Tis always the season.

>> What is something you do, day after day, that is arduous or bothersome? Do you have a subtle itch or a pressing need to make it easier?

This is what I faced for well over 45 years of deep exposure to lab bench work from many different positions from student to grunt to leadership.

Chemical commodities, not biochemical research though.

However as expected there is a certain amount of similarity in some of the laboratory tasks regardless of the diversity of scientific objectives.

I'm still willing to grab dangerous chemicals & apparatus by the throat with my own bare hands if necessary for valuable clients. Just not wanting to use my own throat, so I never wanted to pipet by mouth either.

The vintage photo of Dr. Verder looks like she is filling a measuring pipet, before capping the glass tube with a fingertip then precisely dispensing manually as many scientists at the time would do.[0]

Now it's fire-retardant lab coats and respirator-ready facial hair as table stakes.

In my lab I had a vintage picture of Edison holding up a chemical solution above eye level, observing it carefully without safety glasses or PPE of any kind. His lab in the background was "a little bit" cluttered with chemicals and stuff. I didn't draw attenton to this kind of artwork, it was hanging off to the side in the front office, I figured it spoke for itself.

Plus I had more types of PPE than most are familiar with, which I used carefully as needed. But that's not what I'm focusing on right now.

Mouth pipetting was still common when I was getting started 30 years later than 1938, as a student so this is what had been taught for many decades but you were supposed to be a realistic judge about what risk there could be depending on what you were pipetting. The rubber bulbs which can substitute for mouth pipetting can be clumsy and not as precise and each person was expected to draw the line at what laboratory solutions they were going to avoid inhaling. These were often referred to as Pasteur pipets and were still all-glass everywhere, even thin disposable ones mostly until the 1980's when plastic disposables took over.

But by the 70's there was growing interest in safety and "rules" against mouth-pipetting were getting more widespread, but it just made people look the other way when desperate workers did it a little bit anyway, there was not usually an effective formal replacement.

Ripe for disruption by mechanical means I would guess.

Maybe with increasing complexity to the mechanism I would say it's mainly worthwhile for quite repetitive work.

Regular glass pipets are still everywhere and I was just lucky to become a professional not long before a simple precision pipet bulb was invented having little plugged vents in the rubber that are controlled by careful squeezing.[1] People from the chemical plants and refineries had never seen this, it was only available from one company until 20 years later when the patent expired. It was good for major company chemists and engineers to be able to see me manually doing NBS-traceable (now NIST-traceable) work with obvious clarity when stakes were highest. They knew their own laboratories, which supported the process units that actually made the chemicals, were way more expensively built but still somewhat embarrassing sometimes when it came to absolute certainty. Now decades later I'm not alone, "everyone" claims to be NIST-traceable, I still say not so fast. When I came to my employer almost a decade ago I had to kick out the mechanical pipets and replace them with serialized traceable manual traditional glass type, with major retraining for this exact reason. [2] Expert witnessing is more critical than routine work.

I always liked the Gilson salesman, and Ranin too but I never bought anything since the stakes are so high with the big ships, and your ship doesn't come in every day anyway so there's not that kind of repitition. But a couple barges aren't too bad either. So I've got a lifetime of ideas that other people could use where I didn't go far enough to actually even flush out a prototype since I didn't need it for myself at the time. Over the decades I've watched some of the things I had come up with, be recognized and commercialized by capable operators much later. Some of the most obvious things are the most commercializable and it was going to happen anyway. Every milestone or breakthrough doesn't have to be that elusive to be good. It doesn't bother me to be late to market when I'm not in the market to begin with. It's a good feeling knowing there's more where that came from all the time, and early ideas that nobody else has touched have now stood the test of time without competition developing. Plus if I had patented everything most of it would be expired by now.

A lot of the chemical plants only make a handful of different chemicals at each location, and usually only a few of those are actually commodities. That limited number of chemicals are the ones that each of their labs is designed and built to handle 24/7, and some tasks can get pretty repetitive for them. But when you regularly work with material from all over the place you really get ideas for inventions for all kinds of different things. Especially with emerging instruments and techniques when there aren't so many worthwhile publications to go on. So it can be a slippery slope and you end up inventing something every day. Never comercialized very much yet, too busy, a lot is not worth money anyway or would require becoming a capitalist of some kind where the terms are not very attractive. I did OK getting paid for what I could do rather than how much I sold. Well I enjoyed sales starting as a teenager and eventually starting my own commercial lab, scientific instrument sales was supposed to be a future effort but I did not approach that milestone close enough with any prototype before natural disaster set it back where you can not make up for lost time. I also had a framed vintage picture of Hewlett & Packard posing with their original invention, hanging back there.

The edge of the bench can be like a goal line where you can make field goals from a reasonable distance (if your desk or office is not too far from the bench) but you can only actually score a touchdown by crossing the line yourself. Extra points count for twice as much too when somebody personally carries the ball across the line rather than kicking it in "remotely". Plus in old labs there has never been enough space on the bench for PC's because they weren't built for it, they were just crammed in. I know. I did it myself.

I still like to build labs from the ground up, it's a hoot.

[0] In the backgroud of the photo there's a vat on a low wooden bench, that is a precision heating bath where the electronic temperature control consists of the logic necessary to turn off the heating element when the mercury in a special wired thermometer rises to make contact with a thin wire reaching into the inside of the glass from the top. The depth of the wire was adjustable with a knob at the top of the thermometer, not unlike the knob that would later appear at the top of the adjustable mechanical pipets to easily adjust their volumes. I was one of the last to use a bath of this vintage which I had gotten surplus and never thought I would ever restore. This does remind me that years later, but still before digital, when we needed a 0.001 degree tolerance for another location I rapidly designed an analog temperature controller using a solid-state sensor at the bottom of a glass tube, with the circuitry at the top in a small enclosure to run on an external bipolar power supply. I needed it to be a drop-in replacement for the glass mercury ones that were still common in the much more modern baths that were still in use. Plus it had to be built with as many parts as possible from Radio Shack, ended up the only thing I needed from elsewhere was a gigohm resistor. Another one of those everyday inventions. Once digital appeared it took years before this precision could be reached.

[1] https://www.coleparmer.com/i/silicone-pipette-filler-3-way-v...
Now these are available in many polymers other than natural rubber, with openings plugged with different materials than the original stainless steel ball bearings.

[2] Also kicked out IT since they weren't very good with chemicals (or even electronics) but that's a different story altogether.