A music box is an ingeniously simple device. With just a punch card, these contraptions can pump out all sorts of tunes. When Manu Prakash was thinking about how to make chemistry research cheaper and easier, he came back to the idea of the music box. If decades-old computers could be programmed with punch cards, why not chemistry? The result is a hand-cranked enclosure that reads the holes on a punch card to dispense droplets of reagents. Boom — instant chemistry.
This device won a contest to reimagine the chemistry set for the 21st century, but it’s not just for kids. The prototype of the music box chemistry set has 15 independent pumps that are triggered by a gear pin each time it interacts with a hole in the punch card. Each hole releases one droplet of fluid from the corresponding pump into a channel that combines the chemicals in the desired proportions.
Prakash sees this device as a way to get young people interested in science thanks to the ease of use, but also as a way to solve problems in the developing world. His chemistry set only costs about $5 to make and can be created on a 3D printer. This gets around the problem of high-cost, complicated equipment that requires extensive training to operate.
One example of how you might use this technology is in water purity analysis. The music box chemistry set doesn’t need power, so it could be used in remote regions where water purity is a concern due to lack of centralized treatment. The user would load the right cartridge, fill a reservoir with the water to be tested, and run the punch card through. This dispensed the sample water with the right reagents to test for contamination or the presence of microorganisms.
The prize money will help Prakash and his team improve the design of the music box-inspired chemistry set. The hope is that it will become a product that other groups of researchers and regular people can use to do science and educate.