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 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.
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'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.
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.
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...
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.
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." :-)
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
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.
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 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'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
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.
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....
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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!
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!
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 TH-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.
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 still have my slide-rules from vocational High School here in San Francisco in the 60's. I finally got a vintage super quality Pickett bamboo unit. I like Fran.
A few years ago I gave my son the Pickett 1010 I used when I was in the Marine Corps over half a century ago. Your video brought back memories from long ago. I can say that all of my favorite memories are of the past.😱😁
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
Great video.. A few comments : 1. Vernier Callipers have no logarithmic scales and therefore don't qualify as slide rules. 2. Wernher von Braun used a Nestler 37 "Electro". Sergei Korolev used a Nestler 23R "Rietz".
I beg to differ on #1, most common Vernier calipers have a frame & a slide, and can convert mm to inches with accuracy to 0.05 mm (1/128") making it an analog computer capable of very limited multiplication or division calculations.
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.
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.
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 found a slide rule at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago. The moment I saw it my jaw dropped, eyes popped open, and inhaled audibly. I was looking for one since forever and now I have it and it only cost me $3.35 (Beaver bucks, as is the tradition here in Soviet Canuckistan).
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!
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 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 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...
Thanks for the demo. And thanks for this little touch : checking SR results with a classic TI-30 ; precisely the first scientific calculator model cheap enough to kill the SR.
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 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 really enjoyed this video . The slide rule was invented by my ancestor William Oughtred in 1622 . He was a fellow at Cambridge University and taught Christopher Wren mathematics amongst other achievements . Having said that I still don't know how to use one !
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!
I was in the last cadre of high school students in Australia (circa 1975) who were taught the slide rule in Mathematics class...Faber Castell studio, I recall. Learning to fly, I used a Jeppersen Computer, circular slide rule for navigation and performance calculations. Now I have a collection of some 40 slide rules, which I use whenever opportunity arises. I joy in my "new-in-box" FC 2/83 N and its little brother 62/83 N Novo Duplex (doncha love the names of these beautiful instruments), as well as a selection of Pickets, KE, Fish, etc. Some years ago, my teacher-librarian wife arranged for me to teach classes to Primary School students in her school, for which I equipped a set of Aristo student slide rules and made up some teaching plans (on Powerpoint, forgive me!). Now I make it a point when traveling to keep in my pocket a tiny 5" Sun Hemmi which I can whip out when a calculation is needed; smart phone, nah! Paired with my favorite fountain pen, I am able to embarrass my adult children with Grandpa's mathematical sophistication. Wonderful video series, Fran.
I was taught how to use a slide rule in Secondary School in the early 1950's. We could use them in class and at home, but not during examinations! I still have both of mine, a Sun-Hemmi 149A (6") and a Sun-Hemmi 190 (12"). I used them for many years until electronic calculators came along. I went through several of those, ending up with an HP 42S. My grandchildren think that the slide rule is magic - they never learned about logarithms and trig functions.
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 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.
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.
When I was in the Air Force in 1985, during my training as a imagery interpreter specialist (imagery intelligence stuff), we did our photogrammetry calculations using a slide rule. In fact, we had a separate class to teach us how to do the same calculations on a pocket calculator. Their logic was, "in the field, if your calculator battery dies, you'd be out of luck if you don't know 'slip stick'." I still have mine, along with the accompanying log tables. Good times!
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.
My slide rule at college was a Casio FX82. That was back in 1982/3. I still have it and it still works. I've never used a slide rule but my dad was using them until his sight packed up. They will probably come to me one day, and I will have to learn how to use them just out of curiosity.
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.
The true secret of the slide rule is scientific notation. Converting everything to a number between one and ten, with an exponent. Along with the simple number, exponents are added or subtracted. Very large or very small numbers are easily dealt with. Perfect for electronics.
Dread Naught : absolutely! When I was reading Mech Eng at university in the late 60s (!), the slide rule could happily give perfectly adequate answers to long calculations by using the cursor and end flipping it as necessary. The only thing left was to locate the decimal point but that helped you use basic arithmetic. And slide rules where SO elegant ....
Von Braun used a Nestler 23R, as did Einstein. I have one. They are scarce. The most useful would be the Pickett N4. Contrary to your claims, slide rules were used for high precision calculations. There were people called "computers" who used long 4-6 FEET long slide rules to perform calculations. Advanced slide rules can do multiplication, division, logarithms, natural logs, exponents, square roots, cube roots, tangents, sines, cosines, reciprocals, inverse functions, and more. I have a nice collection. I also used a Concise circular slide rule in high school because I could not afford those newfangled "electronic slide rules" at the time. Also, Deitzgen is pronounced "DIGHTSgen", not DEETSgen. Until a few years ago, I used a Keuffel and Esser 4181 to do quick hole size conversions for residual stress measurements (blind hole method).
We were the last class to use slide rules at my electronics school. I still keep one around. My old bamboo Post disappeared so I've got a Pickett. Great for electronics.
I had one of those deals in High School back in the 60's. Never did much but basic math on it but I knew it was smarter then I. I lost it long ago, ,however I watched an old Periscope video on them and had that urge to have one in my grubby 71 year old fingers. So off to Ebay I went, found the best looking for around 10 bucks and ordered it. It came in this mornings mail, rather quick considering it came from half way across the USA From California to South Dakota. Been playing with it this morning and it is all coming back to me. The device is the same brand as yours however the scales are different as to which side of the rule they exist on. This is exactly like the old 1953 film example so it was very easy to go along with the video to have the works all come back to me. Now I don't do much where I need one of these but at my age I keep trying to lean new things or renew old knowledge. I have this idea I guess that in order to keep a healthy mind one must use it by continuing to learn, add information to the old grey database as it were. Thanks for the added lesson you went further then the periscope video. Thanks for the brain boost!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Fran, I still have my dad’s college slide rule; also a Dietzgen in a belt holster. I used it during my first year at the University of Cincinnati. The next year I was required to purchase my first calculator: a TI with the red LED’s and molded magnifying lenses. It was EXPENSIVE at the time. Now I can get a better one at Dollar Tree for 99 cents.
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.
I went to school in the 90s and I always had calculators at my disposal. For fun I decided to use an old HP engineering calculator with reverse polish notation for school and I also found someone to teach me the slide rule. Much more fun than the dumb calculators where you don’t even need to now the order of operations.
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 met a design engineer who swore by his slide rule. He could see which of his stock components was the nearest size to the output of the slide rule without having to work it out and made selecting the correct size unit much quicker.
I had two slide rules given to me by a college girl friend of my Dad's back in the 70s. My house burned down in 2019 and sometimes I remember that I had them and miss them and want to get another and learn how to use it for my simple calculations and drawings. I thought, I could make one if I knew how to reduce the scale of the linear numbers, like the fret board on a guitar. Then it occurred to me that I could bend it around and make a bracelet for every day wear and today's teachers would not know what it was or what it did nor how to use it. Cheat codes... Thanks for the tutorial, I hope to find one at an old book shop or antique store or even on line.
My dad showed me, how to use a slide rule in the 1970s before we had calculators. Ok, he also had an electronic calculator with nixie tubes, which was fascinating. I think, it could add, subtract, multiply, but it could not divide. In the 1980s, I have made myself a music slide rule for music theory. My teacher was completely fascinated about it, back then. When my son learned some music theory, I have built him a music slide rule, too. His teacher was fascinated, too :-) A year ago, I have made a circular music slide rule, which is even more handy :-) Oh... before the end of your video, I have bought a slide rule from ebay. I am such a hoarder :-))))
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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 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.
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'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.
"I'd thank my dad, if he were still around."
my feels: 😭♥️
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.
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...
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.
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." :-)
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
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.
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 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'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
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.
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. :-/
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.
That reminded me I have to "D scale" my coffee machine.
Someone once told me they use "D Scale" on fishing boats, too.
It’s a sine of the times
Did you C scale before D scale?
I use a Castell 67/87 RB with an Addiator, a great tool to have near by
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Still have mine from college back in the early 70's; a Pickett 880.
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.
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 :-)
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!
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!
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 TH-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.
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!
The Franlab jam at the end is badass
I still have my Pickett N1010SL-ES Super Power Trig slide rule from my college days.
I still have my slide-rules from vocational High School here in San Francisco in the 60's. I finally got a vintage super quality Pickett bamboo unit. I like Fran.
A few years ago I gave my son the Pickett 1010 I used when I was in the Marine Corps over half a century ago. Your video brought back memories from long ago. I can say that all of my favorite memories are of the past.😱😁
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
Great video..
A few comments :
1. Vernier Callipers have no logarithmic scales and therefore don't qualify as slide rules.
2. Wernher von Braun used a Nestler 37 "Electro".
Sergei Korolev used a Nestler 23R "Rietz".
I beg to differ on #1, most common Vernier calipers have a frame & a slide, and can convert mm to inches with accuracy to 0.05 mm (1/128") making it an analog computer capable of very limited multiplication or division calculations.
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.
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.
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 found a slide rule at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago. The moment I saw it my jaw dropped, eyes popped open, and inhaled audibly. I was looking for one since forever and now I have it and it only cost me $3.35 (Beaver bucks, as is the tradition here in Soviet Canuckistan).
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!
great memories. I wonder how many of us inherited slide rules from our Dads. thank you for the video... again
I paused this video and grabbed my slide rule to follow along with the video. Your collection of purposeful rules was really interesting.
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
Love specialised slide rules.
Still use a cutting speed/feed/surface speed/rpm slide rule in the machineshop.
And why not.
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 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...
Thanks for the demo. And thanks for this little touch : checking SR results with a classic TI-30 ; precisely the first scientific calculator model cheap enough to kill the SR.
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 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 really enjoyed this video . The slide rule was invented by my ancestor William Oughtred in 1622 . He was a fellow at Cambridge University and taught Christopher Wren mathematics amongst other achievements . Having said that I still don't know how to use one !
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!
I was in the last cadre of high school students in Australia (circa 1975) who were taught the slide rule in Mathematics class...Faber Castell studio, I recall. Learning to fly, I used a Jeppersen Computer, circular slide rule for navigation and performance calculations. Now I have a collection of some 40 slide rules, which I use whenever opportunity arises. I joy in my "new-in-box" FC 2/83 N and its little brother 62/83 N Novo Duplex (doncha love the names of these beautiful instruments), as well as a selection of Pickets, KE, Fish, etc. Some years ago, my teacher-librarian wife arranged for me to teach classes to Primary School students in her school, for which I equipped a set of Aristo student slide rules and made up some teaching plans (on Powerpoint, forgive me!). Now I make it a point when traveling to keep in my pocket a tiny 5" Sun Hemmi which I can whip out when a calculation is needed; smart phone, nah! Paired with my favorite fountain pen, I am able to embarrass my adult children with Grandpa's mathematical sophistication. Wonderful video series, Fran.
I was taught how to use a slide rule in Secondary School in the early 1950's. We could use them in class and at home, but not during examinations! I still have both of mine, a Sun-Hemmi 149A (6") and a Sun-Hemmi 190 (12"). I used them for many years until electronic calculators came along. I went through several of those, ending up with an HP 42S. My grandchildren think that the slide rule is magic - they never learned about logarithms and trig functions.
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 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.
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.
When I was in the Air Force in 1985, during my training as a imagery interpreter specialist (imagery intelligence stuff), we did our photogrammetry calculations using a slide rule. In fact, we had a separate class to teach us how to do the same calculations on a pocket calculator. Their logic was, "in the field, if your calculator battery dies, you'd be out of luck if you don't know 'slip stick'." I still have mine, along with the accompanying log tables. Good times!
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.
My slide rule at college was a Casio FX82. That was back in 1982/3. I still have it and it still works. I've never used a slide rule but my dad was using them until his sight packed up. They will probably come to me one day, and I will have to learn how to use them just out of curiosity.
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.
The true secret of the slide rule is scientific notation. Converting everything to a number between one and ten, with an exponent. Along with the simple number, exponents are added or subtracted. Very large or very small numbers are easily dealt with. Perfect for electronics.
And perfect for chemistry too.
The cursor comes into it's own when you do a string of calculations one after the other.
Dread Naught : absolutely! When I was reading Mech Eng at university in the late 60s (!), the slide rule could happily give perfectly adequate answers to long calculations by using the cursor and end flipping it as necessary. The only thing left was to locate the decimal point but that helped you use basic arithmetic. And slide rules where SO elegant ....
Von Braun used a Nestler 23R, as did Einstein. I have one. They are scarce. The most useful would be the Pickett N4. Contrary to your claims, slide rules were used for high precision calculations. There were people called "computers" who used long 4-6 FEET long slide rules to perform calculations. Advanced slide rules can do multiplication, division, logarithms, natural logs, exponents, square roots, cube roots, tangents, sines, cosines, reciprocals, inverse functions, and more. I have a nice collection. I also used a Concise circular slide rule in high school because I could not afford those newfangled "electronic slide rules" at the time. Also, Deitzgen is pronounced "DIGHTSgen", not DEETSgen. Until a few years ago, I used a Keuffel and Esser 4181 to do quick hole size conversions for residual stress measurements (blind hole method).
We were the last class to use slide rules at my electronics school. I still keep one around. My old bamboo Post disappeared so I've got a Pickett. Great for electronics.
I had one of those deals in High School back in the 60's. Never did much but basic math on it but I knew it was smarter then I. I lost it long ago, ,however I watched an old Periscope video on them and had that urge to have one in my grubby 71 year old fingers. So off to Ebay I went, found the best looking for around 10 bucks and ordered it. It came in this mornings mail, rather quick considering it came from half way across the USA From California to South Dakota. Been playing with it this morning and it is all coming back to me. The device is the same brand as yours however the scales are different as to which side of the rule they exist on. This is exactly like the old 1953 film example so it was very easy to go along with the video to have the works all come back to me. Now I don't do much where I need one of these but at my age I keep trying to lean new things or renew old knowledge. I have this idea I guess that in order to keep a healthy mind one must use it by continuing to learn, add information to the old grey database as it were. Thanks for the added lesson you went further then the periscope video. Thanks for the brain boost!
It is truly a wonderful World with bright people like you
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!
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.
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.
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
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!
Glad to see someone besides me still can use a slide rule. Got my K&E in 1963. Still haven't changed the battery ;-)
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.
Thanks for this much-needed refresher on these things. I have my Dad's too.
Got my dad's too. Thanks dad.
Fran, I still have my dad’s college slide rule; also a Dietzgen in a belt holster. I used it during my first year at the University of Cincinnati. The next year I was required to purchase my first calculator: a TI with the red LED’s and molded magnifying lenses. It was EXPENSIVE at the time. Now I can get a better one at Dollar Tree for 99 cents.
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!
Foresters use them to calculate timber volumes as electronic devices don't work well in damp, dripping forests.
I went to school in the 90s and I always had calculators at my disposal. For fun I decided to use an old HP engineering calculator with reverse polish notation for school and I also found someone to teach me the slide rule. Much more fun than the dumb calculators where you don’t even need to now the order of operations.
know :-)
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 met a design engineer who swore by his slide rule. He could see which of his stock components was the nearest size to the output of the slide rule without having to work it out and made selecting the correct size unit much quicker.
I had two slide rules given to me by a college girl friend of my Dad's back in the 70s. My house burned down in 2019 and sometimes I remember that I had them and miss them and want to get another and learn how to use it for my simple calculations and drawings. I thought, I could make one if I knew how to reduce the scale of the linear numbers, like the fret board on a guitar. Then it occurred to me that I could bend it around and make a bracelet for every day wear and today's teachers would not know what it was or what it did nor how to use it. Cheat codes... Thanks for the tutorial, I hope to find one at an old book shop or antique store or even on line.
My dad showed me, how to use a slide rule in the 1970s before we had calculators. Ok, he also had an electronic calculator with nixie tubes, which was fascinating. I think, it could add, subtract, multiply, but it could not divide. In the 1980s, I have made myself a music slide rule for music theory. My teacher was completely fascinated about it, back then. When my son learned some music theory, I have built him a music slide rule, too. His teacher was fascinated, too :-) A year ago, I have made a circular music slide rule, which is even more handy :-) Oh... before the end of your video, I have bought a slide rule from ebay. I am such a hoarder :-))))