Technology, our best friend

What would you do when technology lets you down? I recently had a chance to find out first hand when the machine I used for contact angle measurements went out of order.

Fortunately there was a plan B, which meant I had to conduct those experiments the old-school way using a device that consisted of a fluorescent screen to enlarge the image of a manually created droplet. The droplet was made using a syringe and had to be as perfectly round as possible to minimize errors (try it yourself, it isn’t as easy as it sounds), afterwards its height and length were measured on the screen using a caliper. Getting the needed results from the measured data wasn’t a walk in the park either, as this was done using a rather archaic program which was not able to make the necessary calculations for multiple experiments in a row, nor was it able to save this data in a digital output file.

I guess this story shows how big of a help technology is to scientists these days; not only does it allow us to measure and see things that weren’t detectable before, it also saves us precious time…

David Weinberger