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.)