You’re a couple hours deep on a hefty bike ride. You reach for your water – the only thing that’s keeping you alive – and to your shock and horror discover that it’s all but gone.

It’s the stuff of cycling nightmares, but thanks to a student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, it need never happen again.

Meet your favourite new tool: the ‘Fontus’. All you have to do is attach a water bottle to the Fontus, attach the Fontus to your bike, and then let the gadget fill up the water bottle by sapping water from the air.

And yes, ‘Fontus’ is a hilarious word, which is yet another bonus.

The gadget is named after the Roman god of wells and springs – surely one of the shitter gods in the Roman repertoire – and it uses ‘the principle of thermoelectric cooling’ to bring water from the air you cycle past straight to your bottle, leaving you looking smug and your body hydrated.

It can produce half a litre of water in an hour, which admittedly is a borderline underwhelming amount…

The technicalities of the product make use of solar panels which cool parts of the chamber and heat up others. When the Fontus pulls in air as the bicycle moves forward then, it is slowed and cooled, condensing it into water and capturing it for consumption.

The Fontus works best in hot and humid conditions – at 20 degrees Celsius to be exact – which is good, because that’s obviously when you’ll be after water most.

Despite all the hype though, it can only produce half a litre of water an hour, a borderline underwhelming amount, and at it’s best it sees – wait for it – a drop of water a minute filling up the bottle.

If that wouldn’t make for the shittest GoPro video of all time, then we certainly don’t know what would.

The Fontus also doesn’t have a purification system yet, so it’s not great for cities with polluted air (i.e. every city in the world), but creator Kristof Retezár is working to develop it further.

It is a cool idea though, and as Kristof points out, if it one day can be perfected, it could be used for far more important causes than hydrating cyclists.

We wish you all the best in your quest for water then Mr. Retezár, but for now, we reckon we’ll stick with a couple spare bottles whenever we head out on a ride.

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