watching, the oil spills that continued, the exxon valdez in particular. but we've been seeing them up to that point and when i finally -- the exxon valdez happened and i saw that the reaction was the exact same. the oil looked like pudding. the birds had the arms, wings, distorted images that went with the animals. people on the beach in rubber boots and pitch forks, i thought is this the best we can do? i was approached with a small technology out of the department of -- the d.o.e. department of energy. it was a little machine about six inches tall separating very severe stuff but i looked at the machine and with my brother and the scientist that invented it we thought we could scale it up to separate oil and water at high speeds and i thought we could create a first line of defense where oil spills are concerned so i grabbed about 20 scientists and engineers and three years after r&d and close to -- a lot of dollars, scaled