We tend to think of the air as empty. You can walk through it. You can wave your arms around in it. We think of things as vanishing into thin air for a reason.

But “empty” is doing a lot of work. The atmosphere around us is carrying an enormous quantity of stuff. Most of it only seems negligible because it is spread very, very thin.

After Cody Soodeen’s parents got sick from drinking contaminated well water, he started to think about all that perfectly good vapor floating around in the air.

The shallow pool above your head

Meteorologists use a measurement called “precipitable water” to describe how much liquid water would cover the ground if all the moisture in the column of atmosphere above it were condensed at once. Under humid conditions, that amount can be measured in inches.

In other words, there are days when you are standing beneath the equivalent of a shallow pool of ambient water. We don’t notice because it’s been distributed vertically for several miles.

That is a strange way to think about the atmosphere, and once you start, it becomes hard to stop. What would other ambient things look like if gathered into one place? A little pile of allergens in the corner. A refreshing glass of Canadian wildfire particulate sitting on the windowsill. Perhaps some substances benefit from remaining democratically dispersed.

Water is different.

The useful exception

Concentrated in the right way, atmospheric moisture becomes useful. Cody set about inventing a way to concentrate it.

The Best Atmospheric Water Collector draws moisture directly from the surrounding air and turns it into drinking water, producing up to 10 liters per day under suitable conditions. The collected moisture is heated, distilled, passed through ultrafiltration and UV sterilization, then remineralized before dispensing hot, cold, or room-temperature water.

This ground-breaking - or, rather, air-breaking - solution was named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year and won the prestigious Innovation Award at the Consumer Electronics Show.

No plumbing connection is required. It simply needs an electrical outlet, the surrounding air, and a willingness to embrace the fact that your drinking water supply is already hovering invisibly around the room.