Staff Reporter
A 97-YEAR-OLD Canary Islander man is being credited with inventing the prototype for a revolutionary way of collecting water from mist as it condenses.
Tadeo Casañas came up with his plan after his small island of El Hierro in the Canaries went without rain in 1948.
After being awakened by water dripping through the heather roof of a hut he had built high up in the fog-shrouded hills where he had gone to hunt, he crafted a makeshift water collection system.
He cut various branches to collect the condensate then constructed an aqueduct to a cistern, before installing a pipe that delivered 14 litres a minute and helped save his village.
“They called me ‘the wise man of El Hierro’,” said Tadeo. “Now, I am dying. But I bother people with questions. Because I want to learn more.”
The modern version of Tadeo’s plan was invented by Venezuelan Ricardo Gil.
His Agua de Niebla de Canarias company have created aluminium structures capable of collecting 35,000 litres of water a day from an area of only 350 square metres.
It’s a simple idea like all the best ones and the islands in the Atlantic could’nt be a better place to do this. Why, because there are no pollutants in the air there unlike other places surrounded by heavy industry, so the water collected should have a very neutral PH. However I do doubt the figures for the new construction, I find them implausible.
Ridiculous claims by this old geezer who says he invented it. Fog/dew collectors are an ancient idea, known and used in many places, including the driest place on earth, the Atacama desert. The principle has been utilised, using plastic sheets, to save lives in waterless situations. The original notion probably came from observing condensation on spiders webs. Some hemp fields in Morocco are nourished by this naturally occurring phenomena.
Hate to disappoint you, but Tadeo Casañas is far from the first person to come up with this idea. Fog collectors/dew collectors have been used in many parts of the world for centuries. The Inca used them in South America, building fog fences” to collect water from the air. I’ll give Tadeo credit for coming up with the idea of his own accord, but he is neither the only one, nor the first one to come up with such an idea.
Sounds like the same type of story as the Spanish bloke who claimed he cracked the last enigma message. That turned out to be total codswallop too. In fairness, it does say in this story that he “invented a system”, so perhaps his system is unique, however it remains unlikely. There’s no such thing as an original thought…