I was taught to use a slide rule as a teenager when I used to help my father on weekends with his work, I'd get pocket money for my efforts.
My father, a mechanical engineer, used to bring home large plans (blueprints/diazo whiteprints) of new powerstations he was working on. The drawings were so big that the only place they could be fully opened and spread out was on the lounge room carpet. I'd lie down on my stomach spread out across the drawing with pencil, paper and slide rule in hand and cost the I-beams and RSJs against tables of steel types and prices (cost/ft).
The tool of choice back then had to be the slide rule as calculators weren't commonly available. In hindsight, for this job, the slide rule would still have been the better tool had I also had a calculator. For after checking the cost of a RSJ with a specific CSA (cross section), I did not have to move the rule's slide for every different length of same—all that was necessary was for me to look along the scale and note the cost for any given length. Pushing multiple buttons on a calculator in that circumstance would have been much more awkward.
It's a shame the slide rule has slipped from fashion because it has several significant advantages over a digital calculator, the first is that for repeated calculations where a variable changes each time, one doesn't have to enter a new value as all results are already calculated and displayed—one only has to read the result at the appropriate point on the scale.
The other is that slide rules use mostly log or exponential-type scales, they present instant graph-like visualizations of one's calculations. I've always thought that kids ought to be taught how to use slide rules for this reason.
With the demise of the slide rule I reckon we've lost that instant visualization. Electronic calculators provide much greater accuracy but lacking the visual/graphical-like representation their results are sterile (and in some situations less informative). We also see the same issue arising with the differences between analog/moving-coil and digital multimeters.
I reckon that both of these analog tools illustrate the virtue of approaching things from an analog perspective. No, I'm not resorting to Luddite mode and rejecting digital but rather we should take the best from both approaches. I think we were too eager to ditch analog technology and my view seems to be supported with the recent rekindling of interest in analog computers (as they're more appropriate in some applications due to their simplicity and that they require less power).
Incidentally, I still have my father's Faber-Castell 2/83N slide rule and my Hemmi Darmstadt that I used to do those calculations—both of which I still use.
My father, a mechanical engineer, used to bring home large plans (blueprints/diazo whiteprints) of new powerstations he was working on. The drawings were so big that the only place they could be fully opened and spread out was on the lounge room carpet. I'd lie down on my stomach spread out across the drawing with pencil, paper and slide rule in hand and cost the I-beams and RSJs against tables of steel types and prices (cost/ft).
The tool of choice back then had to be the slide rule as calculators weren't commonly available. In hindsight, for this job, the slide rule would still have been the better tool had I also had a calculator. For after checking the cost of a RSJ with a specific CSA (cross section), I did not have to move the rule's slide for every different length of same—all that was necessary was for me to look along the scale and note the cost for any given length. Pushing multiple buttons on a calculator in that circumstance would have been much more awkward.
It's a shame the slide rule has slipped from fashion because it has several significant advantages over a digital calculator, the first is that for repeated calculations where a variable changes each time, one doesn't have to enter a new value as all results are already calculated and displayed—one only has to read the result at the appropriate point on the scale.
The other is that slide rules use mostly log or exponential-type scales, they present instant graph-like visualizations of one's calculations. I've always thought that kids ought to be taught how to use slide rules for this reason.
With the demise of the slide rule I reckon we've lost that instant visualization. Electronic calculators provide much greater accuracy but lacking the visual/graphical-like representation their results are sterile (and in some situations less informative). We also see the same issue arising with the differences between analog/moving-coil and digital multimeters.
I reckon that both of these analog tools illustrate the virtue of approaching things from an analog perspective. No, I'm not resorting to Luddite mode and rejecting digital but rather we should take the best from both approaches. I think we were too eager to ditch analog technology and my view seems to be supported with the recent rekindling of interest in analog computers (as they're more appropriate in some applications due to their simplicity and that they require less power).
Incidentally, I still have my father's Faber-Castell 2/83N slide rule and my Hemmi Darmstadt that I used to do those calculations—both of which I still use.