The Magic Water Tap

It was approaching the end of a hot summer, and Kelvin had just a week left until lessons started again at school. Nearly every morning and evening since the end of the last Summer Term, Kelvin had helped water the plants in their garden. 

“I wish I had a magic watering can!”, his dad would say again and again. “If I did, I wouldn’t need to keep going back to the tap, because the can would stay full.” Kelvin always laughed, and then his dad did too. Professor Crispin Ovate-Moore (Kelvin’s dad) was a scientist, and a very serious, intelligent and hard-working man. He only repeated his words when he was turning a problem around in his mind. When he spoke, there was always a bit more going on underneath the surface which his dad was too cautious to say.

On this morning, Kelvin returned with his dad to the garden tap only to find that there was no more water to take. Kelvin’s mother (Marilyn) walked out from the kitchen and raised her arms into the air, nearly in tears to discover that there was no water flowing from any taps inside the house either. “What am I to do? I’ve clothes to wash, food to cook, all sorts of things to see to, and we haven’t even got any water to flush the loo!”

Kelvin and his dad took a couple of buckets down to the bottom of the garden where a small pond still had some stagnant water to take. They carefully carried the full buckets back to the WC, and then sat down in the shade to think about how to overcome this problem. The weather forecasts did not expect any rain in the next week, but their Water Company had placed a notice on their website explaining that reservoirs had evaporated and there was very little water left anywhere for their customers to draw from. It appeared to be a national emergency. “We all need lots of water!” said Kelvin’s dad (who specialised in scarce resources), and then he said the same thing again.

Kelvin volunteered to go into the nearby woods to see if there were any ponds or streams which hadn’t dried up under the shade of the trees. Meanwhile, his dad  began working overtime, scribbling numbers and symbols onto a notepad, muttering “I wish I had a magic watering can, or perhaps a magic tap! Hmm, I wonder if I could do that.”

Kelvin took his watering can into the woods, following a winding path under the cool, fragrant branches. Then he saw a bright beam of sunshine break through the canopy a short distance away, where it appeared to strike a surface which sparkled like diamonds. Kelvin left the path and went to take a closer look. Sure enough, there was water being stored in a large, brick, tank which appeared to be quite newly built.

Kelvin plunged his watering can into the tank, but as he began to draw it out he heard someone’s footsteps on the dry earth. Kelvin looked up to see Mr Steward, who lived next door, pacing towards him. “Are these your woods, Mr Steward?” Kelvin asked.

“Yes! And this is my water supply. I’ve been finding ways to trap and store water for years, because we keep getting left without supplies. This time it seems worse than ever.  Leave your watering can there a minute, and I’ll show you what else I’ve done with my garden. You might like to do the same.” So Mr Steward gave Kelvin a tour of his garden, then filled an adapted wheelbarrow with water, and accompanied Kelvin who carried his full watering can back to his own house.

Kelvin’s dad was on the roof fitting a small contraption as high as he could onto the chimney stack. When he saw them arrive he said “It needs to be as high as possible to get good pressure.” It had a mini-wind-turbine attached to a copper vessel with a crystal-like lens focusing sunlight onto an adjoining pipe. A hose emerged from the base of the vessel, and Kelvin’s dad attached the other end of this to the garden tap. With a remote control, he then released a brake and the machine swung into action. A short while later, water started pouring out of the tap. “I’m extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air with the turbine, providing heat energy to bind pairs of hydrogen atoms to single oxygen atoms with precisely concentrated solar power, and the resulting water is cooled and collected in the vessel from which it can pour down the pipe to the tap. The trickiest bit is getting the sums right. It’s more effective than I thought it would be, just look at this!” Water was now gushing from the tap, overflowing a watering can, and  running like a small brook along the edge of the path. Kelvin smiled, and Mr Steward’s jaw dropped in amazement.

When Kelvin bet Mr Steward that his dad could make another one at least as good, Mr Steward asked whether he might have one installed on his own roof. “I must have one”, he said. “How much does it cost?” There were enough components in the workshop to make at least one more, so Kelvin and his dad  put everything together then walked to their neighbour’s house where they found a good place to put it.

They were almost ready to release the brake and turn the tap on when a man from the Water Company arrived with some large plastic bottles filled with drinking water. “What’s all this?” he said when he saw all of the water capture features in Mr Steward’s garden, so Mr Steward gave him a tour and showed him how it all worked. When they returned to the garden tap the water was flowing freely.  When Mr Steward explained this to him, the man froze. Then he said, “I must phone somebody”, and took out his mobile, hitting a memory key that took him straight through to the desk of the Managing Director. “You won’t believe what I’m looking at; there’s a machine here that makes tap water from the air which is just pouring out fresh, new water.”

They had only just walked back through the woods to Kelvin’s home when a large car drove up and a few men in smart suits jumped out to take a look at what was happening. Kelvin and his mum served them glasses of cool, new water, whilst fresh and clean cotton shirts and towels flapped gently on washing-lines nearby.

“We’ve got to have this! This invention will change the game. Our customers need this tap now!” They soon negotiated a deal with Kelvin’s dad and his university (who lacked a water engineering department but with funding would found one). Kelvin’s dad would be on both payrolls and share money raised through selling Intellectual Property rights that the Water Company would get legally protected right away. The Professor could take a year’s sabbatical and help them to rapidly set up a factory production line to get water flowing in everyone’s homes as quickly as possible. There was a research and teaching role for Mr Steward too.

When Kelvin went back to school the following week, he began to really appreciate what his dad had done. All the children were really happy about the impact of the new Magic Taps which their families had been supplied with so quickly. They were able to arrive at school on time, well-fed and fit for a long school day wearing freshly clean uniforms. Just a week previously, that didn’t seem possible. When lunchtime came, all the children cheered Kelvin and raised their water bottles, shouting “Hip hip hooray for Kelvin’s dad and the Magic Tap!” 

The world was a different place. No-one would ever be short of water ever again. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

The following summer Kelvin was in the garden again helping his dad tend the beautifully green lawn, the heavily-laden fruit trees, and giant-vegetable plants. The weather was more hot than ever before, with even less rain, but the ponds were full, streams were running high, fountains and sprinklers sprayed the air, and everywhere was washed, bright and clean. Then a gleaming car pulled up and the Managing Director of the Water Company jumped out and ran over to Professor Crispin Ovate-Moore, “We’ve got a problem!” he said.

The Water Company was having difficulty treating the amount of water that was reaching their water treatment sites through the sewerage system, and the Government had been in touch about the quality of the air in cities and towns where there weren’t so many trees. Even in the forests the oxygen levels had been measured and recorded as low. They couldn’t keep on taking oxygen from the air any more, unless they came up with a solution.

Kelvin’s dad picked up his notebook and a pencil, and started writing down some maths. “I wish I had a fresh air machine!” he said over and over again. “If I did, I could keep on using my Magic Tap.” Kelvin didn’t laugh. He felt very upset. He had enjoyed growing bigger and better plants that year and didn’t want to give them up. Mr Steward had also been teaching him about all the different trees in his garden and woodlands which Kelvin also helped to keep watered, and Kelvin had been taught how trees liked to be far away from the traffic that crowded the roads (because pollution stuck to their trunks and leaves, which stopped them taking carbon-dioxide from the air when it was sunny, and so prevented them turning it into oxygen). Everyone needed the oxygen trees produced in order to breathe. Then there were the problems with the trees’ roots in places full of tarmac, buildings and pavements. So Kelvin started saying over and over again, “I wish I had some little trees that pollution doesn’t stick to and can still help us breathe”. The Managing Director of the Water Company nodded, and jumped back into his car, “I like the sound of that. Let me know what you need to get the production line started.” Then he drove away.

Kelvin was so busy that summer. Whilst his dad was in his workshop experimenting with lots of different materials and gadgets, Kelvin was lining-up a wide selection of green, leafy, trees that he’d found thriving in pots, or hard ground, close to nearby roads. When Mr Steward taught him how to get hybrid seeds, he filled the greenhouse with hundreds of surprising new seedlings and got very excited about seeing how they’d turn out. Kelvin enjoyed using the Magic Tap, just like he enjoyed taking his toys out of the cupboard and playing with them. It wasn’t so much fun putting them back into the cupboard at the end of the day, which was like what his dad now needed to do with all the water. Experimenting with new varieties of trees was different. Once they’d cracked open their seed jackets, you just needed to help them keep on growing.

There was no stopping the hard work. Every day the problems caused by too much water everywhere began to be seen. Plants and buildings began to rot, types of weed and unwanted fungus began to grow, whilst muddy places turned into marshland very quickly. Newspapers spread fear about places near rivers being submerged by autumn rains and winter storms. Professor Crispin Ovate-Moore was already respected for tackling problems of scarcity in the world, but now he needed to lead the way in addressing the difficulties faced by a level of superabundance that was, before the Magic Tap, a problem known only by a privileged few.

The first ever Fresh Air Machine looked like a small fish tank with a steel box on one end, connected to a funnel with a fan unit in between. It sucked-in water through a pipe near the base. Getting the new machine up to speed had been the biggest challenge, but with the help of a precise clockwork mechanism it could work through the night as well as the day at any rate that a tap flowed. The Water Company quickly set up factories so that every Magic Tap was matched with an emergency Magic Air Machine, and larger versions were built at their water treatment plants and other key places prone to flooding.

Kelvin and his dad celebrated the success of their latest invention in the greenhouse amongst the little trees. They drank pure water from their original Magic Tap, and enjoyed breathing-in with their prototype Fresh Air Machine nearby. They still needed the trees to re-balance the environment with carbon-dioxide during the night, but if they could now fill the cities and roadsides with hardy saplings they’d almost solved that problem too. Sighing with relief, Kelvin’s dad took his phone out of his shirt pocket and placed it on a table, then it rang. The Managing Director of the Water Company was on the line and sounded very happy. “I’m too busy to visit you today, although I’d like to. The Fresh Air Machine project is going well. I’m getting zero complaints from our own Government now, but I’ve got politicians from all over the world trying to get hold of me to discuss installing our systems in their countries. We’re putting them in containers and shipping them to deserts, swamps, and densely populated islands, to name but a few. Your son will also be pleased to know that we’re setting up a Tree Department and we’re interested in what Kelvin’s been growing. If he’ll give us a hand before he goes back to school, we’d be pleased to take over his hybrids and specimens collection and fast-forward his work in our new incubators and labs.”

“The sabbatical is over!” said Kelvin’s dad with a smile. “We both need to get back to what we were doing. Only, we don’t need to keep carrying watering cans between the plants and the garden tap any more. We’ve managed to solve that problem.” Kelvin laughed, and his dad laughed with him.