History
The process of osmosis through semipermeable membranes was first observed in 1748 by Jean-Antoine Nollet. For the following 200 years, osmosis was only a phenomenon observed in the laboratory. In 1949, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) first investigated desalination of seawater using semipermeable membranes. Researchers from both UCLA and the University of Florida successfully produced fresh water from seawater in the mid-1950s, but the flux was too low to be commercially viable until the discovery by Loeb and Sourirajan of techniques for making asymmetric membranes characterized by an effectively thin "skin" layer supported atop a highly porous and much thicker substrate region of the membrane. By the end of 2001, about 15,200 desalination plants were in operation or in the planning stages worldwide.
Read more about this topic: Reverse Osmosis
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)