Sauerbrey’s crystal microbalance

A mashup is the very essence of human creativity: taking existing thoughts, materials, tools and reassembling them in new ways. If the term most commonly describes musical invention, from JS Bach to the Chemical Brothers, it is also ever-present in science where working ‘between fields’ very often results in analogous innovation. A great example of this is the invention of the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM), a device of exquisite sensitivity that appeared out of the blue at the end of the 1950s from a young man with a big idea.

Günter Hans Sauerbrey was born in Berlin, the son of a civil engineer. His father Willy managed to avoid recruitment into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War by virtue of his profession. The family survived the war unscathed and Günter chose to study physics at the Technical University in Berlin (TUB), starting his studies in 1951. It seems that it was there that the germ of his idea first began to crystallise in his mind.