, revealing a long peninsula
leading to the ice-covered continent of Antarctica.
Although claimed by America, the continent proved difficult
to colonize. The few whaling ports that were established to harvest the
plentiful animal populations were seasonal and largely deserted after
overhunting nearly wiped out several species of seals and penguins. Gradually
over the nineteenth century, improvements in artificial lighting and insulated
construction made greenhouses possible. It would not be until the Buckminster
Fuller domes of the 1960s that Antarctica gained a permanent population.
--
In reality, Isaack’s mixture, whatever it actually was, did
not work. Jefferson presented an official report that November, Exhibit 6 in
Vol. 3 of the Annals of Congress, that it was the machines used to do a
distillation process, which had already been experimented for over a century
and put into use aboard ships for decades. While costly, heat-driven distilling
is proven as the most efficient method for making seawater potable.
No comments:
Post a Comment