The Need for Good Notebooks

It’s just as easy to picture a scientist, research assistant, or student bent over an open notebook at their desk as it is to see the same white-coated thinker bent over a table full of beakers, Petri dishes, and glass slides. The simplest experiments could not be completed without the proper tools, and those same experiments could not be duplicated or perfected without accurate records to reference when making adjustments and trying again.

Whether used by professors or students, or by doctors or doctoral candidates, accurate record-keeping is critical to remembering and duplicating the steps leading up to major milestones. Recording the path followed to get to the finish line in a quality notebook is just as important as crossing the finish line itself.

Accurate notes, kept in a durable, high-quality duplicate grid or plain-lined notebook like the products offered by Scientific Bindery, are not only important to the successes that come with experimentation and critical thinking. A notebook full of information will also contain the mistakes made along the way, and those mistakes are always necessary parts of the discovery process.

When Edison was asked how it felt to fail one thousand times on his way to creating the electric lightbulb he replied that he didn’t fail one thousand times. He stated, “The light bulb was created in one thousand steps.”

Edison surely would have recorded those steps in a Scientific Bindery notebook if he had the choice.