Distillation

Distillation is a technique for separating the components of a liquid mixture by selectively boiling off and then condensing its more volatile parts in a still. The earliest evidence for the practice comes from Akkadian tablets of around 1200 BC describing perfume making among the Babylonians, making it one of the oldest known separation methods. Distillation is now used to produce alcoholic beverages, desalinate seawater and refine petroleum, though the repeated boiling and condensing it requires makes it one of the more energy intensive processes in industry.