Blogger Stories

This is something you don't see anymore. 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