It is possible to make a pretty good weighing device, in the form of a balance, using a couple of soda straws, a few pins and a moderate amount of ingenuity. Jerold Zacharais liked to say that he could weigh a fly’s wing with such a device, and he probably could have.

Any student who struggled to achieve it would almost certainly emerge with a new respect for the meaning of measurement. The appreciation was the real point of PSSC. Not accuracy for its own sake but rather for the understanding that it made possible. It was designed to provide a sense of the playfulness that often characterizes good science and with the delight of discovery.

There were many other features of PSSC that were attractive to scientists. Improvising inexpensive and ingenious equipment such as the soda straw microbalance or thinking through how to make atoms and molecules real and believable, filming complicated but interesting physical phenomena. All of it had enormous appeal.

The film called A Million To One deserves description because it conveys so well the light-hearted spirit that came to exist in the studio. The PSSC equipment group had improved upon an invention called a dry-ice puck. It was a simple disk that could float almost without friction on a thin layer of gaseous carbon dioxide. Using the same principle as the British Hovercraft which rides on a cushion of air. The carbon dioxide is obtained from an evaporating piece of dry ice carried in a container attached to the puck. The whole structure weighs perhaps 2 kilograms. But friction is reduced to such a low level that the puck can be set skimming across a smooth surface by a very small force.

“Zach was so impressed by these dry-ice pucks that he kept saying, ‘I’d like to see a cockroach pulling one of these pucks.’ Unknown to him, the film crew went down to New York City and found a flea circus on 42nd Street run by a Professor So-and-So. They made a deal with this guy and they made a three or four minute film strip. The guy actually harnessed a flea to one of these five pound pucks. And they had the movie where the flea actually pulls this damn thing. It was really marvelous.”

A Different Sort Of Time: The Life Of Jerrold R. Zacharias/Scientist, Engineer, Educator. By Jack S. Goldstein/MIT 1992.