Entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist Bill Gates added trickster to his repertoire on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday night, where the Microsoft founder conned the host into drinking water made from human waste with new technology from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dubbed the Omniprocessor, the machine processes human waste and turns it into clean drinking water and electricity — generating two of the resources most-essential to developing countries, while doing away with a leading cause of sickness and disease.
“We challenged engineers to make something that could take sewage and very inexpensively get rid of sewage,” Gates told Fallon. “Sewage is bad. It causes a lot of diseases like diarrhea, because people don’t have good sanitation systems. We said it’s way too expensive, the way the rich countries do it. Make something we can put throughout Africa and get rid of all that sewage.”
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Janicki Bioenergy — an engineering firm based in Seattle — developed the process, which extracts water from sewage and incinerates it to create the steam that powers the device.
Gates unveiled the tech earlier this month on his blog, saying the water is on par with bottled and that he’d drink it every day.