So, yesterday, we discussed Kitty and Cliff Hach- those entrepreneurs who made water testing easy, reasonably priced, and reproducible.

And, back during their heyday as a private firm (they were acquired by Danaher in 1999), folks began to worry about the quality of water they were drinking.  A decade later, many folks simply drank their water from bottles, because of their doubts about their tap water quality.

We were attempting to capitalize on that market.  Between our work in water treatment and reuse, water delivery for semi-conductors, and pharmaceutical water systems, we felt eminently qualified to offer what we considered to be the ultimate home water appliance.

The goal was to provide drinking water for a family of eight. From a device the size of a toaster oven.  Not just any drinking water- one with no organics, no inorganics, and (ideally) with zero microbes.  If the family of eight were attempting to fill a gallon reservoir for dinner, then it was possible that the microbial count would have been somewhere between 5 and 9 per liter.  (Just so you know, your average drinking water has between 250 and 500 microbes per 100 mL!  And, those results for our devices were achieved when we challenged the units with incoming water quality of 10,000- 14000 microbes per milliliter- 7 order of magnitude reductions!)

Our device employed activated carbon, ion exchange, ultraviolet light sterilization (at very high doses), as is seen in the original schematics above.  (And, yes, those processes involved replaceable modules, so we’d have residual, “razor-blade” income to keep the company’s cash flow positive.)

Our ChemE team (Steve Meyers, Suzanne Birdsall, Sue Frasier, M’hammed Saadaoui, and me) had been working on this concept for about a year before we were positive that our designs were complete.  And, our board recognized that this was a consumer product with wide appeal. One that did not belong under the ASTRE (our progenitor firm) rubric.

So, we set up BioFiltration Technologies, Inc. (BFT) and sought out an underwriting team to take the product (and the company) public.  We didn’t need a lot of money- and we didn’t want to give up a lot of control.  (We would have owned more than 55% of the public company after going public.)

In the meantime, we began obtaining regulatory approvals- both from US government authorities and agencies such as the National Sanitation Foundation [now known as NSF International] that produced standards and measured products against those demands.

(We also continued working on our other many projects- water reuse for a mining firm, car wash water recycling, home dry cleaning, contaminant removal via unique microbes, online medical instrumentation, respiratory and dialysis products, along with the rest of the ASTRE staff.)

What we didn’t know was that the underwriters had run into major problems during the 1981-1982 recession (at that time, the worst downturn since the Great Depression).  And, that they lacked the ethical qualities one would expect of fiduciaries.

Before the end of the year, we were getting phone calls from some of our initial investors who were asking what was going on.  Because the escrow had been broken. (That meant the minimum stock offering had been exceeded; stock sales could continue for a while, as one hoped to reach the maximum stock offering.)   Except…

It seems that three of the underwriters managed to plunder the money.  Tempted by the cash, they simply disappeared with the proceeds.

Yes, the SEC investigated.  And, it took about a year before we were personally removed from all suspicion.  But, BFT was over.  We had assigned the product to the company and the company assets were sold to make the investors whole.

And, our dream of providing the best drinking water ever.  And, our model for the consumer was they would have the same sort of involvement with our device as they would by opening a refrigerator door for cold food- other than occasionally changing the light bulb and defrosting the fridge.  But, that dream disappeared along with the perpetrators.