Back when I was a kid, I saw this rectangular thing on Dad's table. It had a slideable strip in the middle and a transparent sliding window with a thin line down the middle. There were numbers all over it that, at first, made me think it was a fancy ruler but the number spacing was all wrong. It couldn't be a ruler so what was it? Ever the curious kid with a fascination for technical stuff, I asked Dad what it was (after experimenting with it for awhile).
He called it a slide rule.
So, it's a ruler without the extra "r", I thought. So, how does it measure things.
He said, "You don't measure with it. It helps me calculate things, like with multiplication."
I guess my eyes went wide. My first thought was, "This thing can help me with my math?"
"How does it work?" I asked him.
He asked me to give him two numbers to multiply. I decided on something simple. I wanted a test that I knew the answer to so that I'd know if the thing really does what Dad said it could do.
"Two times three."
He starts demonstrating. "You move the slider bar until the '2' is here, then you move the sliding window until this marker is on the '3.' Then you can see that the answer is here, it's '6'."
I tried a few other numbers and the thing gave the correct answer every time. Wow! That's neat!
He also had a circular one that worked in much the same way.
Fast forward about five years or so. I was in high school. I noticed that the third or fourth year students were holding slide rules. It was a sort of status thing. If you held one in your hands, you were almost an engineer. There was a giant slide rule in one of the laboratories (maybe ten feet long) that was used to train the students on how to use them. I couldn't wait to get to their level so I can have my own slide rule.
It wasn't meant to be. The calculator began to appear around 1975 or so and it promised to be be vastly better than the slide rule. The slide rule ceased to be part of the curriculum and this status symbol disappeared almost instantly.
Calculators were better. I bought a few of them during high school until I bought a programmable one when I was in fourth year. It's what got me started in programming.
The TI-57 programmable calculator
Occasionally, however, I see a picture of a slide rule and the memory of my first encounter with it comes back. Sometimes I'd think of buying one just for the heck of it. Maybe something to impress my grandchildren with, just as I was.
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