Calculating rule. 1989.0325.07. (Click to enlarge)
Reading John Walker’s post made me think of my high school physics class. We were Manly Men then. We didn’t have no sissy electronic calculators. We used our Manly Men yellow plastic slide rules. The Manly Men are the ones without the pocket protectors.
The slide rule was an ingenious invention. Instead of looking up things in tables and then adding up the two numbers and getting the answer you used a sliding stick to do the same thing. You could easily multiply and divide this way.
(Mike, there is no cheerleader in the video. You better skip it. )
I wonder what happened to my old slide rule.
For those who want to try here is a simulator. Only Manly Men please. No whiners.
http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n525es/virtual-n525-es.html
http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n525es/virtual-n525-es.html
Using the simulator. Slide the middle part of the slide rule by dragging it. The two scales you will use are “C” and “D”. Put the “1” of the “C” scale over the number on the “D” scale that you want to multiply by say “2”. Then look down the “C” scale to say “4”. Under the “4” on the “D” scale will be the number “8”. Therefore 2 x 4 is 8.
Manly men did not use yellow plastic slide rules in high school. That was for the geek wannabes. The yellow Pickets were supplied by the school.
If you wanted to be a physics boss you had a 12″ hardwood slide rule with ivory (or some equivalent) overlay.
Seawriter
There is always an alpha Geek lurking ready to pounce.
Nerds multiply, divide, extract roots, and evaluate trig functions.
Geeks compute overpressure, thermal radiation, and crater dimensions.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/
Here are instructions for making your own Strangelove Slide Rule:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/brico.html
Meanwhile, here are some more problems worked on a conventional slide rule:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sliderule/
John, what was the price of your most expensive slide rule? How many did you have at one time?
SeaWriter, you too. Please answer the same questions.
It is time to find out who outranks who here.
I only had plastic ones. I had the regular yellow plastic school Pickett one and a small 6″ white one. I doubt that I paid more than $10 for them. I should get points for having a pure heart and not back sliding.
FOr my era and my older brother’s, the brand was K&E.
Plastic to metal and considered the ‘one to have’ for serious people.
One goofball from a family with money showed off his magnesium body 12 inch rule.
Like the hapless clown he was, he stuck it in a Bunsen burner to show how it would not warp and was not aware of magnesium plus fire.
Fortunately , the flare he created was dumped in a bucket of sand from the lab by a student wearing the metal working furnace gloves.
> John, what was the price of your most expensive slide rule? How many did you have at one time?
The only slide rule I owned during high school and engineering school was a Lafayette Electronics 5 inch double-sided slide rule like this one:
http://davidcrate.com/inew/lafayette/lafayette_99-7099_decimalog.jpg
It has all the common scales including log-log. I never found the slightly better precision of a 10 inch slide rule worth the bother of lugging it around. It was made of bamboo and plastic. I still have it and it’s in fine condition. As I recall it cost five dollars and change new (that’s around forty bucks today).
I’ve since acquired three additional slide rules on eBay: two 10 inch and one circular.
http://balldiamondball.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/1calculator.jpg
I bet you guys wish you had one of THESE. You put a metal stylus in the ratchet holes and slide up or down, and over to ‘carry one’. Mine, from grade school, still works pretty good!
Pencil, are the black numbers for subtraction? Is pulling down for addition?
Yes, you pull down to add, for subtraction you use the white-on-black numerals to the left of the larger black-on-white numerals. To erase everything you pull up on the metal wire at the top.
What is the battery life, Pencil?
it is ever ready!
You could pick up plastic Pickets for $2 when I was in high school. My dad bought a $50 slide rule when he was in college in the 1950s and gave it to me when I was in high school 20 years later. Made me boss geek.
Used it in college, but calculators and minicomputers were coming out about then. I still have it somewhere.
When I was a freshman in college I got a job baby-sitting an SDS-930 mainframe. This was before the PC. I asked if I could use it when I was not working. They said, “sure”, figuring if I learned to program it, I would be a better operator. So I had my own room-sized personal computer I used for engineering homework back in the mid 1970s.
Seawriter
Seawriter
In Japan young children were taught how to use an abacus. This is great training for the mind.
Doesn’t that promote linear thinking?
Seawriter
They get so good that they can calculate on a mental abacus.
I think it is more just a skill like playing a piano, Does the piano encourage linear thinking?
“(Mike, there is no cheerleader in the video. You better skip it. )”
Drat.
I have a Pickett. The University bookstore moved into their new buildings and upon moving one rack of shelves, discovered some product that had fallen into the void. Decades later, several new-in-box slide rules emerged, and were sold at the marked price — $2.39.
When did you buy the slide rule, Ball?
19, uh, 96?
I never used a slide rule, but did use its rotary equivalent for aviation the E6B Flight Calculator aka the Whiz Wheel.
The ones we used were more simple than those in the Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
Celestial nav was almost dead as a navigation tool in the late 80’s early 90’s so we used them for time/speed/distance/fuel and cross wind correction calculations.
I read that the Academy is teaching it again.
Brent, I figured you would have used some form of slide rule. They are so useful because they take up such little space. Did you use it in the cockpit?
We had them in our nav bags during primary flight training but can’t think of a time I took it out in the plane.
Mostly used them in class.
If SWOs flew jets we would do moboards against the canopy.
I can neither confirm not deny carrying a grease pencil and making notes on the canopy
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