Friday TED Talk: Michael Pritchard on Making Any Water Drinkable

This talk, from the 2009 TED Global Conference in Oxford, is a paradigm of what TED ("Technology, Entertainment and Design") is about. Michael Pritchard became disturbed about a common problem in the third world, started thinking, and went to his garage to construct a workable prototype. After some trial and error, he succeeded to a degree that could scarcely have been expected with such simple materials. The result is a highly effective, but very low-cost, means of supplying drinkable water from marginal supplies anywhere in the world. If you can watch how he prepares the sample which he purifies with his device, and still maintain your equanimity as he quaffs the filtered version, then you are a brave believer in technology indeed --- but at the same time, you would be the ideal target for these TED talks:

As is usual with these posts, read more about Michael Pritchard here; download various versions of his TED Talk from this page; and watch a high-resolution version of the talk here.

For a guide to TED itself, and to the previous talks linked here on Fridays, click this link.