I've just learned that a slide rule can also be used to solve factorable quadratic equations. That is, if x^2+ax+b has real roots, r1 * r2 = b, and r1 + r2 = a. Since C against D is a constant ratio, CI against D is a constant product. After setting the slide such that CI*D = b (above), visually slide along the rule until you find the combination of CI and D to satisfy the "a" coefficient. I've seen several sets of instructions for slide rules, but only one of them had this procedure. One slide to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
This brought back some fond memories. In my Junior year of high school (1975), I got the high score on a competitive math exam. (I even beat the seniors!) The prize was a beautiful aluminum Pickett slide rule that had a set of double-logarithmic scales in addition to the standard scales. The following year, everybody else was using TI-30 calculators, but I used that slide rule all through my senior year and even into my beginning college years. I still have it, along with its leather case and belt-strap. I actually pulled it out while I was watching this video and did the square root calculations with you. Thank you so much for this video.
I still have the slide rule that I got from a very old gentleman that was a friend of my mom. I got it for mowing his lawn. I was 14 at the time (now approaching 65) and he taught me how to use it. I used it all through high school and many years later in college. I still keep it in it's original leather case. Mine is a Dietzgen Trig Log Log rule
I love slide rules! My grandmother gave me my grandfather's slide rule shortly after he died. He had apparently always intended to give me one, but by the time I was ready, calculators were a thing. I proudly carried it in my backpack in college, and even found an excuse to pull it out during an exam when my calculator's battery "died". I put a note on my paper to the effect of, "Forgive slight inaccuracies - last few answers done on a slide rule." :D Great video. We'll see if the price of slide rules on eBay goes up because of this!
I always had a slide rule with me for any exam with the slightest risk of low battery. And then it became sort of superstition. And they are great for scaling. A circular version exist soley for scaling (for graphic work and layout). I know that versions existed for artillery (I've only seen a model for a mortar). And for dosis calculations (when the Bomb drops). I think I have one somewhere. As for regular slide rules I have 3, my father's (very small with physics constants and densities for Eiche, Aluminium, Messing, Kupfer, Granit and unreadable on the back), one from a flea market and one bought brand new from used building materials shop. Why? They might come in handy.
Pilots still learn to use slide-rules in the form of the E6B. It's interesting because it is circular (which works well due to the way logarithms work. You can see simplified versions on some aviator watches too.
I watched this when it came out and couldn’t understand it. I also was sleeping an average of 2 hours a night, I had really severe insomnia for almost 2 years. Watching it now I totally get it, it seems simple even. Little things like this make it evident how cognitively impaired not sleeping made me. I still have memory problems, fatigue, and some other random issues… sleep is precious, y’all.
What a beautiful slide rule! Your Dad must have spent a lot for it back in the day. When Canada went metric, the gas station that I worked at gave away cardboard slide-rules for converting MPG to L/100 Km. Fuel consumption was important in the 70s! We also had stickers that people put on their speedometers to convert MPH to KPH (it would have been a bit awkward using a slide rule converter while driving!)
@@Aengus42 Terry Pratchett actually made fun of that in the novel "Good Omens". He had a footnote that explained the old money system (...Two Farthings = One Ha'penny. Two Ha'pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit...etc.) He concludes by stating: "The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated." :-)
WOW!!!! THANK YOU, VERY MUCH, FRAN, FOR THIS INFORMATIVE VIDEO, ON SOME OF THE AMAZING CAPABILITIES, OF THES DEVICES!!! I REMEMBER WHEN MY DAD, (a "DRAFTSMAN"), FIRST GOT A TEXAS INSTRUMENTS "TI-30" HAND-HELD CALCULATOR", BACK IN THE EARLY/MID 1970'S... I WAS, AND STILL AM FASCINATED BY THE MECHANICAL "SLIDE RULES"!!!! I REMEMBER LOVING TO FIND A VARIETY OF "NOMOGRAPHS" USED FOR A VARIETY OF SPECIFIC PURPOSES, SUCH AS "MECHANICAL SPRING" PROPERTIES, WEIGHT/VOLUMES/PRESSURES,... METAL ALLOY PROPERTIES... SOIL PROPERTIES, ELECTRONICS COMPONENT PROPERTIES, MOTOR SIZES/TORQUES/VOLTS/AMPS, WIRE SIZES, ETC.... WHERE CAN WE FING "SLIDE RULES?!... i'D LIKE TO GET ONE FOR USE IN WORKING ON MODEL AVIATION" RELATED HOBBY DESIGNING...
In 1959 my first subscription to Hot Rod magazine came with a cardboard slide rule set up for all kinds of car things, like matching the bore & stroke of an engine to show it's cubic inches. My father, an Air Force pilot at that time, had a circular one for pre-electronics plotting where they were and figuring out other data needed.
Be wary of buying used slide rules on eBay. If a price seems very good, there's probably something wrong with it. Good ones are pretty expensive nowadays. The problem with one I bought was the 'springs' that keep the cursor aligned and in place were broken.
My first Engineering class in college back in 1974 required us to use the Slide Rule for all computations. After that class, electronic calculators were permitted. My slide rule belonged to my father, a telephone company traffic engineer, and it was a bamboo Keuffel & Esser (K&E) brand. It came in a very heavy duty leather carrying case. For my first Electronic Calculator, also in 1974, I purchased a Texas Instruments (TI) model SR-10 for $110. It was called an “Electronic Slide Rule” although my father’s slide rule could actually perform more functions and it did not have batteries that needed to be charged. Fran, thanks 😊 so much for this video. It brought back many fond memories of my father and his awesome bamboo K&E slide rule. I’ll have to go looking for that slide rule today so I can ask my 9 grandkids and 2 great-grandkids if they might know what this cool 😎 contraption is used for. LOL 😂! Cheers! Dave
A bit behind, working through a backlog of videos but... I saw this and lit up. I may be (relatively) young, but one thing my grandfather taught me years ago was to use a sliderule. I ended up with two of his slide rules - a Hemi 257 and a Hemi 259D. Both are really nice and have some neat features, like squares, roots, multiplication and division, etc... Sometimes, in this world of modern tech, it's just nice to use something physical. Especially when you need to consider significant digits. More decimal points doesn't always mean a more accurate calculation - your calculation should only be as good as your measurements.
I ran across my old slide rule a while back in a time machine junk drawer. I actually used it in my early college days, circa early 70s, about the time when Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard started out with their calculators. I couldn't come even close to affording the early calculators so had to make do with my slide rule. Just for fun, I figured out (sorta remembered) how to do simple multiplication. In the same drawer was my "super fancy" HP calculator I used in the late 80s. It has this magnetic strip reader thing. One could use good old Reverse Polish Notation to write simple-ish programs and zip the mag strip into the reader to load the program into the calculator memory. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Pretty cool back in the day.
There are also caclulating discs for multiple purposes. For instance the geman Kriegsmarine used an Attack Disc to calculate things like interception courses, attack courses, predictions on a target, angle of bow etc. I built one of these and used it to play silent hunter III and it always worked pretty well.
I think we're about the same age. I got my first calculator in 1975, a Rockwell / Anita 30R "Slide Rule Memory" model which was branded House Of Fraser in the UK. But we were still taught how to use slide rules in secondary school so I bought a 6" model which was branded "WHSmith Simplified Rietz" made by Blundell, probably around 1977. Not that I can remember how to use it any more.
When I saw Hidden Figures I was sitting there thinking "Where the hell are the slide rules?" The engineers and the women who did computations prior to the advent of computers should have had slide rules, but there were NONE in sight.
The people known as “computers” used electro-mechanical calculators, which were bulky, noisy, power-hungry predecessors of the later pocket calculators, in order to do precise calculations. They either printed or narrow endless rolls of paper (like ATM or cash register tape) or displayed each digit by rotating a wheel to display the digit behind a window. Slide rules were used by the engineers for ballpark accuracy, and the numbers were refined by sending the inputs to the computers - or to the electronic computers when they arrived.
YES! Slide rules are STILL amazing, My "daily driver" had an aluminum frame and slide, but the really smooth ones used bamboo. I had a bit of a collection, donated by my engineering compatriots as they went "full calculator"; sadly, all were lost in a fire in the mid-1990's. There were odd shape or purpose slide rules, as you show, and it would be difficult to find some of them these days. When I took engineering, you could always pick us out by the belt scabbards for the slide rules - some 20-24 inches long. As much as I find my modern calculator very helpful, I miss the slide rule for some jobs.
I learned to use one during high school honors chemistry in fall of 1962. That was on a cheap plastic one. Two years later I got a nifty Dietzgen before heading off to college. Years later, I got well acquainted with the circular version in the form of the Jeppesen E6B flight computer. I still have all three. You mentioned the accuracy of the slide rule. My chemistry and engineering teachers stressed that no computation can be any more precise than the least precise measurement involved in the calculation.
Thanks. I remember an electronics teacher in 1995 being sad for people who never learnt to use slide rules, commenting that those people never learned to actually think about the true accuracy of the calculations they made based on some measured values - as calculators just pour out that screenful of digits. I'm also too young to have actually learnt to use one, but have acquired a cuople along the way and played with them enough to do the base maths (multiplication and division), but this video was a very good demonstration on what all else these things can be capable of.
Slide rules are still used in initial flight training to compute various aspects of flight by hand in case your electronics die. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
I still have my Faber Castell Rietz 111/87 which is a slide rule for machine and electronics engineering. It is really handy tool for estimating and eyeballing things. I like it.
THANK YOU. After 46 years, the slide rule is simple and amazing. WHY didn't they teach this in highschool math class? I never heard about slide rule in public school and after being introduced to calculators, there was no incentive to investigate the slide rule. Even weirder, my dad was a highschool teacher and a principal.
I have 2. A simple beginner Mannheim simplex rule by K+E and my Dad’s Dietzgen polymath rule, a lot more scales. The people who figured these things out were way smarter than me.
We used slide rules for my electronics class at vocational school, but that was back in 1979 - 1981. My instructor had worked on the Gemini space program. When I went to college, I got to use an HP-33c.
I still have the slide rule I purchased back in high school in the late 60's. Only slide rules were allowed in exams at university in the early 70's. Your video takes me back in time. Also reminds me of using log tables as well as the slide rule. For complicated calculations finding the decimal place was sometimes time consuming. Dave.
I get the same from that Ti-30 as that's the beast my Aunt got for me at school. I was 16 in 1980 so it shows the change in a few years. Calculators were still banned in my school though & the start of every maths lesson would see the distribution of a pile of very tatty log books!
My slide rule is a British Thornton P271. It is a single side slide rule so may not have as many functions as other models. Back in the time when I purchased this, Thornton made a lot of products for mathematics and engineering drawing. Dave.
I still have mine from high school in the late 1960's. Used it all the way through University in the early 70's. All the hand held calculators available at that time were very expensive. The physics department had two TI45's bolted down in their common room but I used the breadbox sized calculator in the chemistry department. Now I have several hand helds including my HP41C that I used in grad school.
Gordon, i’ve still got my HP 41 CX and still love it! Got the Printer, card reader, and tape drive as well. I’ve loaded into 41CX app on my iPad and my iPhone and use them daily. Best darn calculator ever made. Although, with the TI30, you could read in bed at night with the lights out. By the way, there is an HP41.org, (I think that’s the site), that still supports them.
There were high precision slide rules like this one images.app.goo.gl/wDyDkxLkUXhwsjz29 used for scientific and engineering calculations. The scales are arranged around and parallel to the axis of two concentric cylinders, the inner one being able to slide relative to the outer one. This allowed the scales to be cut into a number of equal length segments so the scales could be much longer without increasing the overall length of the slide rule. The center sliding cylinder could be removed, rotated with respect to the fixed cylinder and reinserted so as to index to any point on any segment of the fixed scales. I think these might have provided something like 5 or 6 digits of precision.
I had a slip-stick back in high school when I took a class in business machines. I even used a card punch machine. I can still hear the instructor telling us it was going to be the job of the future. About the time I moved on to my senior year pocket calculators hit the scene and that was the end of my slide rule days.
I got through high school with a slide rule Slide rules are all about estimating Problem now is that students cannot estimate what a reasonable result should be Thanks for showing various types of slide rules This is a gigantic deal No joke Huge, gigantic, intergalactic, or bigger
There is no limit to the power of a slide rule - even to the point of deciding the fate of humanity, as per Strangelove. Everything can be used for good or ill.
Yes they are, I remember back during my Jr. year in high school 1993, asking my electronics teacher to teach me how to use one... Which he did and he even gave me one. He was shocked because I was probably the only student he had in the 90’s with any interest in them....
Enjoyed this one Fran, started collage in 67 with the slide rule and the log table books added a four function calculator (red LED display) in 72 as I finished. The slide rule didn't need batteries, but beer did effect the slide rule for some reason.
I still have my K+E Deci-Lon from high school/college days! Plus the six-inch K+E "pocket" rule that has the same scales. I have a circular Pickett rule which I didn't use very much because the "folded" scales were hard to locate where the result was! I still use it occasionally just to stay "proficient" with it. Amazing devices. And, no batteries required. But, a little difficult to use when the lights go out!
Great - I still give them to my physics students with some instructions and let them play for a while as a way of thinking out of the box, understanding numbers and their relationships better and just a bit of fun. They seem to enjoy it!
1:08 That slide rule looks remarkably like the one I used throughout my college and university years, and well into my early engineering career; a Faber-Castell 1/98 Electro, if memory serves me well. It is in my desk now, having outlived many newfangled calculators, and it needs no batteries!
When I was taking ground school for my private pilot license (1979) we had to use a slide ruler also but the functions where different. The version I used was called E6B flight computer. They still make them and lots of private pilot carry one. Think ground schools still cover there use in a 1/2 day of extra training
I remember using one in my 1970 elecrronics tech class. It worked well with scientific notation working with large and small numbers to calculate tuned RLC circuit etc
I have always wanted to know how to use a slide rule. I remember seeing them in old movies and thinking how cool and smart they make you look. I’m definitely going to get one. Thank you so much Fran!!! Love you!
I've been running through a physics textbook from 1939 with just a slide rule, then checking the math with a calculator you'd be surprised at how accurate they are especially when you account for sigfigs
I worked for a Land Surveyor during High School (mid 60's). At that time the Crew Chief carried around a small book of trig tables for doing computations in the field. I guess things needed to be more accurate than 3 places. But in the 80's I took flight training and you had to learn how to use a circular slide rule for navigation. I'm sure I still have my slide rules from school. Neat Stuff!
When you mentioned the abiltiy to detect the intersection of fine lines I immediately thought of using a Vernier caliper (also a micrometer down to 0.0001 inches). My first Vernier caliper was a cheap Chinese one, but I later picked up a nice post WW II West German Helios off of eBay that was like the one my Dad had in his shop. No batteries or electronic circuits to go bad. I found a Pickett 515T abandoned in an office, and got bit by the bug, and bought a Pickett N-3 ES, a K&E #4081-3 log-log-Decitrig, a Frederick Post 1460 Versalog, and a Dietzgen #1734 Microglide. Presently working to familiarize myself with the various rules and master their use. At age 71. I loved all of the specialized cardboard rules.
Yes, I was using a slide rule at Uni in the 60's. Still have my old slide rule from back then. Also carry my old E6B when flying which is a circular slide rule for navigation and many other calcs (eg. conversions).
I just discovered your channels, and I'm really happy to see this video. I went to college for electronics in 1974 and part of the curriculum was a slide rule course. Those students who were Vietnam Vets were the only students allowed to have calculators, because a basic 4 function calculator cost over $100, and the Vets - with the GI Bill - were the only ones who could afford it.
Yay! Slide rules :-) As a youth I'd watch old science fiction movies where the hero scientist would whip out the slide rule. I was sad that I couldn't afford to get one....fast forward a errrrr few years, I have lots of them, and they are still cool :-)
My uncle gave me a slide rule for a birthday present back in the 70’s. I think it was an eclipse. Sadly I didn’t treat it well as it was the beginning of the hand calculator era. Kids these days don’t know how to use slide rules or even log tables... I use to love using log tables.
It is just so hard to get a good sliderule these days. I still have an old half broken sliderule in my desk, because it has an amazing compound interest scale. For practical stuff I mostly switched to nomographs, because I can print those with a normal printer in case I need special conversion. While I never formally learned to use a sliderule (excluding a nonius like on the calipers) our university lab still gave out printed nomographs especially on the microwave side. Like converting from 50Ohm to 75Ohm base, or converting from resistances to reflections.
I still have my slide made by Post. Plastic case and real glass. My algebra teacher gave it to me when I graduated high school. He even autographed the case for me.
My dad has a Sun Hemmi bamboo slide rule he got for college that is a chemical engineer's model--one side has regular slide-rule scales similar to yours, but instead of more advanced mathematical functions, the scales on the back are all about things like molecular weights of various materials and density and pressure conversions. It has a sort of leather scabbard. Nice-looking except the glass of the cursor has a big crack in it. I was also *just* barely too young to ever really learn to use one. Around 1976 or '77, he bought an Omron scientific calculator (its model number was 86SR which I think actually stood for "slide rule"), one of the first affordable models with trig and hyperbolic functions and such, and it impressed him enough that he got me one. So I had that from an early age.
I was taught how to use a slide rule in high school, electronics 1 & 2, years 1972 to 1974. The teacher was fantastic. Taught us scientific notation along with the slide rule. Best years of high school was in that class. Learned alot from that man. Thanks Fran.
Talking of verniers, they're often built into the ironsights of precision target rifles, measuring miniscule elevation and windage adjustments. This allows a shooter to be able to dial his/her rifle without having to take a lot of zeroing shots each time they shoot at a different distance. This reduces cost (of ammunition expended), time taken to shoot a particular detail, and wear on their barrels. Plus, with adequate testing and practice, allows the shooter to make educated adjustments for atmospheric changes.
You ever get used to using one they can be fun. Back when I was teaching Firemen about fire pump operation, we had a slide rule to determine fire streams. Found it the other day and, still remember how to use it. Could have used that one you have from SHURE back when I was setting up sound systems for shows.
Learned the slide rule in 10th grade Chem class....1974. Years later I'm a teacher at my old school and strolling through the hallways in the summer and happen to see the teacher's demonstrator slide rule sticking out of a garbage can... A 6ft yellow Pickett slide rule! I fish it out if the garbage and hide it in my classroom's darkroom. The rule now lives in my woodshop at home. flic.kr/p/QZtYMS No pocket for your TI-30? Mine came with a faux denim belt-mounted zipper bag.
I see at 1:08 von Braun's slide rule was a Nestler. I just picked up 2 of those, made from Celluloid, in a junk shop for 1€ each. One is especially for electronics calculations.
I got a slide rule from a colleague back in 2005, I started working as an engineer, and i used it to do calculations..i sort off grew fond of these so i started designing them myself for machining calculations, and not to long ago i made a barrel shaped one that could fit in your pocket...
I've got a collection of almost a dozen really old slide rules, including a 7 foot long Pickett handing on my living room wall. hah! One thing I noticed almost immediately after I started learning how to use a slide rule, was that the more you understood the slide rule, the more you didn't need to use it at all. My intuition of the "patterns" of numbers grew immensely almost overnight. We should continue to teach them in schools for this purpose!
I have a book on how to use a slide rule by Isaac Asimov. In the introduction he says, "we have all heard these days of the invention of electronic computers, but to use an electronic computer to do simple arithmetic would be like shooting a fly with naval artillery."
We used slide rules in high school. I went to West Catholic on 49th & Chestnut, way back in the stone ages. In grade school, we had to do all calculations on paper ...and show all work. Fun times. Cool video. Thank you for sharing!
Oh that is so nostalgic. I still have my Faber Castell slide rule that my Dad bought for engineering college and taught me to use. The ubiquitous green box is witness to the years of use and abuse. He had the same model that he used throughout his work life in aircraft design. It took me through my technical college and apprenticeship. Calculators were creeping towards the end of my college time but they were not as quick as a slide rule. Thanks for showing this Fran.
I still have a 12 inch that I got a few decades back. My first one was a circular rule that was a plastic business card give-away in the mid 60s. A distant acquaintance was a Shell Oil engineer who memorized the common logs from 1 to 100. That let him figure out most of slide rule functions with simple addition and subtraction on a pad of paper.
Fran I have been collecting slide rules since I graduated from University in 1976. But your video has taught me more about how to use them than ever before. Thanks!! I think I have about 25 of them of all sizes. And yes no batteries are required and sometimes they actually are faster than slide rules and you can also see a range much easier than a calculator. Very few people use slide rules today and they simply don't understand their advantages.
I have my dad's slide rule and pull it out and use it occasionally. If one has to do repeat calculations or ratios, it's still much faster than a calculator. Pilots still learn to use a version of one for figuring out course vectors with wind taken into account. Yes, most use a computer or tablet, but those can fail and you'd still better be able to get where you're trying to go.
Calculators were just coming in while I was a teenager (my dad had one, with a red display, and clicky buttons), but they weren't allowed at school, so our school work did cover slide rules and their uses. Mum and dad bought me a rotary one, which I thought was quite cool - and no-one else at in my class had one!
I had a three sided one when I was a kid. Had other weird computery promo items my Pa gave me. Most he got at at computer/data possessing conferences in the late 1960's. He also brought home Lindy's cheesecake on occasion . Good Times
Ha ha - I used to have one of those too. Dates us, kinda, doesn't it? Every once in a while I find one in an antique or collector's shop, and then I'm tempted to buy it. Then I think ... nah. I have the DataMath calculator from TI. I think it's the first one they ever made (for the general public). Works beautifully, and has that nice bright red LED readout - which is easy to read.
Excellent ..... !! I used slide rules here in the UK right through school 1969 to 75 but we still weren't allowed to use them in exams. My best friend's father spent a year teaching in California and brought back the first digital calculator we'd ever seen, probably in 1973/4. In a drawing office for a huge civil engineering project that I visited with my father the draughtmen were still using a lever operated calculating engine set on a desk at the front of the drawing office at about that time also. As an aside, at my Junior school I used to walk past Merchiston Tower in Edinburgh twice a day, where John Napier, the 8th Laird and the inventor of Logarithms was born .... we were shown "Napier's Bones" as a tool for learning learning multiplication.
We used cylindrical slide rules in my school in the UK - they have the scales wrapped around a sliding cylinder and effectively made for a 12 foot slide rule which increased accuracy ( also prevented the masters from whacking you over the head with it). Haven't seen one of those in years though.
Started with log tables, moved to a sliderule, progressed to a better sliderule. I seem to remember 2 decimal places was achievable in most cases. I then bought a Sinclair calculator, cost a king's ransom to buy and another to keep in batteries. Then one of my lecturers who was a real wheeler dealer turned up with a huge case of scientific calculators (with power units). They were all gone that morning. That same year there was a flood of calc makes and models, watches and all the trimmings and suddenly they were no longer "special". I still took my sliderule into exams, just because they didn't need batteries. But nostalgia and the visibility of a sliderule soon gave way to the pocketability of a calculator.
My bachelors is in electrical engineering. That was in the 80s and, of the many classes, one that I remember well is a professor showing us how to use a slide rule just for fun.
I have a Hemmi Simplex slide rule sold by Post, model no. 1446. Made in Japan in the 1960s it has a leather case and I dont now how to use it but it's a interesting object.
I've a few aviator watches that that has a slide rule built in them with the rotating bezel acting as the slide. You can calculate and convert so much with them.
I learnt to use a slide rule in school in the late 60's still use some for things like threads and taps etc also prefer a proper vernier and micrometer to the digital ones, have both these days but the old school ones never have a flat battery or fail to work due to oil ingress.
I remember hearing the legends about slide rules, but I never actually learned to use one since we had calculators in the house even when I was very little (the original 1976-vintage TI-30 with the 9-volt battery).
With graphic arts, I loved my proportion wheel, and for a while Texas Instruments made a calculator with graphic arts functions that I absolutely loved. Amazing what I could do with it.
I used a slide rule right up until 2nd year of an engineering degree, when I bought a TI SR-10. I remember showing it to my friends as we all stood around watching it calculate square roots. Amazing! One of the thinks that using a slide rule taught me was to manage orders of magnitude. You mistype something into a calculator, you get a garbage answer, and unless you have a sense of "reasonableness", you just blindly copy the answer.
Just before covid I hung a 6 ft. training slide rule in my shop classroom. Several students thought it was very cool. They went on line and bought them. Then watched UA-cam to learn how to use it. The thought it was so much fun to use them in math class because none of the teachers had ever seen one and did not what they were! I used mine back in the 60's.
"How did they get to the moon just using slide rules?" "Have you ever learned to use a slide rule? They're amazing, it's no wonder we used them to get to the moon."
CIE (Cleveland Institute of Electronics) associated with their correspondence course had an electronics slide rule that came with four booklets "Electronics and Your Slide Rule" parts, I, II, III, IV. They appear on eBay regularly (usually without the booklets). CREI (Capital Radio Engineering Institute) whose course work was considerably more difficult than CIE didn't seem to offer anything like their own slide rule.
Fran mentions that slide rules were used to draw to scale in mechanical and architectural drafting. That would have been way too slow in my experience. I started my engineering career as a mechanical drafter and I'm old enough to have drawn in pencil professionally. I also trained in architectural drafting for a short time. And in all of my experience Fran is the first person who I've heard mention using a slide rule as a drafting tool. When I was drawing on paper we used a much faster tool to scale drawings. It was called a... Scale. It was like a ruler (without a slide) and it had graduations laid out in six different ratios depending on how it was oriented. If we ever found that we needed to draw to a scale that was unattainable with that tool (1:7 or 1:13 or whatever) then we'd just lay out a custom scale on the page and use dividers to pick off the relevant measurements. I never had to do that for real, but we learned how to do it in school (and it was also faster than using a slide rule). Having said that, make no mistake - I agree that Fran is awesome.
I have a Versalog book and always wanted to get a slide rule to go with it. One use was when doing calculations manually or with a calculator was to use it as a sanity check to make sure the result was reasonable.
Still have my K&E log log, or whatever it was, from my high school and college days. My father was an engineer (MS MIT) for the phone company and by proper reduction and manipulation could calculate a ridiculous number of decimal places. Of course he carried a slide rule on him at all times, and the family joke was that he was such an engineer that if our mother asked him what 2x2 was, he would whip out his faithful "slipstick" and in a flurry of baby powder (talc enhances the slipperiness) would announce "2 x 2 is 3.9999, oh hell, call it four."
I have two Pickett slide rules. They're re pretty amazing when you think about the fact that the Apollo astronauts took them to the moon. Slide rules are great at multiplication and division, addition and subtraction (which you "can" do if you jump through some hoops), and, of course, trig log functions. Most slide rules are accurate to the 2nd or "maybe" the 3rd decimal place which is perfect for most real-world applications.
I still have the Post VersaLog II I began college with. Inside the flap of the leather holster, I wrote in ratios for quick unit conversions. It worked great. The only errors I made were in keeping track of the decimal point. For that calculators rule.
I bought a slide rule at a flea market because, as a kid, I thought slide rules were always a mysterious tool used by very smart people. I'm glad I bought it to study this mysterious tool and it was good to see your video and allay the fears I had about slide rules.
I love this channel; brings back the good old days! I was an engineering student back in the early 70s and have gone through several slide rules. They warp, difficult to slide (toothpaste helped) and if you drop that thing, then it's time to get a new one. You need to constantly tune it up. When the basic +-x/ calculator came out, I can still calculate faster with the slide rule. But when the scientific calculator came out, then I had to give up all my slide rules including a circular kind. I remember how different students would assert that their calculation is better and even end up fighting. The scientific calculator solved that problem. Gotta love your TI-30. I'm a calculator collector and the one I have died. I still have my TI-58c and TI-59. I preferred the HP-41c over TI because of its RPN. The underlying principle of the slide rule will never disappear. It's even in your smartphone or every time your turn or slide that volume control. Thanks for sharing and keep them videos a coming!
My dad had an old fairly thick book that had charts for sqare roots and all kinds of other caculations. So if you wanted to find the square root of 293, you go to the page that has 293 on the far left vertical column, then go across the horizantal line to the square roots column. Each vertical column had a different calculation for 293. It went up past the number 1000 and had other sections. It was pretty fast to find calculations. I never needed it much, I used it a tiny bit for school homework on occassions, it was pretty handy. I'm guessing they don't print those books anymore.
Dad had a slide rule that was circular. It's around here somewhere I'll find it when I'm looking for something else. After he retired from Westinghouse in 1971 he really embraced the pocket calculator.
In the early ‘70s in secondary school I used logarithms to calculate things but I used slide rules to get an approximate value to see if my log calculations were in the ball park. I had to calculate chemical amounts to 4 decimal places which was a PITA and the simplest logs calculations would take up a whole page of working. Calculators were a boon in 1975 when the prices came down.
This reminds me of when one of my professors showd us a slide rule in a tutorial meeting, just for the fun of it. He tried to show how easy it was but us "children of the pocket calculator" was left a bit fuddled. I too had my first pocket calculator in 1976, comlete with red LED numbers.
The trick to showing off a slip stick in the calculator age was to do a string of calculations, including a square or cube root. With practice a slide rule can be very quick at that. It slows down when you need to do simple addition or subtraction!
Big controversy back in '74 @ State Tech was calculator use. We still had those gigantic slide rules at the front of the class room that were large enough to see from the back. Some instructors that thought a calculator was like cheating for math class you lose the ability to keep track of the decimal place & so forth. Got a really a nice Post slide rule w/ leather case for $10 when dude got a new TI scientific calculator & sold his slide rule.
I used a $1.25 plastic slide rule as a freshman physics major in 1964-5. Calculations were good to about 3 significant digits, which is enough for lots of applications. The real challenge was figuring out where the decimal place went. A couple of years ago I put together a little collection starting with a bamboo rule given to me by an uncle. Lots of different old, used makes and models were available on eBay, and I was able to get a new-old-stock advanced rule from Faber-Castell, as well. They are fun to use.
I've just learned that a slide rule can also be used to solve factorable quadratic equations. That is, if x^2+ax+b has real roots, r1 * r2 = b, and r1 + r2 = a. Since C against D is a constant ratio, CI against D is a constant product. After setting the slide such that CI*D = b (above), visually slide along the rule until you find the combination of CI and D to satisfy the "a" coefficient. I've seen several sets of instructions for slide rules, but only one of them had this procedure.
One slide to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
This brought back some fond memories. In my Junior year of high school (1975), I got the high score on a competitive math exam. (I even beat the seniors!) The prize was a beautiful aluminum Pickett slide rule that had a set of double-logarithmic scales in addition to the standard scales. The following year, everybody else was using TI-30 calculators, but I used that slide rule all through my senior year and even into my beginning college years. I still have it, along with its leather case and belt-strap. I actually pulled it out while I was watching this video and did the square root calculations with you. Thank you so much for this video.
I still have the slide rule that I got from a very old gentleman that was a friend of my mom. I got it for mowing his lawn. I was 14 at the time (now approaching 65) and he taught me how to use it. I used it all through high school and many years later in college. I still keep it in it's original leather case. Mine is a Dietzgen Trig Log Log rule
I love slide rules! My grandmother gave me my grandfather's slide rule shortly after he died. He had apparently always intended to give me one, but by the time I was ready, calculators were a thing. I proudly carried it in my backpack in college, and even found an excuse to pull it out during an exam when my calculator's battery "died". I put a note on my paper to the effect of, "Forgive slight inaccuracies - last few answers done on a slide rule." :D Great video. We'll see if the price of slide rules on eBay goes up because of this!
I always had a slide rule with me for any exam with the slightest risk of low battery. And then it became sort of superstition. And they are great for scaling. A circular version exist soley for scaling (for graphic work and layout). I know that versions existed for artillery (I've only seen a model for a mortar). And for dosis calculations (when the Bomb drops). I think I have one somewhere. As for regular slide rules I have 3, my father's (very small with physics constants and densities for Eiche, Aluminium, Messing, Kupfer, Granit and unreadable on the back), one from a flea market and one bought brand new from used building materials shop. Why? They might come in handy.
typograf62 that is why I use solar-powered calculators.
Great story , thank you for sharing !
I purchased my first slide rule in 1961. I still have it.
Pilots still learn to use slide-rules in the form of the E6B. It's interesting because it is circular (which works well due to the way logarithms work. You can see simplified versions on some aviator watches too.
I watched this when it came out and couldn’t understand it. I also was sleeping an average of 2 hours a night, I had really severe insomnia for almost 2 years. Watching it now I totally get it, it seems simple even. Little things like this make it evident how cognitively impaired not sleeping made me. I still have memory problems, fatigue, and some other random issues… sleep is precious, y’all.
Getting a CPAP cleared a lot of my brain fog.
What a beautiful slide rule! Your Dad must have spent a lot for it back in the day.
When Canada went metric, the gas station that I worked at gave away cardboard slide-rules for converting MPG to L/100 Km. Fuel consumption was important in the 70s!
We also had stickers that people put on their speedometers to convert MPH to KPH (it would have been a bit awkward using a slide rule converter while driving!)
We had a phase like that in the UK when our money went metric overnight in 1972 I think. There were slide rule calculators everywhere for ages!
@@Aengus42 Terry Pratchett actually made fun of that in the novel "Good Omens". He had a footnote that explained the old money system (...Two Farthings = One Ha'penny. Two Ha'pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit...etc.) He concludes by stating:
"The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated." :-)
WOW!!!! THANK YOU, VERY MUCH, FRAN, FOR THIS INFORMATIVE VIDEO, ON SOME OF THE AMAZING CAPABILITIES, OF THES DEVICES!!! I REMEMBER WHEN MY DAD, (a "DRAFTSMAN"), FIRST GOT A TEXAS INSTRUMENTS "TI-30" HAND-HELD CALCULATOR", BACK IN THE EARLY/MID 1970'S... I WAS, AND STILL AM FASCINATED BY THE MECHANICAL "SLIDE RULES"!!!! I REMEMBER LOVING TO FIND A VARIETY OF "NOMOGRAPHS" USED FOR A VARIETY OF SPECIFIC PURPOSES, SUCH AS "MECHANICAL SPRING" PROPERTIES, WEIGHT/VOLUMES/PRESSURES,... METAL ALLOY PROPERTIES... SOIL PROPERTIES, ELECTRONICS COMPONENT PROPERTIES, MOTOR SIZES/TORQUES/VOLTS/AMPS, WIRE SIZES, ETC.... WHERE CAN WE FING "SLIDE RULES?!... i'D LIKE TO GET ONE FOR USE IN WORKING ON MODEL AVIATION" RELATED HOBBY DESIGNING...
In 1959 my first subscription to Hot Rod magazine came with a cardboard slide rule set up for all kinds of car things, like matching the bore & stroke of an engine to show it's cubic inches. My father, an Air Force pilot at that time, had a circular one for pre-electronics plotting where they were and figuring out other data needed.
"I'd thank my dad, if he were still around."
my feels: 😭♥️
Be wary of buying used slide rules on eBay. If a price seems very good, there's probably something wrong with it. Good ones are pretty expensive nowadays.
The problem with one I bought was the 'springs' that keep the cursor aligned and in place were broken.
My first Engineering class in college back in 1974 required us to use the Slide Rule for all computations. After that class, electronic calculators were permitted. My slide rule belonged to my father, a telephone company traffic engineer, and it was a bamboo Keuffel & Esser (K&E) brand. It came in a very heavy duty leather carrying case. For my first Electronic Calculator, also in 1974, I purchased a Texas Instruments (TI) model SR-10 for $110. It was called an “Electronic Slide Rule” although my father’s slide rule could actually perform more functions and it did not have batteries that needed to be charged.
Fran, thanks 😊 so much for this video. It brought back many fond memories of my father and his awesome bamboo K&E slide rule. I’ll have to go looking for that slide rule today so I can ask my 9 grandkids and 2 great-grandkids if they might know what this cool 😎 contraption is used for. LOL 😂! Cheers! Dave
A bit behind, working through a backlog of videos but...
I saw this and lit up. I may be (relatively) young, but one thing my grandfather taught me years ago was to use a sliderule. I ended up with two of his slide rules - a Hemi 257 and a Hemi 259D. Both are really nice and have some neat features, like squares, roots, multiplication and division, etc...
Sometimes, in this world of modern tech, it's just nice to use something physical. Especially when you need to consider significant digits. More decimal points doesn't always mean a more accurate calculation - your calculation should only be as good as your measurements.
I use a Castell 67/87 RB with an Addiator, a great tool to have near by
I ran across my old slide rule a while back in a time machine junk drawer. I actually used it in my early college days, circa early 70s, about the time when Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard started out with their calculators. I couldn't come even close to affording the early calculators so had to make do with my slide rule. Just for fun, I figured out (sorta remembered) how to do simple multiplication. In the same drawer was my "super fancy" HP calculator I used in the late 80s. It has this magnetic strip reader thing. One could use good old Reverse Polish Notation to write simple-ish programs and zip the mag strip into the reader to load the program into the calculator memory. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Pretty cool back in the day.
There are also caclulating discs for multiple purposes. For instance the geman Kriegsmarine used an Attack Disc to calculate things like interception courses, attack courses, predictions on a target, angle of bow etc. I built one of these and used it to play silent hunter III and it always worked pretty well.
I think we're about the same age. I got my first calculator in 1975, a Rockwell / Anita 30R "Slide Rule Memory" model which was branded House Of Fraser in the UK. But we were still taught how to use slide rules in secondary school so I bought a 6" model which was branded "WHSmith Simplified Rietz" made by Blundell, probably around 1977. Not that I can remember how to use it any more.
When I saw Hidden Figures I was sitting there thinking "Where the hell are the slide rules?" The engineers and the women who did computations prior to the advent of computers should have had slide rules, but there were NONE in sight.
The people known as “computers” used electro-mechanical calculators, which were bulky, noisy, power-hungry predecessors of the later pocket calculators, in order to do precise calculations. They either printed or narrow endless rolls of paper (like ATM or cash register tape) or displayed each digit by rotating a wheel to display the digit behind a window. Slide rules were used by the engineers for ballpark accuracy, and the numbers were refined by sending the inputs to the computers - or to the electronic computers when they arrived.
YES! Slide rules are STILL amazing, My "daily driver" had an aluminum frame and slide, but the really smooth ones used bamboo. I had a bit of a collection, donated by my engineering compatriots as they went "full calculator"; sadly, all were lost in a fire in the mid-1990's. There were odd shape or purpose slide rules, as you show, and it would be difficult to find some of them these days. When I took engineering, you could always pick us out by the belt scabbards for the slide rules - some 20-24 inches long. As much as I find my modern calculator very helpful, I miss the slide rule for some jobs.
I learned to use one during high school honors chemistry in fall of 1962. That was on a cheap plastic one. Two years later I got a nifty Dietzgen before heading off to college. Years later, I got well acquainted with the circular version in the form of the Jeppesen E6B flight computer. I still have all three. You mentioned the accuracy of the slide rule. My chemistry and engineering teachers stressed that no computation can be any more precise than the least precise measurement involved in the calculation.
Thanks. I remember an electronics teacher in 1995 being sad for people who never learnt to use slide rules, commenting that those people never learned to actually think about the true accuracy of the calculations they made based on some measured values - as calculators just pour out that screenful of digits.
I'm also too young to have actually learnt to use one, but have acquired a cuople along the way and played with them enough to do the base maths (multiplication and division), but this video was a very good demonstration on what all else these things can be capable of.
Slide rules are still used in initial flight training to compute various aspects of flight by hand in case your electronics die. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
I still have my Faber Castell Rietz 111/87 which is a slide rule for machine and electronics engineering. It is really handy tool for estimating and eyeballing things. I like it.
In my high school math class in 1969 there was a giant slide rule mounted over the blackboard. It was about six feet long by fourteen inches wide.
THANK YOU. After 46 years, the slide rule is simple and amazing. WHY didn't they teach this in highschool math class? I never heard about slide rule in public school and after being introduced to calculators, there was no incentive to investigate the slide rule. Even weirder, my dad was a highschool teacher and a principal.
I remember it being taught in six grade in the early 60s. Still haven't been able to master it.
I have 2. A simple beginner Mannheim simplex rule by K+E and my Dad’s Dietzgen polymath rule, a lot more scales. The people who figured these things out were way smarter than me.
We used slide rules for my electronics class at vocational school, but that was back in 1979 - 1981. My instructor had worked on the Gemini space program.
When I went to college, I got to use an HP-33c.
I still have the slide rule I purchased back in high school in the late 60's. Only slide rules were allowed in exams at university in the early 70's.
Your video takes me back in time. Also reminds me of using log tables as well as the slide rule. For complicated calculations finding the decimal place was sometimes time consuming.
Dave.
I get the same from that Ti-30 as that's the beast my Aunt got for me at school. I was 16 in 1980 so it shows the change in a few years. Calculators were still banned in my school though & the start of every maths lesson would see the distribution of a pile of very tatty log books!
My slide rule is a British Thornton P271. It is a single side slide rule so may not have as many functions as other models.
Back in the time when I purchased this, Thornton made a lot of products for mathematics and engineering drawing.
Dave.
I still have mine from high school in the late 1960's. Used it all the way through University in the early 70's. All the hand held calculators available at that time were very expensive. The physics department had two TI45's bolted down in their common room but I used the breadbox sized calculator in the chemistry department. Now I have several hand helds including my HP41C that I used in grad school.
Gordon, i’ve still got my HP 41 CX and still love it! Got the Printer, card reader, and tape drive as well. I’ve loaded into 41CX app on my iPad and my iPhone and use them daily. Best darn calculator ever made. Although, with the TI30, you could read in bed at night with the lights out. By the way, there is an HP41.org, (I think that’s the site), that still supports them.
There were high precision slide rules like this one images.app.goo.gl/wDyDkxLkUXhwsjz29 used for scientific and engineering calculations.
The scales are arranged around and parallel to the axis of two concentric cylinders, the inner one being able to slide relative to the outer one. This allowed the scales to be cut into a number of equal length segments so the scales could be much longer without increasing the overall length of the slide rule.
The center sliding cylinder could be removed, rotated with respect to the fixed cylinder and reinserted so as to index to any point on any segment of the fixed scales.
I think these might have provided something like 5 or 6 digits of precision.
I had a slip-stick back in high school when I took a class in business machines. I even used a card punch machine. I can still hear the instructor telling us it was going to be the job of the future. About the time I moved on to my senior year pocket calculators hit the scene and that was the end of my slide rule days.
I got through high school with a slide rule
Slide rules are all about estimating
Problem now is that students cannot estimate what a reasonable result should be
Thanks for showing various types of slide rules
This is a gigantic deal
No joke
Huge, gigantic, intergalactic, or bigger
There is no limit to the power of a slide rule - even to the point of deciding the fate of humanity, as per Strangelove.
Everything can be used for good or ill.
Yes they are, I remember back during my Jr. year in high school 1993, asking my electronics teacher to teach me how to use one... Which he did and he even gave me one. He was shocked because I was probably the only student he had in the 90’s with any interest in them....
When I was 10, one of my teachers gave me a set of Napiers Bones.
@@millomweb Oh, awesome! Wish I had a set of those in my collection. I'm jealous!
Quite possibly the first teacher I knew to die - lung cancer.
The second one - who had a son in the same class as me, committed suicide.
@@millomweb condolences. :-/
Enjoyed this one Fran, started collage in 67 with the slide rule and the log table books added a four function calculator (red LED display) in 72 as I finished. The slide rule didn't need batteries, but beer did effect the slide rule for some reason.
I still have my K+E Deci-Lon from high school/college days! Plus the six-inch K+E "pocket" rule that has the same scales. I have a circular Pickett rule which I didn't use very much because the "folded" scales were hard to locate where the result was! I still use it occasionally just to stay "proficient" with it. Amazing devices. And, no batteries required. But, a little difficult to use when the lights go out!
The Franlab jam at the end is badass
Foresters use them to calculate timber volumes as electronic devices don't work well in damp, dripping forests.
Great - I still give them to my physics students with some instructions and let them play for a while as a way of thinking out of the box, understanding numbers and their relationships better and just a bit of fun. They seem to enjoy it!
1:08 That slide rule looks remarkably like the one I used throughout my college and university years, and well into my early engineering career; a Faber-Castell 1/98 Electro, if memory serves me well. It is in my desk now, having outlived many newfangled calculators, and it needs no batteries!
When I was taking ground school for my private pilot license (1979) we had to use a slide ruler also but the functions where different. The version I used was called E6B flight computer. They still make them and lots of private pilot carry one. Think ground schools still cover there use in a 1/2 day of extra training
And that was a circular slide rule, I believe.
@@alandaters8547 You got it
There's at least one episode of Star Trek in which an E6B shows up being used by Spock for some arcane calculation.
I remember using one in my 1970 elecrronics tech class. It worked well with scientific notation working with large and small numbers to calculate tuned RLC circuit etc
Basic formulas :)
1) log (x * y) = log (x) + log (y)
2) log (x / y) = log (x) - log (y)
3) log (x ^ 2) = 2 * log (x)
4) log (x ^ n) = n * log (x)
5) log (n√x) = (1 / n) * log (x)
:)
Still have mine from college back in the early 70's; a Pickett 880.
I have always wanted to know how to use a slide rule. I remember seeing them in old movies and thinking how cool and smart they make you look. I’m definitely going to get one.
Thank you so much Fran!!! Love you!
I've been running through a physics textbook from 1939 with just a slide rule, then checking the math with a calculator you'd be surprised at how accurate they are especially when you account for sigfigs
I still use mine. I have 3..a 6 inch, 12 inch and a circular one! And i don't have to worry about batteries or charging anything!
I worked for a Land Surveyor during High School (mid 60's). At that time the Crew Chief carried around a small book of trig tables for doing computations in the field. I guess things needed to be more accurate than 3 places. But in the 80's I took flight training and you had to learn how to use a circular slide rule for navigation. I'm sure I still have my slide rules from school. Neat Stuff!
When you mentioned the abiltiy to detect the intersection of fine lines I immediately thought of using a Vernier caliper (also a micrometer down to 0.0001 inches). My first Vernier caliper was a cheap Chinese one, but I later picked up a nice post WW II West German Helios off of eBay that was like the one my Dad had in his shop. No batteries or electronic circuits to go bad.
I found a Pickett 515T abandoned in an office, and got bit by the bug, and bought a Pickett N-3 ES, a K&E #4081-3 log-log-Decitrig, a Frederick Post 1460 Versalog, and a Dietzgen #1734 Microglide. Presently working to familiarize myself with the various rules and master their use. At age 71.
I loved all of the specialized cardboard rules.
Yes, I was using a slide rule at Uni in the 60's. Still have my old slide rule from back then. Also carry my old E6B when flying which is a circular slide rule for navigation and many other calcs (eg. conversions).
I just discovered your channels, and I'm really happy to see this video. I went to college for electronics in 1974 and part of the curriculum was a slide rule course. Those students who were Vietnam Vets were the only students allowed to have calculators, because a basic 4 function calculator cost over $100, and the Vets - with the GI Bill - were the only ones who could afford it.
Yay! Slide rules :-) As a youth I'd watch old science fiction movies where the hero scientist would whip out the slide rule. I was sad that I couldn't afford to get one....fast forward a errrrr few years, I have lots of them, and they are still cool :-)
My uncle gave me a slide rule for a birthday present back in the 70’s. I think it was an eclipse. Sadly I didn’t treat it well as it was the beginning of the hand calculator era. Kids these days don’t know how to use slide rules or even log tables... I use to love using log tables.
It is just so hard to get a good sliderule these days.
I still have an old half broken sliderule in my desk, because it has an amazing compound interest scale.
For practical stuff I mostly switched to nomographs, because I can print those with a normal printer in case I need special conversion. While I never formally learned to use a sliderule (excluding a nonius like on the calipers) our university lab still gave out printed nomographs especially on the microwave side. Like converting from 50Ohm to 75Ohm base, or converting from resistances to reflections.
I still have my slide made by Post. Plastic case and real glass. My algebra teacher gave it to me when I graduated high school. He even autographed the case for me.
My dad has a Sun Hemmi bamboo slide rule he got for college that is a chemical engineer's model--one side has regular slide-rule scales similar to yours, but instead of more advanced mathematical functions, the scales on the back are all about things like molecular weights of various materials and density and pressure conversions. It has a sort of leather scabbard. Nice-looking except the glass of the cursor has a big crack in it.
I was also *just* barely too young to ever really learn to use one. Around 1976 or '77, he bought an Omron scientific calculator (its model number was 86SR which I think actually stood for "slide rule"), one of the first affordable models with trig and hyperbolic functions and such, and it impressed him enough that he got me one. So I had that from an early age.
I was taught how to use a slide rule in high school, electronics 1 & 2, years 1972 to 1974. The teacher was fantastic. Taught us scientific notation along with the slide rule.
Best years of high school was in that class. Learned alot from that man.
Thanks Fran.
Talking of verniers, they're often built into the ironsights of precision target rifles, measuring miniscule elevation and windage adjustments. This allows a shooter to be able to dial his/her rifle without having to take a lot of zeroing shots each time they shoot at a different distance. This reduces cost (of ammunition expended), time taken to shoot a particular detail, and wear on their barrels. Plus, with adequate testing and practice, allows the shooter to make educated adjustments for atmospheric changes.
You ever get used to using one they can be fun. Back when I was teaching Firemen about fire pump operation, we had a slide rule to determine fire streams. Found it the other day and, still remember how to use it. Could have used that one you have from SHURE back when I was setting up sound systems for shows.
Learned the slide rule in 10th grade Chem class....1974. Years later I'm a teacher at my old school and strolling through the hallways in the summer and happen to see the teacher's demonstrator slide rule sticking out of a garbage can... A 6ft yellow Pickett slide rule! I fish it out if the garbage and hide it in my classroom's darkroom. The rule now lives in my woodshop at home.
flic.kr/p/QZtYMS
No pocket for your TI-30? Mine came with a faux denim belt-mounted zipper bag.
Nice save on the Pickett 6’ demo rule. The one in my HS chemistry class got a regular workout.
I see at 1:08 von Braun's slide rule was a Nestler. I just picked up 2 of those, made from Celluloid, in a junk shop for 1€ each. One is especially for electronics calculations.
Love specialised slide rules.
Still use a cutting speed/feed/surface speed/rpm slide rule in the machineshop.
And why not.
I still have my Pickett N1010SL-ES Super Power Trig slide rule from my college days.
I got a slide rule from a colleague back in 2005, I started working as an engineer, and i used it to do calculations..i sort off grew fond of these so i started designing them myself for machining calculations, and not to long ago i made a barrel shaped one that could fit in your pocket...
I've got a collection of almost a dozen really old slide rules, including a 7 foot long Pickett handing on my living room wall. hah!
One thing I noticed almost immediately after I started learning how to use a slide rule, was that the more you understood the slide rule, the more you didn't need to use it at all. My intuition of the "patterns" of numbers grew immensely almost overnight. We should continue to teach them in schools for this purpose!
I have a book on how to use a slide rule by Isaac Asimov. In the introduction he says, "we have all heard these days of the invention of electronic computers, but to use an electronic computer to do simple arithmetic would be like shooting a fly with naval artillery."
We used slide rules in high school. I went to West Catholic on 49th & Chestnut, way back in the stone ages. In grade school, we had to do all calculations on paper ...and show all work. Fun times.
Cool video. Thank you for sharing!
Oh that is so nostalgic. I still have my Faber Castell slide rule that my Dad bought for engineering college and taught me to use. The ubiquitous green box is witness to the years of use and abuse. He had the same model that he used throughout his work life in aircraft design. It took me through my technical college and apprenticeship. Calculators were creeping towards the end of my college time but they were not as quick as a slide rule.
Thanks for showing this Fran.
I still have a 12 inch that I got a few decades back. My first one was a circular rule that was a plastic business card give-away in the mid 60s. A distant acquaintance was a Shell Oil engineer who memorized the common logs from 1 to 100. That let him figure out most of slide rule functions with simple addition and subtraction on a pad of paper.
Fran I have been collecting slide rules since I graduated from University in 1976. But your video has taught me more about how to use them than ever before. Thanks!! I think I have about 25 of them of all sizes. And yes no batteries are required and sometimes they actually are faster than slide rules and you can also see a range much easier than a calculator. Very few people use slide rules today and they simply don't understand their advantages.
I have my dad's slide rule and pull it out and use it occasionally. If one has to do repeat calculations or ratios, it's still much faster than a calculator. Pilots still learn to use a version of one for figuring out course vectors with wind taken into account. Yes, most use a computer or tablet, but those can fail and you'd still better be able to get where you're trying to go.
Or grading corset patterns...
Calculators were just coming in while I was a teenager (my dad had one, with a red display, and clicky buttons), but they weren't allowed at school, so our school work did cover slide rules and their uses. Mum and dad bought me a rotary one, which I thought was quite cool - and no-one else at in my class had one!
I had a three sided one when I was a kid. Had other weird computery promo items my Pa gave me. Most he got at at computer/data possessing conferences in the late 1960's. He also brought home Lindy's cheesecake on occasion . Good Times
I still have the one I got in school in the 70s. Requires no battery, perfect for the zombie apocalypse. (And, I have a TI-30 calculator too!)
My bro had/has a Ti-51-III
It was rubbish compared to my Sharp EL-504. The buttons weren't so reliable and I don't think it was as accurate.
Was given my slide rule in the mid 60s when I started high school. Still have it.
Ha ha - I used to have one of those too. Dates us, kinda, doesn't it? Every once in a while I find one in an antique or collector's shop, and then I'm tempted to buy it. Then I think ... nah. I have the DataMath calculator from TI. I think it's the first one they ever made (for the general public). Works beautifully, and has that nice bright red LED readout - which is easy to read.
Excellent ..... !!
I used slide rules here in the UK right through school 1969 to 75 but we still weren't allowed to use them in exams. My best friend's father spent a year teaching in California and brought back the first digital calculator we'd ever seen, probably in 1973/4. In a drawing office for a huge civil engineering project that I visited with my father the draughtmen were still using a lever operated calculating engine set on a desk at the front of the drawing office at about that time also.
As an aside, at my Junior school I used to walk past Merchiston Tower in Edinburgh twice a day, where John Napier, the 8th Laird and the inventor of Logarithms was born .... we were shown "Napier's Bones" as a tool for learning learning multiplication.
We used cylindrical slide rules in my school in the UK - they have the scales wrapped around a sliding cylinder and effectively made for a 12 foot slide rule which increased accuracy ( also prevented the masters from whacking you over the head with it). Haven't seen one of those in years though.
David Melbourne Curta?
I have one of those in my collection. Super cool!
I still have mine, made by Otis.
Super, did'nt know they existed, knew the circular ones though: handy for multiple calculations.
@@tedf1471 Mine is Oliver Garfield Co., Inc. It came with the original box. Get this, the price on the box is $3.00!
Started with log tables, moved to a sliderule, progressed to a better sliderule. I seem to remember 2 decimal places was achievable in most cases.
I then bought a Sinclair calculator, cost a king's ransom to buy and another to keep in batteries.
Then one of my lecturers who was a real wheeler dealer turned up with a huge case of scientific calculators (with power units). They were all gone that morning. That same year there was a flood of calc makes and models, watches and all the trimmings and suddenly they were no longer "special". I still took my sliderule into exams, just because they didn't need batteries.
But nostalgia and the visibility of a sliderule soon gave way to the pocketability of a calculator.
My bachelors is in electrical engineering. That was in the 80s and, of the many classes, one that I remember well is a professor showing us how to use a slide rule just for fun.
I have a Hemmi Simplex slide rule sold by Post, model no. 1446. Made in Japan in the 1960s it has a leather case and I dont now how to use it but it's a interesting object.
I've a few aviator watches that that has a slide rule built in them with the rotating bezel acting as the slide. You can calculate and convert so much with them.
I learnt to use a slide rule in school in the late 60's still use some for things like threads and taps etc also prefer a proper vernier and micrometer to the digital ones, have both these days but the old school ones never have a flat battery or fail to work due to oil ingress.
I remember hearing the legends about slide rules, but I never actually learned to use one since we had calculators in the house even when I was very little (the original 1976-vintage TI-30 with the 9-volt battery).
With graphic arts, I loved my proportion wheel, and for a while Texas Instruments made a calculator with graphic arts functions that I absolutely loved. Amazing what I could do with it.
I used a slide rule right up until 2nd year of an engineering degree, when I bought a TI SR-10. I remember showing it to my friends as we all stood around watching it calculate square roots. Amazing! One of the thinks that using a slide rule taught me was to manage orders of magnitude. You mistype something into a calculator, you get a garbage answer, and unless you have a sense of "reasonableness", you just blindly copy the answer.
Just before covid I hung a 6 ft. training slide rule in my shop classroom. Several students thought it was very cool. They went on line and bought them. Then watched UA-cam to learn how to use it. The thought it was so much fun to use them in math class because none of the teachers had ever seen one and did not what they were! I used mine back in the 60's.
"How did they get to the moon just using slide rules?"
"Have you ever learned to use a slide rule? They're amazing, it's no wonder we used them to get to the moon."
Fantastic video, yes I have used one many years ago. I never had to worry about the battery running out...lol. thanks for sharing...Vic
CIE (Cleveland Institute of Electronics) associated with their correspondence course had an electronics slide rule that came with four booklets "Electronics and Your Slide Rule" parts, I, II, III, IV. They appear on eBay regularly (usually without the booklets). CREI (Capital Radio Engineering Institute) whose course work was considerably more difficult than CIE didn't seem to offer anything like their own slide rule.
Fran mentions that slide rules were used to draw to scale in mechanical and architectural drafting. That would have been way too slow in my experience. I started my engineering career as a mechanical drafter and I'm old enough to have drawn in pencil professionally. I also trained in architectural drafting for a short time. And in all of my experience Fran is the first person who I've heard mention using a slide rule as a drafting tool. When I was drawing on paper we used a much faster tool to scale drawings. It was called a... Scale. It was like a ruler (without a slide) and it had graduations laid out in six different ratios depending on how it was oriented. If we ever found that we needed to draw to a scale that was unattainable with that tool (1:7 or 1:13 or whatever) then we'd just lay out a custom scale on the page and use dividers to pick off the relevant measurements. I never had to do that for real, but we learned how to do it in school (and it was also faster than using a slide rule).
Having said that, make no mistake - I agree that Fran is awesome.
I have a Versalog book and always wanted to get a slide rule to go with it.
One use was when doing calculations manually or with a calculator was to use it as a sanity check to make sure the result was reasonable.
Still have my K&E log log, or whatever it was, from my high school and college days. My father was an engineer (MS MIT) for the phone company and by proper reduction and manipulation could calculate a ridiculous number of decimal places.
Of course he carried a slide rule on him at all times, and the family joke was that he was such an engineer that if our mother asked him what 2x2 was, he would whip out his faithful "slipstick" and in a flurry of baby powder (talc enhances the slipperiness) would announce "2 x 2 is 3.9999, oh hell, call it four."
I have two Pickett slide rules. They're re pretty amazing when you think about the fact that the Apollo astronauts took them to the moon. Slide rules are great at multiplication and division, addition and subtraction (which you "can" do if you jump through some hoops), and, of course, trig log functions. Most slide rules are accurate to the 2nd or "maybe" the 3rd decimal place which is perfect for most real-world applications.
I still have the Post VersaLog II I began college with. Inside the flap of the leather holster, I wrote in ratios for quick unit conversions. It worked great. The only errors I made were in keeping track of the decimal point. For that calculators rule.
neat! slide rulers are cool! at the computing museum in san jose they have a good collection of these! awesome!
I bought a slide rule at a flea market because, as a kid, I thought slide rules were always a mysterious tool used by very smart people. I'm glad I bought it to study this mysterious tool and it was good to see your video and allay the fears I had about slide rules.
I love this channel; brings back the good old days!
I was an engineering student back in the early 70s and have gone through several slide rules. They warp, difficult to slide (toothpaste helped) and if you drop that thing, then it's time to get a new one. You need to constantly tune it up. When the basic +-x/ calculator came out, I can still calculate faster with the slide rule. But when the scientific calculator came out, then I had to give up all my slide rules including a circular kind. I remember how different students would assert that their calculation is better and even end up fighting. The scientific calculator solved that problem.
Gotta love your TI-30. I'm a calculator collector and the one I have died. I still have my TI-58c and TI-59. I preferred the HP-41c over TI because of its RPN.
The underlying principle of the slide rule will never disappear. It's even in your smartphone or every time your turn or slide that volume control.
Thanks for sharing and keep them videos a coming!
My dad had an old fairly thick book that had charts for sqare roots and all kinds of other caculations. So if you wanted to find the square root of 293, you go to the page that has 293 on the far left vertical column, then go across the horizantal line to the square roots column. Each vertical column had a different calculation for 293. It went up past the number 1000 and had other sections. It was pretty fast to find calculations. I never needed it much, I used it a tiny bit for school homework on occassions, it was pretty handy. I'm guessing they don't print those books anymore.
Dad had a slide rule that was circular. It's around here somewhere I'll find it when I'm looking for something else. After he retired from Westinghouse in 1971 he really embraced the pocket calculator.
In the early ‘70s in secondary school I used logarithms to calculate things but I used slide rules to get an approximate value to see if my log calculations were in the ball park. I had to calculate chemical amounts to 4 decimal places which was a PITA and the simplest logs calculations would take up a whole page of working. Calculators were a boon in 1975 when the prices came down.
This reminds me of when one of my professors showd us a slide rule in a tutorial meeting, just for the fun of it. He tried to show how easy it was but us "children of the pocket calculator" was left a bit fuddled. I too had my first pocket calculator in 1976, comlete with red LED numbers.
Let me guess, a four banger (+,-,×,÷) and cost a good amount of cash?
The trick to showing off a slip stick in the calculator age was to do a string of calculations, including a square or cube root. With practice a slide rule can be very quick at that. It slows down when you need to do simple addition or subtraction!
Big controversy back in '74 @ State Tech was calculator use. We still had those gigantic slide rules at the front of the class room that were large enough to see from the back. Some instructors that thought a calculator was like cheating for math class you lose the ability to keep track of the decimal place & so forth.
Got a really a nice Post slide rule w/ leather case for $10 when dude got a new TI scientific calculator & sold his slide rule.
I used a $1.25 plastic slide rule as a freshman physics major in 1964-5. Calculations were good to about 3 significant digits, which is enough for lots of applications. The real challenge was figuring out where the decimal place went. A couple of years ago I put together a little collection starting with a bamboo rule given to me by an uncle. Lots of different old, used makes and models were available on eBay, and I was able to get a new-old-stock advanced rule from Faber-Castell, as well. They are fun to use.