Slide Rule
I inherited my Dad??s Dietzgen slide rule 15 years ago. I??m trying to teach myself all of its capabilities. It??s like chess, the basics are easy to learn but it is challenging to become an expert. The device is ingenious really. It??s just a way to add logarithms together for multiplication and division but with various scales resized for other things like squaring numbers and so on.
I still have my K&E log log duplex decitrig slide rule bought in 1959 when I was a much younger engineering student.. Amazing (and complex device).
Still have my Post Versalog from college. HP scientific calculator came out when I was a Sr but cost almost as much as a quarter room and meals in the dorm. I didn't get a calculator for some years, but had access to scientific desk calculator at work.
The other day I picked up Dietzgen equivalent to my slide rule at a sale for a buck. The cursor glass on one side is broken, but the other side looks cool in the display case with my great uncle's 20 inch slide rule.
Mike Segar... he was a union field surveyor on my crew back in 1977 +/-
he truly mastered the slide rule.
In those days almost every field calculation (even slope corrections) were made by every crew member, basic error checking.
Mike zipped up the answer as fast, or Faster than the rest of us...amazing
the rest of us were using either a Curta or one of the new HP programmable calculators...
Mike was a long haired Hippy, lived in his VW micro-bus. I have no idea what happened to him later
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slide rules are awesome. I never became a wiz .... I still have a couple, not a clue how to use them now
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Hoganmiller: he was the Geometry/Algebra/Calculus teacher at my high school.
he had a Six Footer mounted on the wall above the blackboard. He used it in every lesson.
in 1963-1968 we were all expected to become proficient with a slide rule
I had to buy a slide rule in the mid 1970s for high school chemistry class. I spent the first semester learning how to use it, then received a Bowmar Brain calculator for Christmas (my dad had done a survey for one of Bowmar's employees), and I never used it again.
I still have my slide rule and my dad's, as well as the Bowmar Brain in the display case in my office.
My dad kept using his into the 1990s, along with his Monroe mechanical calculator (which I also still have).
Nowadays, I would wouldn't dream of using such old devices. I use exclusively HP 11c calculators from the 1980s. I bought a lifetime supply of used ones on ebay about 15-20 years ago. None of them have failed.
Had never heard of the Bowmar Brain before.
I have an hp11c emulator on my personal iOS devices. I bought the genuine hp15c emulator for my new iPhone 13pro my employer issued me.
Using the slide rule I realize how lazy I??ve become about knowing the magnitude of the answer, just smashing keys on the calculator.
My slide rule is a Eugene Dietzgen Co. N1733 (polymath multiplex decimal trig type log log rule). I think mid 1950s.
I figured out how to work up the area of a circle which I considered a major accomplishment but I didn??t do it in a continuous sequence. Doing a series of calculations on a slide rule without writing down intermediate answers or even needing to remember them is what the serious power users can do.
Had never heard of the Bowmar Brain before.
It was one of the first available scientific calculators, if I recall correctly. I think I was the first in my class to have one.
It wasn't very reliable: I had to replace the keyboard at least once. It had an LED display and Nicad batteries. But it did have a full set of trig functions and a single register memory.
Checking my slide rules:
My 1975 Picket Model N902-T is in excellent condition.
Unfortunately, my dad's Picket & Eckel Model 500 with a copyright date of 1948 was an early model for them, and is made from magnesium instead of aluminum. It is badly corroded with a white powdery substance and though I can probably clean it up a bit for display, I'm afraid it will never slide again.
Here is a photo from http://www.sliderulemuseum.com/Pickett.htm
Surveying buggy whips:
The NGS monument's old location is now occupied by a building.
So many things have changed. Slide rules, Cutra's, 8 place tables, 3 man crews, solars, I don't even think there are compass roses to layout anymore. Does anyone still do those?
Good luk wit dis! ????
