Alexander Zarchin (1897–1988) was a Ukrainian-Israeli chemist and inventor. He is most noted for inventing a process of sea

water desalination Desalination is a process that takes away mineral components from saline water. More generally, desalination refers to the removal of salts and minerals from a target substance, as in soil desalination, which is an issue for agriculture. Saltw ...

."Jews of Silence." ''B'Or Ha'Torah.'' Number 1, Summer 1982.

Biography

Levi Eshkol visiting desalination plant in Eilat 1964

Born in Ukraine to a family of religious

Zionist Zionism ( he, צִיּוֹנוּת ''Tsiyyonut'' after ''Zion'') is a nationalist movement that espouses the establishment of, and support for a homeland for the Jewish people centered in the area roughly corresponding to what is known in Je ...

s, as a young man, Zarchin studied industrial chemistry and specialized in

metallurgy Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys. Metallurgy encompasses both the sc ...

. In 1934, he was arrested by the authorities for the crime of Zionism (he patented a chemical process using magnesium as "LCLA" an acronym for the phrase "''L'ma'an Tzion Lo Achsheh''" ("for the sake of Zion I will not hold my peace") from the

Book of Isaiah The Book of Isaiah ( he, ספר ישעיהו, ) is the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the first of the Major Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. It is identified by a superscription as the words of the 8th-century BC ...

) and was sentenced to five years in prison. Zarchin was then recruited into the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

, and by the end of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, he managed to reach

West Germany West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...

, and from there he immigrated to

Palestine __NOTOC__ Palestine may refer to: * State of Palestine, a state in Western Asia * Palestine (region), a geographic region in Western Asia * Palestinian territories, territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely the West Bank (including East ...

in the summer of 1947. Since his arrival and settlement in Israel, his work was in the area of sea water desalination, petroleum production from bitumen stone, wind operated generators, and other areas.

Invention of seawater desalination

In 1964, Alexander Zarchin obtained a patent for seawater desalination. Zarchin's method of sea water desalination involved freezing sea water in a vacuum, forming pure water crystals which are then melted to produce salt-free water. The salt is drained off in the vacuum stage. One of Alexander Zarchin's main contributions to the vacuum freezing vapor compression (VFVC) system was the incorporation of a compressor having a rotor with nexible unmachined Hades, made of thin stainless strip. In 1965, Zarchin founded IDE Technologies.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zarchin, Alexander 1897 births 1988 deaths 20th-century Israeli inventors Soviet emigrants to Mandatory Palestine