With the possible exception, of course, of a manufacturer of scientific equipment for colleges and laboratories.
What production line could make use of a ruling engine?
And if one could, could it use a micro-densitometer in the same process?
Of course, the micro-vacuum pump could be used in vacuum tube manufacture, in a pinch. Vacuum tube companies normally used large-volume pumps instead of the little super-efficient exhaustion pump that could take a few cubic centimeters down to a few millimicrons of mercury.
The electron microscope was a nice hunk of stuff, but the thing was not applicable to anything except research.
And the instantaneous X-ray gadget was tricky as the devil—and adapted mostly to the job of taking pictures of bullets under fire as they passed up through the rifling of a gun.
One pile of stuff was directed—according to Tom's designation—only at the problem of investigating the Earth's gravitational field as for strength, direction, and conflicting urges.
A transit. Now what in the name of sin would a radio engineer want with a transit? Nice piece of stuff, and far superior to the little dumpy-level that Tom used to lay out antenna arrays and directive antennas of one sort or another. But, a transit!
And so the list went. $111,367.34 worth of the most interesting, best made, neatly assembled hunks of utterly impractical scientific machinery ever collected under one roof.
A solid vista of impracticality as far as the eye could reach.