He didn't promise to turn water into wine, but he might as well have. In the '60s, there were plenty of disciples thirsting to cash in on the Next Big Thing.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 31, 1999

PORT RICHEY -- Newt Gehring's laboratory was his garage, and in it he cobbled together the tall dream he hawked around Tampa Bay.

Captured in that makeshift lab in a 1962 photo, Gehring resembles a rogue inventor from an old sci-fi film, all horn-rimmed glasses, rumpled workman's clothes, and a big, egg-shaped head with more skull than hair.

Behind him, his life's work: The clunky tanks and tubes he promised held the secret of making the salty oceans drinkable.

The amateur chemist, then 49, had been tinkering recklessly for years. To identify the substances he coaxed from seawater, he smelled them, tasted them and sometimes put matches to them, once igniting an explosion that hurled him down his driveway.

Lucky for Gehring, his experiments didn't kill him. And lucky for him, he lived in a land with a famous weakness for tall dreams.

No pitchman, however wild-eyed, ever lacked for marks in the Sunshine State. Here, suckers have always been as ubiquitous as the swampland their fortunes went bubbling under.

If the history of Florida is a story of opportunity -- of people coming from colder, more tradition-bound places in search of fast riches and new beginnings -- it's also a cautionary tale about pie-in-the-sky folly.

So in the mid-1960s, when Gehring, retired engineer and self-styled water messiah, made the sea look like so much convertible cash, it's no surprise he found disciples.

Those mysterious tanks

Squatting on a marshy island in the Gulf of Mexico just west of Port Richey, a remnant of Gehring's legacy survives: a network of massive, crumbling concrete tanks -- some capable of holding 20,000 gallons of liquid.

For years, people wondered about their origin. This being Florida, folks figured they were put there by long-dead dupes seeking some impossible windfall. Legend held that the tanks were meant to cull gold from oceanwater.

That wasn't quite the case.

When Gehring built the experimental tanks on a 10-acre plot in 1966, he planned to pump 150,000 gallons of seawater through them a day, creating drinkable water and selling the chemicals he extracted -- sodium, magnesium, chlorine and hydrochloric acid.

The process, called electrodialysis, used an electric current as a magnet to remove the chemicals through a filtering screen. It wasn't a new idea, but Gehring claimed he knew something nobody else did: exactly how much current to apply.

Gehring feared that corporate "pirates" would poach his ideas, so he guarded them closely. Beyond the miracle of freshwater, Gehring claimed he could end global food shortages by using the sea's microscopic plant and animal life to form high-protein food cubes.

It was a beguiling vision, and people opened their wallets. Articles said he raised more than $100,000 for the Port Richey plant. General Electric workers pooled their money to buy $5,000 worth of stock in Gehring's company.

To Gehring's advantage, investors didn't fully grasp how his machine was supposed to work. But all that talk of electrodes and high-frequency vibrations sure sounded sweet and scientific.

"I guess a lot of people were in the same position I was," says Sam Y. Allgood, 83, of New Port Richey, one of the money-losing investors. "They weren't sure exactly what it was and exactly what they were doing."

Was it because people couldn't understand Gehring that he inspired such faith? Allgood adds, wryly, "Any time you can talk over people's heads, you must be a genius."

Another of the investors, Anthony E. Coryn, now 84 and living in St. Petersburg, said the inventor's process sounded plausible at the time.

"It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme," Coryn says. "It just never proved workable."

Even today, Coryn, whose family runs other successful businesses, sounds embarrassed by the debacle. "I'm not used to being part of a failure," he says. "Unfortunately, Mr. Gehring was very secretive about what he had."

Failures, then success

What went wrong?

Simply put, Gehring's method cost too much.

Electrodialysis has proven practical on brackish water because of its relatively low salt content. But it took so much energy to tease salt from seawater using that method that others proved more marketable. One of them is a pressure-driven system called reverse osmosis. It will be used in a massive new desalination plant planned for Tampa Bay.

Another of Gehring's failed ventures -- using a "secret" process to turn untreated waste into drinking water at an experimental plant in Madeira Beach -- landed him in jail on state charges. In 1970, Gehring admitted to bilking nearly $30,000 from investors, pleading guilty to 12 counts of violating securities laws by selling unregistered stock.

Placed on probation and ordered to repay his victims, Gehring skipped town and went years without returning a dime.

Again and again, he was caught and hauled before judges. Again and again, he used the same plea to escape jail: Give me a little more time to perfect my latest invention, and I'll have the money.

In 1979, Gehring, then living in Utah, apparently got lucky with one of his inventions. Using proceeds from a wind turbine he designed to generate electricity, he repaid his debt. After that, the papers forgot him.

What finally happened to the Port Richey plant?

Turns out, a distinctively Floridian fiasco has become, over the years, a distinctively Floridian wonder.

The Pasco County School Board bought the abandoned, vandal-stripped property for $25,000 in 1974, and today it's an oasis of coastal hammocks and burgeoning estuaries, cattails and oyster reefs, mangroves and marshes, classrooms and aquariums.

Called the Energy Management Center, the site is meant to study alternative forms of energy and to serve as a kind of eco-park, where thousands of elementary school kids handle fiddler crabs and marsh snails, observing one of the state's ecological nursery-grounds up close.

The eco-park has grown up around Newt Gehring's crumbling old tanks, and EMC director Gary Perkins says he's tried for years to find some good use for them.

Some he's turned into storage sheds and workshops. Others he tried to keep fish and stringrays in, but they kept dying.

"It's bigger than most people's swimming pool," Perkins says, standing before one of the 20,000-gallon, 42-foot-long, 8-foot-deep tanks, its bottom sloshing with algae. "A great lap pool."

The law of perpetual tinkering

The old inventor's ending isn't quite so happy.

Now 86, Newt Gehring says he wakes up every day expecting to die amid the clutter of his unfinished inventions.

Blind, barely able to walk and fighting cancer, Gehring lives in a two-bedroom house with a son in Crittenden, Ky. His lab was once a makeshift garage. Now he fumbles with bolts and screws at his kitchen table, still trying to transform them into useful machines.

On the phone, he wheezes heavily. But the voice of a true believer still rasps through.

The Port Richey plant would have worked, he insists, if he had just had more time and money to perfect it.

Personality conflicts, not bad science, drove his project into the ground, he says.

"It got so aggravating that the people that were with me didn't know from nothing, and they wanted to dictate, and eventually I just got tired of it," he says. "It was so nerve-racking -- people trying to give you advice that didn't know anything about it."

He was never after money, he says. He was a humanitarian.

"Most inventors never have a lot of money," he says. "I hardly have one dollar to rub against the other." Unlucky for an inventor-entrepreneur, he doesn't even have other people's dollars to rub together.

Gehring says his health is so bad, he doesn't expect anything to come of his desalting ideas. He says he misses the Florida sunshine. He also misses his dead wife terribly, and wants to meet her in heaven.

Till then, he toils away at his kitchen table, racing to complete his last earthly dreams -- a new variety of fire hydrant, and hydrogen-based auto fuel.

"Maybe if I can stay alive for another 60 days, or 90 days," Gehring says, "I'll have something."

-- Times researchers Caryn Baird, Kitty Bennett and Mary Mellstrom contributed to this report.