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and the fact that they were starting a plant in Freeport, Texas, I think. I asked Bo Jones and David Lloyd to look into how much money was the Office of Saline Water being given to do research and development, and I found that in fiscal '59 they had an appropriation of one million 182 thousand dollars, and for fiscal '60 they had one million 335 thousand, and there was a question of an additional 400 thousand dollars that the Office of Saline Water wanted to proceed on a program of basic and fundamental research on a number of problems that had to be solved before you could get an economically feasible process for saline-water conversion. This amount of money seemed to me ludicrously small.

They also had an allowance of about two million 500 thousand dollars for construction of actual plants under the Office of Saline Water, and one was for the construction of a plant in Freeport, Texas, for one million and a half. And they also had funds for engineering and design of a conversion plant for brackish water, which is another problem but related. And for the acceleration of construction of plants, one million dollars.

Well, the total effort didn't seem to me very much considering that we were spending an enormous amount of money in the world to make nations self-supporting, whose main problem was lack of usable water. So, I thought about talking to Senator Johnson about this.

I went to see him and told him about the problem and he understood, naturally, that this was an important problem