"In 1966 Israel invited a California scientist, Sidney Loeb, to spend a year at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (the new Hebrew name for Beersheba). Loeb had worked for industry after taking an undergraduate degree in engineering in 1941. Feeling restless, he quit his job at the age of forty and went to graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like the researchers in Israel, scientists at UCLA had been seeking practical desalination methods. Loeb joined the quest with another student, a Canadian named Srinivasa Sourirajan. They developed the first successful reverse-osmosis process in 1960--"successful" in the sense that it worked in a laboratory, not that it could be deployed in the real world. Sourirajan soon ran into visa problems and Loeb continued alone, constantly tweaking the all-important membrane. By 1965 the technology had advanced enough that Loeb was able to build a commercial reverse-osmosis plant--the first in the Americas--in Coalinga, a town of about six thousand in the San Joaquin Valley. So thick with salts was its groundwater that residents had always brought in potable water by tanker cars. The"