An eccentric inventor from Texas mixed cow manure, seawater, and yeast, producing a magic potion that he said could boost agricultural yields, make oil wells more productive, and cleanse the environment. Seventeen years after his death, scientists are trying to prove that he was right, and entrepreneurs are selling products based on his discovery.
Jim Martin's Living Water by TOM CURTIS
No one seems to know for sure just where or when the old man discovered the secret oflife, but my best guess is that it was in EI Paso, Texas, sometime between 1950 and 1953. James Francis Martin was already well into his fifties back then and had come back to live for a few years in the town where he was born. An archetypal American inventor in the tradition of Thomas Edison, he was a self-taught chemist, metallurgist, and naturalist who got no further in school than the fourth grade. Though he made his living traveling through the desert Southwest as a railroad fireman, Jim Martin's lifelong passion was figuring out how to make things, things he often put together from ingn~dients he found in the natural world-a natural insect repellent for plants, a patented pollution-reducing muffler, a way to preserve fruit for years, a procedure for making synthetic opals and an array of alloys. But Martin's crowning achievement-an invention he often said was 50 years ahead of its time-was not fully. accepted during his lifetime. From the early 1950s through 1975, when he died in a small town in Central Texas, he worked relentlessly to bring his discovery to the world's attention. It.was a colorless, odorless liquid he somet-imes called "the living water." It was derived from seawater, cow manure, and yeast-simpleingredients that were transformed by a fermenta-
tion process into a substance with remarkable qualities. It could stimulate microbes that exist in nature to multiply rapidly and cleanse polluted water and soils, neutralize dangerous chemicals, eat sewage sludge, even make the desert bloom. Starting nearly 40 years ago, Martin demonstrated virtually all these uses, but he was ignored at the time. Peoplejust could not believe that this innocuous-looking water was the environmental panacea its inventor so passionately believed it to be. Today at least six Texas companies are quietly peddling variations of Martin's seminal breakthrough, everywhere from the Middle East to American garden shops. These substances only recently have come to be studied seriously by scientists impressed by their phenomenal abilities. Horticultural specialists and farmers have been struck by the power of these products, confirmed in controlled tests, to dramatically increase crop production an.d to stanch soil erosion. Others have noted their capacity to reclaim salt-stressed soils and allow crops to thrive with saltwater irrigation. Studies commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy have verified that microbes treated with a version of Martin's water can boost oil production. A1\:ofthesepFOducts'Can betraced back to Martin, and some of the people making them knew Martin personally. One acquaintance refers to him simply as "the old man." Over the years Martin's name faded away, and so did claims that the substance could work near-miracles. Instead, the companies tailored