Not every technological breakthrough can be an airplane, or penicillin.
Sometimes, they are just small improvements to daily life, often things we didn’t even know we needed. Sometimes, they are even things we really don’t need. This one might be more the latter, but it’s still cool: biophysicist Daniel Perlman came up with a way to prevent glass bottles from dripping down the side during a pour.
Perlman did it with a wine bottle, because he apparently likes wine. Here’s the demonstration video:
If you’re wondering what the difference is between those two bottles, it’s actually a very small one.
Via Gizmodo:
After a bit of trial and error, he found that using a diamond cutting tool to carve a two-millimeter-wide, one-millimeter deep groove just below the lip of a wine bottle was the simplest solution.
When wine droplets trying to run back down the bottle encounter that groove, they would need to flow against the force of gravity to go up and across to the other side, or simply leap over it. What happens instead, is that those potential dribbles just return to the rest of the flow, saving napkins, tablecloths, and shirt sleeves from getting strained.
This should actually work for any kind of glass bottle, too, so even if you’re not a wine person, you should be able to eventually benefit from the innovation. For example, my thoughts went to taco sauce bottles, though your mileage may vary.
As the Gizmodo piece mentions, it’s going to be a while before drip-free bottles are the norm, because it’ll require a change to the bottle-manufacturing process itself. But eventually, Perlman’s method could solve a very small but very persistent problem.
[Gizmodo]
