Jewish Invention Myths: Water and the Air Well

One of the more bizarre ‘Jewish Invention’ claims I have come across in recent years is the claim made by the jewish website ‘Kosherica’ that jews invented… well… water.

They write that:

‘9. Water

Israel found a way of creating drinking water out of air. This technology, developed by the Israeli company EWA, is producing water out of thin air by using a condenser. It absorbs the humidity from the air, holds it in silica-based granule then condenses it into pure water. The extra beauty is that 85% of energy used is pumped back into the system. In other words, an existing resource is used to create a much-needed resource, without which we can’t exist.’ (1)

Now what ‘Kosherica’ is describing isn’t water but rather what is called an air well or a man-made structure which acts as a natural water condenser to change water molecules in the air from a gaseous to a liquid state thus generating water.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news for ‘Kosherica’… well I don’t but you get what I mean, but air wells are ancient and not a modern Israeli invention as they claim. The truth is air wells are thought to have been invented by the ancient Greeks in the sixth century B.C. (2) and were in widespread use by the Roman and Byzantine eras. (3)

In truth the modern re-discovered of the air well as a concept – the Russian engineer of German origin Friedrich Siebold (or sometimes Zibold) – did so from piecing together the function of an artificial mound near in the Crimean Byzantine city of Theodosia (alternatively Feodosia) in 1900 and then building his own modern version of the air well near the site of the Byzantine original which was fully functioning by 1912. (4)

So no jews didn’t invent the original nor the re-discovered air well and they certainly didn’t invent water!

References

(1) https://kosherica.com/10-awesome-israeli-inventions/

(2) Vadim Nikolayev, D. Beysens, A. Gioda, I. Milimouk, E. Katiushin, J. P. Morel, 1996, ‘Water recovery from dew’, Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 182, p. 20

(3) Ibid., pp. 20-22

(4) Ibid., pp. 21-22