Scientific instrument

A scientific instrument is a measuring instrument used for scientific purposes.

History

Historically, they were made by instrument makers living near a centre of learning or research, such as a University or research laboratory. They designed, constructed and refined instruments for specific purposes, but if demand was sufficient, an instrument would go into production as a commercial product. An example in UK was W.G. Pye & Co. Ltd. which was founded in 1896 in Cambridge by William George Pye, an employee of the Cavendish Laboratory, as a part-time business making scientific instruments. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the company employed 40 people manufacturing instruments that were used for teaching and research.

Scope

Scientific instruments are part of laboratory equipment, but are considered more sophisticated and more specialized than other measuring instruments as scales, rulers, chronometers, thermometers or even waveform generators.

Some scientific instruments can be quite large in size, like particle colliders or radio-telescope antennas and antenna arrays that are miles or kilometers wide. The converse or nanoscale also has been applied, with much of the activity centered on nanomedicine, particularly as non-invasive medical imaging has exploded on the diagnostic arts and minimally invasive surgery and surgical robotics have come into use. Instruments on the scale of a single molecule may soon interact with our bodies at the cellular and biochemical level to collect diagnostic information and provide accurate drug delivery mechanisms.

The digital era

Instruments are increasingly based upon the integration with computers to improve and simplify control, enhance and extend instrumental functions, conditions, parameter adjustments and data sampling, collection, resolution, analysis (both during and post-process) and storage and retrieval.

Individual instruments can be connected as a local area network (LAN) and can be further integrated as part of a laboratory information management system (LIMS). This can give Internet access to databases of physical properties, for example a peptide spectral library allowing results comparisons and advanced data analysis. Developers have used open source principles to rapidly improve low-cost open-source hardware for scientific measurements and to create open source labs.[1] With the advent of low-cost 3-D printing scientists can manufacture many of their own components.[2][3] The 3-D printers themselves can even be modified to function as research tools (e.g. fluid handling).[4]

Scientific instruments can be found on board sounding rockets, satellites or planetary rovers and controlled by radio telemetry.

List of scientific instruments

List of scientific instruments manufacturers

List of scientific instruments designers

History of scientific instruments

Museums

Types of scientific instruments

See also

See also

References

  1. ↑ Pearce, Joshua M. 2012. “Building Research Equipment with Free, Open-Source Hardware.” Science 337 (6100): 1303–1304.open access
  2. ↑ Baden, T., Chagas, A.M., Gage, G., Marzullo, T., Prieto-Godino, L.L. and Euler, T., 2015. Open Labware: 3-D printing your own lab equipment. PLoS Biol, 13(3), p.e1002086.
  3. ↑ Zhang, C., Anzalone, N.C., Faria, R.P. and Pearce, J.M., 2013. Open-source 3D-printable optics equipment. PloS one, 8(3), p.e59840.
  4. ↑ Chenlong Zhang, Bas Wijnen, Joshua M. Pearce. Open-source 3-D Platform for Low-cost Scientific Instrument Ecosystem. Journal of Laboratory Automation 21(4) 517-525 (2016). DOI: 10.1177/2211068215624406

Further reading

Directory of British Scientific Instrument Makers 1550–1851, G. Clifton (ed.). London: Zwemmer (1995).

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