It all begins in England, in the early 19th century. The Thames, Londoners' main source of water, was heavily polluted by sewage. Epidemic diseases such as cholera and typhoid were spreading. Queen Elizabeth was concerned about this situation, which was depriving the inhabitants of clean water.

A providential man appeared. He was John Doulton, inventor of a crude filter built around the assembly of different earth and clay materials. This was the beginning of water filtration.

In 1862, it was John's son Henry who took over his father's work and modernised filtration with a manganese and carbon filter. That same year, Pasteur published his work on the contamination of water by micro-organisms, a source of infection for animals and humans. Doulton sought to improve its filters still further.

In 1901, King Edward VII knighted Henri Doulton and authorised him to use the word ‘Royal’ in reference to his products. They would henceforth be called ‘Royal Doulton’.

In 1906, Doulton developed a porous ceramic filter, capable of both eliminating micro-organisms such as bacteria and at the same time self-sterilising. It proved to be as effective as the Pasteur filter created in France. They were used in hospitals, laboratories, adopted by the army and used for domestic filtration all over the world.

In 1972, Doulton became Pearson & Son Ltd.

In 1980, the Pearson group bought Fairey Holdings.

In 1985, the company changed its name to Fairey Industrial Ceramics Ltd and bought the rights to the Berkefeld brands. Berkefeld then marketed ceramic water filters and gravity filtration systems.

In 1998, New Millenium Concepts Ltd (NMCL) entered into an agreement with Fairey and became the distributor of Berkefeld products in the US.

In 1999, NMCL began offering Berkey® and Big Berkey® filters in the United States.

In 2003, the Black Berkey® purification elements were developed, currently the most efficient gravity filters.
These filters have been tested 10,000 times with 100,000 pathogens per litre of water and analyses have no longer found any of these elements in the filtered water...