Always worth a look inside
I joined UWCRCN when it opened 17 years ago. The labs were completely empty and the budget impressive so I went through the Pasco catalogue and ordered everything I wanted. On my list were two electro meters, these are voltmeters that can be used to measure static potentials of the sort of size you get when rubbing plastic rods. It means you can do experiments with parallel plate capacitors and get actual quantitative results. The problem not only that most of electrostatics was removed from the syllabus but they stopped working. They were pretty expensive so I tried to find someone who could fix them but failed and they've been gathering dust ever since. The other day I was in the lab thinking about some new experiments to do and remembered the electrometers. After my success with the photogates I thought I might see if I could fix them. When I took the top off I was surprised to find they had batteries inside. Aha, two good as new electrometers find there way back onto the shelf.