Boiling Water

Seek and ye shall find.

Pat

How Things Work, November, 1996
Louis A. Bloomfield, Professor of Physics, The University of Virginia

To distill water, you need to condense steam on a cold surface and collect the condensate. You could boil water in a teapot and allow the steam flowing out of its mouth to pass across the underside of a clean metal bowl full of ice water. The steam would condense as pure distilled water on the outside of the bowl. If you then placed a clean cup under the metal bowl, the distilled water would drip into that cup.