for adhesive bonding of materials, wetting of the surface, which can be measured by the contact angle, is critical to successful adhesive application. to determine how well a liquid wets a solid surface is proportional to the contact angle from the liquid while on the solid. this is determined by the respective surface tensions of the solid and liquid. william zisman's contribution to adhesives in the way of his zisman plot, which has a variation today that graphs 1-cos(θ) vs γ . in this variation the x-intercept gives the critical surface tension of the liquid needed to effectively wet the solid surface. there are two steps when graphing the data which are to neglect all the points around zero on the y-axis to initially plot the line of best fit to find γ ; however, when graphing the line initially if a point near 0 lands to the right of the intersection redo the regression including that point to make the measurement of the critical surface tension, γ, more accurate. a table of variables and an example can be seen below.