Although there are cans of water shown there are no solar stills shown.
No, but the capiton says that the square cans may be replaced with chemical sea water kits. Similar to this one pictured. This kit was available at least in 1940, maybe earlier.
The following was written on an old Museum label that accompanied this kit:"
In 1935 two English chemists, Adams and Holmes, discovered that certain synthetic resins could remove all the solid substances dissolved in water.
As I wrote
before in this post:
"That doesn't sound like the "water machine" described by Mantz that condensed moisture "from a person's breath."
I also posted this quote at the same time:
"Sun stills did not come into general use until near the end of the war. Progress had been made earlier in the development of a desalting kit, and by
September 1944 they were being issued. These kits took most of the salts from sea water by chemical precipitation and filtering, but the materials in the kit were subject to deterioration."
The
manual page I posted before is dated
April, 1944 and the wording is "Chemical seawater purification kits
may replace some of the water cans." This shows that the manual was revised with the expectation that the desalting kits, then under development, would be included in the raft supplies at some time in the near future which is consistent with the September 1944 introduction date mentioned in my quote. This is 7 years after Earhart disappeared and after high priority, as rapid as possible, wartime development.
What makes you think this desalting kit was available in 1940? It stands to reason that had they been available in 1940 that they would have been in raft emergency kits right away when WW2 started, there would be no reason to wait until hundreds of airmen had been lost by delaying until 1944 their introduction. Note that in December 1942 Hap Arnold said "get the solar stills in production as soon as possible." He did not add "never mind, forget the solar stills since chemical desalting kits have been available for years, just order a hundred thousand of those." Again it is a long time from the point where some scientist makes some interesting discovery until that discovery is turned into a usable product and that that usable product is put into production. The nine year period from the discovery in 1935 until desalting kits reached production in 1944 illustrates this point.
I have attached a
1945 ad describing the desalting kits. Notice that it says, "Flyers adrift at sea have a
new life-saver- the Permutit Sea Water Desalting Kit." Hmmm, new in 1945, gee, it doesn't make any sense the ad would say "new" in 1945 if they had been around since 1940, does it. The patent application for the chemical desalting kit process wasn't filed until
1944.
And on the other subject we have been discussing, the amount of water needed to sustain life for a day, I notice that the instructions on the desalting kit says that each chemical packet makes
one pint of water, hmmmm, why not make the packets bigger so that each one would make a full quart, hmmmmm.
gl