^[2] Reverse osmosis is most commonly known for its use in drinking water purificationfrom seawater, removing the salt and other effluent materials from the water molecules.

History[edit]

A process of osmosis through semipermeable membranes was first observed in 1748 by Jean-Antoine Nollet. For the following 200 years, osmosis was only a phenomenon observed in the laboratory. In 1950, the University of California at Los Angelesfirst investigated desalination of seawater using semipermeable membranes. Researchers from both University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Florida successfully produced fresh water from seawater in the mid-1950s, but the fluxwas too low to be commercially viable^[3] until the discovery at University of California at Los Angeles by Sidney Loeb^[4] and Srinivasa Sourirajan at the National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, of techniques for making asymmetric membranes characterized by an effectively thin "skin" layer supported atop a highly porous and much thicker substrate region of the membrane. John Cadotte, of