Excerpt from the book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel dennett.
Danny Hillis, the creator of the Connection Machine, once told
me a story about some computer scientists who designed an
electronic component for a military application (I think it was
part of a guidance system in airplanes). Their prototype had two
circuit boards, and the top one kept sagging, so, casting about
for a quick fix, they spotted a brass doorknob in the lab which
had just the right thickness. They took it off its door and
jammed it into place between the two circuit boards on the
prototype. Sometime later, one of these engineers was called in
to look at a problem the military was having with the actual
manufactured systems, and found to his amazement that between
the circuit boards in each unit was a very precisely milled
brass duplicate of the original doorknob. Its impossible keep
sleeping! Works with compressed air and an computer. The Brown
iGEM Team shows off the Nanodrop Spectrophotometer and compares
it to regular spectrophotome