Welcome to the laboratory graveyard:
This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There's a computer that's so old it has a 5 1/4" floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that's so old it has a nicely carved wooden frame. Actually, that last one probably counts as an antique, and might be worth something on that basis. It's certainly not being used, though.
And yet, we keep this stuff around, because we can't bear to throw it out. Which brings us to the Dorky Poll question:
What's the most useless piece of apparatus floating around your work space for no good reason?
This is a tough one. I inherited my lab space from a previous faculty member who left a lot of stuff behind when he moved back to California. The more obviously useless stuff, I got rid of, but there are a lot of relics hanging around because for some reason, I thought they might be useful for something. These are piled up on shelves and a counter top in the back corner of my lab:
Some of that stuff is actually useful gear that's just been stacked there while I work on other stuff, but the binders are manuals for computer software that runs on a computer we don't have any more. I'm really not sure why I haven't thrown those out.
Probably the single most useless piece of experimental hardware in that stack is a scope camera. That is, a mount that holds a Polaroid camera in front of an analog oscilloscope, so you can take blurry pictures of experimental signals that you then paste into a lab notebook, and measure with a rule to try to determine features of your signal. This was apparently used as recently as 1999, but I recently spent $1700 to buy a digital oscilloscope with a USB port on the front, that does a much better job of transferring scope traces into a more convenient format.
So, what's the most useless thing you have lying around?
(Note: This post topic was actually suggested by my parents, after hearing this NPR story about hoarding. So, well, thanks, Mom.)
Comments
# 1 | mollishka | May 23, 2007 9:32 AM
Those pictures look like they could have been taken in the basement of the dorm I lived in ... there was also a Saturn engine and a PDP 11 and a pile of computer monitors that went up the ceiling down there.
My department moved buildings about 7 years ago. Not enough time to accumulate anything really good.
# 2 | Melissa | May 23, 2007 10:15 AM
Most days, I'd say "me."
# 3 | Eric Lund | May 23, 2007 10:45 AM
Our physics building is to be rebuilt over the next 15 months. Earlier this month there was a formal closing ceremony at which two vintage voltmeters, which were probably among the building's original lab equipment (ca. 1915), were raffled off. My boss was one of the winners.
# 4 | Uncle Al | May 23, 2007 10:54 AM
An unnamed university's Dept. of Chemistry dumped a bunch of relic undergrad lab oxidation bombs. Uncle Al recovered three platinum crucibles. They are useless without their steel shells, but are retained for $entimental reason$.
# 5 | ctenotrish, FCD | May 23, 2007 11:45 AM
It wasn't my field project, but a good friend needed a way to spin down blood drawn from sea turtles. This was at-sea field work, with zero electricity (thus none of our existing lab equipment would work), so she wasn't sure what she'd be able to do. My Dad found a hand-cranked, two-tube centrifuge that had been salvaged from an old school. The 'fuge could be clamped to a board or boat-part, and any collected blood samples could be processed right away, which was important for her study. Sometimes, old stuff is the best stuff!
# 6 | Nick | May 23, 2007 12:01 PM
I currently have a zone refiner set up in a lab that was formerly used for fiber optic communication work. Most of the table space is being used as a staging area for someone else's cold atom work, but neither myself nor the cold atom guy have gotten around to cleaning out a lot of the storage space. Thus, there are cabinets full of ancient, poorly-documented optical fiber, nonfunctional power supplies and microwave amplifiers, and fiber-coupled Mach-Zender modulators with specs more than 10 dB from state of the art.
When I was in graduate school, one of the professors was retiring, so he was cleaning out his labs and storage space. I stopped by to chat with him as he was laboriously moving an enormous cylinder of grey metal. He informed me that it was a 96.7 lb. boule of 99+% pure yttrium metal. They had apparently bought it surplus from the military to use bits of it for an x-ray source or something. They had only ever needed a few grams, but they got a good deal on it, so they bought the whole, enormous thing. It was just too extraordinarily weird (and valuable; yttrium metal is about $100 an ounce) to send to surplus, so I hid it in my advisors storage space with a note explaining its origins. I told one of the younger grad students about it, so that knowledge of it would remain alive in the group, but I have no idea what ever became of it.
# 7 | CCPhysicist | May 23, 2007 3:00 PM
I'd put that electrometer in my office! It looks beautifuly.
The most useless thing I keep around is a very nice computer program written for a grad numerical analysis class a few decades ago. It solves a PDE with a very good matrix solver (partial pivot and all that). It is on cards. Subroutines are color coded on the outside. I keep thinking I should get it encased in plastic as a paperweight.
And I keep my original slide rule, and my first calculator. The slide rule (top end log log deci trig) still works, so it does not actually count in this category.
# 8 | MarkH | May 23, 2007 4:18 PM
A speedvac. It centrifuges samples under vacuum. It used to be used in DNA preps before they realized it hurt yields and aspirating the ethanol and air-drying DNA pellets was faster and easier and gave better DNA (and probably prevents cross-contamination).
It's been sitting under our bench for about 3 years, for some insane reason we moved it when we moved the lab from another building where it was sitting unused under a bench.
# 9 | llewelly | May 23, 2007 10:00 PM
CCPhysicist:
Lay down some plywood (or maybe even tough cardboard), stick some black
velvet on top of the plywood, and then divide the cards into 12 to 16
piles (preferably more or less along the lines of the color coding),
fan the piles, and stick them to the black velvet. Cover it all with
a sheet of nice framing glass, and frame with brushed aluminum. Hang it on your wall in your
living room. Find an enterprising local artist that can help you with
materials & show you how it's done. If you have hand written or
printed fortran source for it you should frame that too.
# 10 | Frank | May 24, 2007 6:16 AM
I have some gigantic iris diaphragms for aligning optics that are relics of the Star Wars age. These 12" irises put the 0.5", 1", or occasional 2" that I now use to shame. The mirror mounts are a little odd to look at as well, but the thought that I could decapitate myself with a piece of optomechanics is odd. Still useful to some, but not me except as a showpiece.
# 11 | Ed Martz | May 24, 2007 8:54 AM
An external Bernoulli Box removable storage unit, along with a bunch of 40 MB cartridges for it. Next to it are assorted Zip and Jazz drives, also gathering dust, as well as an internal Syquest Sparq drive.
There are also a couple of Syquest 44 MB cartridge drives for the Mac, but I still occasionally need to use one of those because we still have a lot of potentially useful stuff on Syquest cartridges. I should probably think about transferring all that stuff to CD, huh?
# 12 | Chad Orzel | May 24, 2007 8:58 AM
There are also a couple of Syquest 44 MB cartridge drives for the Mac, but I still occasionally need to use one of those because we still have a lot of potentially useful stuff on Syquest cartridges. I should probably think about transferring all that stuff to CD, huh?
Sounds like a job for a summer undergraduate student...
# 13 | Mike Saelim | May 24, 2007 9:38 AM
I would say "me" for the most useless object in my workplace, but since I'm so useless, it ends up not really being a workplace.
# 14 | Unistrut | May 25, 2007 5:43 AM
My office came with a book, published in 1960 or so called "Introduction to Mining".
I work in a theater.
# 15 | Ed Martz | May 25, 2007 9:02 AM
Sounds like a job for a summer undergraduate student...
Alas, if only. Unfortunately, I'm not in academia, so summer undergraduates are few and far between round these parts, which means I'll have to do it myself. Bother.
The main problem right now is that my snazzy G5 has no SCSI port, thanks to Steve Jobs declaring that SCSI is obsolete, so I'll have to dig out the old Power Mac that's lurking around here somewhere.