Institutions The Riess Institute Known for Magmatic water | Died 17 December 1985 | |
Citizenship United States of America Fields Geochemistry, metallurgy, geo-hydrology, geology Spouse Thelma Josephine McKinney | ||
Stephan Ernst Riess (26 December 1898, Dillingen, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire – 17 December 1985, Escondido, California, USA) was a geochemist, mineralogist and geo-hydrologist who immigrated to California after World War I. "Uncle Steve" as he was known to family and friends would spend over five decades, locating over 800 water wells, studying the concept of earth-generated water. Also known as "new water" or "primary water",
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Riess's theories and exploits were chronicled in what is considered to be the primary water textbook, "New Water for a Thirsty World" by University of Southern California economics professor Dr. Michael Salzman published in 1960, with a forward by Aldous Huxley. Salzman learned of Riess as a result of numerous news articles chronicling Riess's exploits during the 1950s. It was Riess who introduced the term primary water into English and the scientific lexicon by calling "the new water he finds 'primary' water because of its close association with primary minerals." In 1957, Encyclopædia Britannica's Book of the Year wrote the following on The "New Water" Theory of Stephan Riess: "Stephan Riess of California formulated a theory that "new water" which never existed before, is constantly being formed within the earth by the combination of elemental hydrogen and oxygen and that this water finds its way to the surface, and can be located and tapped, to constitute a steady and unfailing new supply."
Riess ultimately formulated the Theory of Primary Water and through the applied science of geo-hydrology, the study of surface waters of deep Earth origin, worked to end water scarcity globally. The book "New Water for a Thirsty World" by Michael Salzman was dedicated to him:
Biography
Born in 1898 to the Prussian Army officer Herman Franz Wolf Riess von Scheurnschloss and his wife (née Koch) in Dillingen on the Danube, Kingdom of Bavaria (by that date part of the German Empire), he joined a "school ship" at the age of 14 to train to become a sailor. A few years later he served aboard a German Navy ship that was sunk during the 1916 Battle of Jutland in the North Sea. He was saved from the frigid sea by the British and became a prisoner of war. While a POW in England he began to learn English. After World War I he returned to Germany where he studied chemistry and metallurgy. Affected by the crisis of the post-war years of the Weimar Republic, Riess would travel to Australia and South America and ultimately the United States where he ended up in California working industrial mine concerns.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s while working at mines throughout the American Southwest he experienced frequent flooding of mining operations by what seemed to him as inexplicable and sometimes immense flows of subterranean water. Riess began to study these phenomena as a new area of research. While working for Hoover Family interests in El Dorado Canyon south of Las Vegas, Nevada, where all water was piped great distance and elevation from the Colorado River, Riess worked with a crew to hand dig his first primary water well. When the source was struck, laborers scrambled from the pit to avoid drowning; eventually the free-flowing water created a lagoon until it was brought under control.
By 1935 because of a chemical "soup" he had created to leach precious metals from low-grade complex / primary non-free milling ore, he was invited to Stanford University to meet with the family of Herbert Hoover. They had lengthy discussions about the flooding out of mines. As a result, Riess was appointed to the position of Chief Metallurgist for the Bureau of Mines and encouraged to continue his research of this water phenomenon. During World War II Riess worked with the federal government to determine which mines in North America had sufficiently high grades of ore to support the war effort.
Theory of primary water
As a mining engineer in the 1940s Riess had access to government and mining company assay laboratories. In order to investigate the problem of subterranean water, he began taking soil and rock samples from the failed mines and submitted them to chemical analysis. Riess thereby developed a body of test data leading to a previously undetected pattern. These waters, he noted:
By 1954, often together with drilling manager Jim Scott, Riess had sited and drilled 70 of these hard rock wells, usually located in distressed areas of little or no rainfall. In the midst of an extended drought in California, his work would come to the attention of news reporters, water resource bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, farmers and industry leading to the publication of Salzman's book in 1960. By the late 1970s he had documented over 800 primary water wells and attracted a group of professionals who would launch The Riess Foundation and, in the 1980s, The Riess Institute to train the next generation of primary water specialists. Christopher Bird nominated Riess in 1982 for the Right Livelihood Award, considered the alternative Nobel Prize. The committee asked that his name be resubmitted in 1983. His legacy continues in the vision of the Primary Water Institute established by his protege and friend Pal Pauer.
Although Reiss' theory received much publicity in the popular press during his life, and has become popular with dowsers, his theory of primary water has received very little support among groundwater scientists. Riess' assertion that there are large volumes of potable primary water (what geologists call juvenile water) has been examined and rejected by hydrogeologists of the California Department of Water Resources and the US Geological Survey. Scientists from both organizations found no evidence that water pumped from Riess-located wells was anything but normal groundwater derived from downward-infiltrating precipitation. The California Department of Water Resources compiled information on wells located by Riess, and of the 11 wells for which they had reliable information, yields varied from 0 to 90 gallons per minute, with an average of 19 gallons per minute, far lower than the range of 500 to 3,000 gallons per minute claimed by Riess for his wells.