Lovely Steampunk-esque Science Teaching Instruments.

Optical Pumping of Rubidium Gas

Boing Boing reader Theodore Gray (he of the gorgeous Periodic Table posters and puzzles I've blogged before) writes in to say,

Much as I hate the term steampunk, I love the style, and I notice a lot of it on boingboing, so I though you might appreciate this company, Teachspin.

I saw their booth at a trade show recently and their instruments are absolutely beautiful, exactly what you'd expect of 19th century fine machining and woodworking, except they are sophisticated modern devices like NMR machines, rubidium time oscillators, and torsion balances, and you can actually buy them. I particularly like the two earth field NMR machines, "Earth's Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" and "Earth's Field NMR Gradient/Field Coil System." Here's the optical pump, and the torsion oscillator (which looks much better in person that in that photo.)

Above, the Optical Pumping of Rubidium Gas device.