When I was working in a survey and engineering department for a municipality I had to spend a lot of time explaining to my people that in many field measurements getting more than two decimal places was unrealistic in construction layout situations even though a calculator or data collector would give a result to three or more decimal places which the operator would want to right down in the field book.
The advantage of a slide rule, I would argue, is in it emphasising proportions. It also is set up perfectly to *explain* the basic formulae you find in tables books for trigs, logs etc. as they really go together hand in glove. The argument from physics (e.g. buckingham pi thm) is you always need to ultimately calculate quantities in dimensionless terms of which the proportional nature of the rule always does by design. (PS: I don't know if there is a revival in rpn calculators in schools now that you can get say the hp35 on a phone app, i.e. looks much simpler than later complicated developments)
As several others have pointed out, the slide rule forces you to keep track of the decimal place and precision in your head; to think about whether your result makes sense in context. A calculator or spreadsheet simply takes your inputs and cranks out an answer that you have to take on faith as correct. You don't ever really get a feel for it because the calculator is doing all the work. Taking a slide rule and applying it to practical problems is not only rewarding, but actually fun. Play KSP, turn off the DV function, and figure it out using a slide rule. I guarantee that within a week you will not only enjoy the game more, but you will understand orbital mechanics and the rocket equation better than 90% of the people who work at NASA.
I tried to solve math problem with slide rule. It was quite simple problem and actually interesting puzzle meant for 7th class of elementary school, which included fractions, substitutions and quadratic equation. And that's the problem. With two digit precision in input, i need to solve sqrt(2.9^2+4*13.5)=sqrt(8.41+54)=sqrt(62.41). Out of sudden I could only guess that sqrt(62.5) is roughly 7.9. Well. Depends. On small 5inch ruler setting 62.4 on x^2 is a guess. On bigger ruler it's twice better. On e^x it's worse. Best is to find 0.624^2 on e^0.1x scale, but not every ruler has it. So I guess it does not solve every problem, because accuracy is somewhat needed as it's easily lost in multiplications. Fun fact is that on elementary school or middle education, teachers want exact and nice results. On university at first semester of measurements, you take note that voltmeter has 1% accuracy and amp-meter has 5%. Then you get table with result such as 45.6789W. Teacher looks at it and let's you to rewrite it, cause out of sudden 45.7+/- 6% is more correct. And, surprisingly, even something like 6-7 decimal digits accuracy of 32bit floating points numbers on computer could be a pain, especially when solving system of equations using naive gauss-elimination method, averaging ten milions of numbers. On the other hand sliding rule is awesome for doing repeated multiplications really fast.
In public school during the 1960's, I was quite the expert with a Sliderule! In those days there was a huge six foot long teaching Sliderule on a stand at the front of every classroom used to teach math! There were 6 inch long "pocket" rules. Twenty inch long desk or briefcase rules. And of course nearly every serious math/science student owned his/her own 10 inch rule. Rules didn't disappear from students "kit" until about 1976. The years that Texas Instruments introduced their inexpensive ($25.) Ti-30 "Sliderule" calculator!
I got a slide rule back in high school when only "egg heads" and "nerds" had such things. Sadly I never mastered it and have always regretted it. Dug it out of a box and am taking another run at learning it's mysteries. Thanks for your videos highlighting the values of learning the slide rule.
Full discosure...was a high school student in the late 1970s-early 1980s, and engineering student in the mid 1980s. And I have practiced as an engineer since then. So I have worn out my share of TI-30 calculators (I have two right now...one for work, and one for home). I also learned to fly, so became acquainted with using an E6-B calculator (part wind-drift calculator, one part circular slide rule for calculating fuel burn, time-distance, etc.) While slide rules scratch a nostalgic itch, I don't believe that mandating students use slide rules instead of calculators has any real benefit. To the extent that slide rules are no longer even manufactured in any meaningful quantity (and slide rules are something of a precision instrument), a slide rule mandate probably does nothing but create a captive market for a $100+ slide rule (just as the TI-84 mandate has inflated the cost of graphing calculators). STEM teachers are further ahead teaching students scientific notation, and how to use log and trig tables.
@@MikeB3542 Don't wanna go into much detail about the educational value of the slide rule, but your argument breaks already down with your cost argument. There is a German company selling slide rules for teaching purposes for 7.50 Euro. That's a rather small "investment" for the benefit on getting some hands-on-experience with logarithms...
I like to do things as analog as I can I do my wood working with chisels and hand saw that I sharpen bye hand .I run a manual machine shop for fun .doing things this way gives you skills that apply to other things. In my case manual dexterity. The slide rule would do this for your mind. One can never really have to mini skills
Using a slide rule for complex calculations requires learning to approximate the result in order to find the correct power of ten. It teaches the user to be able to calculate in approximate terms without the aid of any tools but their mind. This is a very useful skill.
in reality that is an important skill for engineers. Just because you can design to 4+ decimal places, does not mean that you should or can manufacture it. Higher precision costs more, and wears out faster. It also results in more rejects and waste. Lower tolerance engineering design results in lower costs, less waste, and more durable and long lasting designs that are easier to maintain and repair. Often times "back of the napkin" calculations are all that is required in engineering, being close enough is often good enough. Just round values such that you give a buffer to account for worst case scenarios, and add in safety factors.
The issue with slide rulers was the order of magnitude, one could lose track of the decimal point. The issue with electronic calculators is the exaggerated "precision" and many people write out all the decimal places without any concern for the implicit precision of the inputs. On balance, the slide ruler is more educational as you have to track the stages of the calculation and use your brain, e.g. multiplying by a reciprocal instead of trying to divide and going off the scale.
When you learn to use a slide rule ,even a basic model like the Post 1447 ,you actually learm better about the principles of mathematics I think. Mind you ,I am 70 y.o. what do I know?
I was born in '69 and I don't remember using a calculator very much in grade school or middle school (at least not inside the school classroom, but I had a TI-1250 at home for my homework problems). By the time I was in H.S. in the mid 80's I do remember using a calculator in the classroom.
I got into slide rules entirely by chance. I'd used one briefly and not terribly successfully at school. As an adult, not a lot of years ago, I came across some slide rules on a car boot sale table and bought them. I tinkered with one; an ancient K&E from the 1930s, then I lost them all in a burglary. I was mightily brassed off that some bozo should steal my slide rules, when he perhaps wouldn't even have a clue as to what they were, so I made a resolution not to be defeated; to get another one and actually learn to use it. EBay came to the rescue. I now have several, and use them for most of my calculations. Fun, and mathematically illuminating, especially given that I need pencil and paper, a calculator or a slide rule to make up for my awful mental maths!
I definitely think schools should at least have a club for slide rule, logarithms tables, and trig. I want to bring those in Mexico, like academic rally, where teams could go solving problems with Slide rules and log tables and accumulatings points. I don't know if a larger application would be posible, but at least a seminar would do some good to those shinny new brains.
Sounds like a great idea, having competitions using slide rules. You could also add another analog calculator called the "Magic Brain Calculator" as a part of the competition. I made a little video showing a basic example of multiplication using the Magic Brain Calculator and how much faster even an early electronic calculator from the 1970's like the TI-1250 does the calculation, check it out if you have time : th-cam.com/video/IPIzQ1H6rTY/w-d-xo.html
8:17 "Will I ever be able to understand all those functions and what they do?" That may be a needlessly intimidating question. Students need to understand the functions they are expected to use in their class. When looking at the available functions in Excel, it is not important to me whether I will "ever be able to understand *_all_* those functions and what they do." I may or may not ever have a need to become familiar with one of the functions I don't already know how to use. Before today, I never heard of Excel's DOLLARFR function. Now that I see what it does, I don't feel bad that I didn't know about it before.
I cleaned out a closet at work and found a Pickett Cleveland Electronics School 10” rule, but after watching some of Prof Herning’s videos, I bid and won a very good condition Pickett N-3 ES for about $50 delivered to my mailbox. The top stock was a little out of register, but all it took was a couple of light taps on the stock for everything to line up, and then tightened two screws on the end brackets. For $8.00 I got a 500 page collection of slide rule manuals off of Amazon from the Slide Rule Museum that I can read on the Kindle app on my iPad. A fine blend of new and old school when I solve trig problems with Khan Academy.
After using the sliderule for a while and understand the principle, I have a better understanding of numbers and they relations. This understandig I have never get from school with calculators. So I would like to see that the kids nowadays starts the math with the sliderule before they use a calculator.
I was right at the cusp. My older sister (6 years older) did all of her high school math on a slide rule, and I did all of mine on a calculator. I was grateful back then. But now here I am learning slide rules, and buying 50+ year old tech on eBay. What amazing machines! Still, I don't think we should make slide rules mandatory learning--even for engineers. I remember my instrumentation class in college (Mech Eng) and learning not just significant figures for a single calculation, but propagating the errors and precision all the way through all of the calculations and measurements we obtained in the corresponding lab. What an eye opener on our final project when the error analysis showed greater than +/-100% possible error!!! Very valuable class that went much further than just a slide rule for making one appreciate the importance of getting precise measurements. And if you can measure more than 3-4 significant digits, you can use them on your calculator, rather than losing them to a slide rule.
Just picked up a K+E 4055 (K&E Favorite, Trade Mark), serial number 731854, probably late 1930s. Very similar but no CI scale. It has Sin, Tan & Log scales on the back plus conversion tables along with slide rule settings. Looks like mahogany, it’s beautiful. $40. They had another one, different brand but I passed on it. Also scored a manual Monroe calculator at a thrift store for $8, not expecting that one, just sheer luck. Came around a corner and holy heck will you look at that.
Of course any of the scales on the reverse can be read using the rear windows, but you have to change the way you do the setting in order to solve a triangle. Looking back I'm not sure why I didn't use the T scale. When flipped, S and T on this slide rule can be used in the same way you use S and T and fancier duplex slide rules like the Versalog or 4081. Using the S scale like this you can, for example, solve a triangle using the law of sines, only setting the slide once and without reading the value of either sine function.
Have the 4041 and 4058W great vid Not sure how to use the back yet, though The person said their dad bought the 4041 new in the 40's But, looking at what I found it looks to be olderDid they make the 4041 after the N came out in 1925?
I'm old, bald, fat and on my 3rd retirement - but IMHO a section of time on how to use a Log-Log slide rule would give students insights to trig and logs and relationships to each other and between logs and non-log numbers, they are very unlikely to ever get that insight using a calculator. That kind of insight is useful and gives a "leg up" in chemistry, physics, electronics, calculus, and other classes and disciplines.
I think that schools should return to slide rules, it makes you think about what you are doing. I am currently having issues with my daughter's maths teacher. Her notes are lists of answers for work she did online along with glued in worksheets. There are no worked through examples. She is needing to be reminded how to do things that should be second nature. I told him a year ago that she was bored and he was losing her. She comes home with doodles on her hands and books because he lost her. Her previous teacher had her doing great working 3 to 4 years ahead. I was raised on tables and then a slide rule. Two years before I left school a new exam was introduced that had a mandatory calculator paper. Only one person had a calculator and it was a Sinclair. We had to get a Casio M-1, which cost nearly a week's wage for my father. It ate through batteries as well. A year after I left school I had to buy a scientific calculator for college, Casio fx~510 which I still have and it works but not as well as my HP Prime or Matlab/Simulink.
yes, teaching the difference between theoretical values/calculations, and real measurements and the true limitations of accuracy and accounting for error.
I get enough of a ribbing by showing up at work with my HP RPN calculator, but at least I can show it is demonstrably superior to everyone else's stupid algebraic device. Now imagine showing up with a slide rule!!! There is definitely something to be said for analog devices showing you when you are chasing after fairy-tale numbers and meaningless precision. I am old enough to remember when people switched from analog to digital electronic multimeters. The analog meters, because the galvanometer itself required a small amount of power to be driven, gave an immediate look and feel, in addition to the numeric value to be read off a scale. The new digital meters give multiple decimal places of "precision", but if you are not careful these could be multiple places of fiction. I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen technicians record "fake" voltages, when they are recording only radio waves captured through the stray reactance in a circuit, making an antenna. An analog meter would have shown the correct value - 0 - because of the meter's own input impedance.
Hahaha, you know what I mean. Actually I cover a method for addition using the trigonometric scales in this video: th-cam.com/video/2rQ9WDbD2qk/w-d-xo.html. That could actually be used on this slide rule. Do you mean that or something else like the L scale?
Simeon Georgiev Well it requires adding 1. Definitely all addition tricks on the slide rule are "hacks" in the sense that slide rules are not designed for adding.
I agree with you that addition and subtraction aren't something one will do with slide rule, but it's good to know that type of "hacks", that impressed me when I first saw it was possible to add with slide rule
with, or without, the slide rule in the picture, logarithms are still useful. this is a failure of math to teach them sooner, to teach them properly. Logs are part of the triangle of power, and are needed to solve exponentials. They have been used for hundreds of years and are as equally important and useful as Sine or Cosine can be. Just depends upon what you are doing. Students would understand logs if they were introduced to them at a younger age and had more years practice using them.
Let the dead rest. I'm part of the last group in high school that learned and bought a slide rule (still have it; it is a collecter's item). Three digits was hell for me: more like 2.5 digits. Basically I use HP calculators: Fix 4 is the defeult (4 digits after the period/comma). HPs are the calculators of choice by engineers and scientists: they know about accuracy.
I'm a Mechanical Engineer. Never learned how to use a slide rule until just recently (self-learning it). Learning on a slide rule can be important and useful, not in that everyone needs to Rely upon them, but in the sense that when Learning math, using the slide rule will improve your math skills, understanding, and intuition. I teach middle school, high school, and college students math all the time, at all different levels. I have learned a lot about what works in teaching math by doing it, and had many years to observe the degradation of math skills, as well as figuring out why that is and what is causing it, as well as how to fix it (I have demonstrated my ideas work many times in real world practice and demonstration, and continue to refine my ideas based upon how well they work or not). Another person noted, "Using a slide rule for complex calculations requires learning to approximate the result in order to find the correct power of ten. It teaches the user to be able to calculate in approximate terms without the aid of any tools but their mind. This is a very useful skill." In reality the above is an important skill for engineers. Just because you can design to 4+ decimal places, does not mean that you should or can manufacture it. Higher precision costs more, and wears out faster. It also results in more rejects and waste. Lower tolerance engineering design results in lower costs, less waste, and more durable and long lasting designs that are easier to maintain and repair. Also, more intuition with math enables engineers to work faster and more efficiently. The younger engineers are coming into the job lacking practical skills in calculus, algebra, triangle trig, GD&T, etc. and we're having to teach them from scratch. The further they are from the reality of math by relying upon software tools and graphing calculators and calculators that solve calculus problems for them, the less they can do as an engineer on the job.
HP calculators are certainly nice (I had a 15-C in college and being able to do RPN felt like a superpower). But but they were/are expensive, so have been using TI-30 variants for work. They get the job done (they indeed have a fixed precision setting), and for $10-15, it's no great loss if they get messed up or "walk away" at a jobsite. I have a bunch.
Using an electronic calculator provides more exact results but teaches less about the calculation done than the slide rule. School is supposed to be about teaching...
When I was working in a survey and engineering department for a municipality I had to
spend a lot of time explaining to my people that in many field measurements getting more than two decimal places was unrealistic in construction layout situations even though a calculator or data collector would give a result to three or more decimal places which the operator would want to right down in the field book.
The advantage of a slide rule, I would argue, is in it emphasising proportions. It also is set up perfectly to *explain* the basic formulae you find in tables books for trigs, logs etc. as they really go together hand in glove. The argument from physics (e.g. buckingham pi thm) is you always need to ultimately calculate quantities in dimensionless terms of which the proportional nature of the rule always does by design. (PS: I don't know if there is a revival in rpn calculators in schools now that you can get say the hp35 on a phone app, i.e. looks much simpler than later complicated developments)
As several others have pointed out, the slide rule forces you to keep track of the decimal place and precision in your head; to think about whether your result makes sense in context. A calculator or spreadsheet simply takes your inputs and cranks out an answer that you have to take on faith as correct. You don't ever really get a feel for it because the calculator is doing all the work.
Taking a slide rule and applying it to practical problems is not only rewarding, but actually fun. Play KSP, turn off the DV function, and figure it out using a slide rule. I guarantee that within a week you will not only enjoy the game more, but you will understand orbital mechanics and the rocket equation better than 90% of the people who work at NASA.
Playing KSP with a slide rule is one of the most hardcore engineer flexes I can imagine. Good grief
I tried to solve math problem with slide rule. It was quite simple problem and actually interesting puzzle meant for 7th class of elementary school, which included fractions, substitutions and quadratic equation. And that's the problem. With two digit precision in input, i need to solve sqrt(2.9^2+4*13.5)=sqrt(8.41+54)=sqrt(62.41). Out of sudden I could only guess that sqrt(62.5) is roughly 7.9. Well. Depends. On small 5inch ruler setting 62.4 on x^2 is a guess. On bigger ruler it's twice better. On e^x it's worse. Best is to find 0.624^2 on e^0.1x scale, but not every ruler has it.
So I guess it does not solve every problem, because accuracy is somewhat needed as it's easily lost in multiplications. Fun fact is that on elementary school or middle education, teachers want exact and nice results. On university at first semester of measurements, you take note that voltmeter has 1% accuracy and amp-meter has 5%. Then you get table with result such as 45.6789W. Teacher looks at it and let's you to rewrite it, cause out of sudden 45.7+/- 6% is more correct.
And, surprisingly, even something like 6-7 decimal digits accuracy of 32bit floating points numbers on computer could be a pain, especially when solving system of equations using naive gauss-elimination method, averaging ten milions of numbers.
On the other hand sliding rule is awesome for doing repeated multiplications really fast.
In public school during the 1960's, I was quite the expert with a Sliderule! In those days there was a huge six foot long teaching Sliderule on a stand at the front of every classroom used to teach math!
There were 6 inch long "pocket" rules. Twenty inch long desk or briefcase rules. And of course nearly every serious math/science student owned his/her own 10 inch rule.
Rules didn't disappear from students "kit" until about 1976. The years that Texas Instruments introduced their inexpensive ($25.) Ti-30 "Sliderule" calculator!
I got a slide rule back in high school when only "egg heads" and "nerds" had such things. Sadly I never mastered it and have always regretted it. Dug it out of a box and am taking another run at learning it's mysteries. Thanks for your videos highlighting the values of learning the slide rule.
YES! Schools should use slide rules! Learning is more important than precision.
Not if the goal is to keep people stupid heh
@@3nertia The governments' goal is to produce workers & give themselves more raises... Sick!
Full discosure...was a high school student in the late 1970s-early 1980s, and engineering student in the mid 1980s. And I have practiced as an engineer since then.
So I have worn out my share of TI-30 calculators (I have two right now...one for work, and one for home).
I also learned to fly, so became acquainted with using an E6-B calculator (part wind-drift calculator, one part circular slide rule for calculating fuel burn, time-distance, etc.)
While slide rules scratch a nostalgic itch, I don't believe that mandating students use slide rules instead of calculators has any real benefit.
To the extent that slide rules are no longer even manufactured in any meaningful quantity (and slide rules are something of a precision instrument), a slide rule mandate probably does nothing but create a captive market for a $100+ slide rule (just as the TI-84 mandate has inflated the cost of graphing calculators).
STEM teachers are further ahead teaching students scientific notation, and how to use log and trig tables.
@@MikeB3542 Don't wanna go into much detail about the educational value of the slide rule, but your argument breaks already down with your cost argument.
There is a German company selling slide rules for teaching purposes for 7.50 Euro.
That's a rather small "investment" for the benefit on getting some hands-on-experience with logarithms...
I like to do things as analog as I can I do my wood working with chisels and hand saw that I sharpen bye hand .I run a manual machine shop for fun .doing things this way gives you skills that apply to other things. In my case manual dexterity. The slide rule would do this for your mind. One can never really have to mini skills
Using a slide rule for complex calculations requires learning to approximate the result in order to find the correct power of ten. It teaches the user to be able to calculate in approximate terms without the aid of any tools but their mind. This is a very useful skill.
in reality that is an important skill for engineers. Just because you can design to 4+ decimal places, does not mean that you should or can manufacture it. Higher precision costs more, and wears out faster. It also results in more rejects and waste. Lower tolerance engineering design results in lower costs, less waste, and more durable and long lasting designs that are easier to maintain and repair.
Often times "back of the napkin" calculations are all that is required in engineering, being close enough is often good enough. Just round values such that you give a buffer to account for worst case scenarios, and add in safety factors.
The issue with slide rulers was the order of magnitude, one could lose track of the decimal point. The issue with electronic calculators is the exaggerated "precision" and many people write out all the decimal places without any concern for the implicit precision of the inputs. On balance, the slide ruler is more educational as you have to track the stages of the calculation and use your brain, e.g. multiplying by a reciprocal instead of trying to divide and going off the scale.
When you learn to use a slide rule ,even a basic model like the Post 1447 ,you actually learm better about the principles of mathematics I think. Mind you ,I am 70 y.o. what do I know?
The entire age spectrum can learn anything if the teacher and student are both working hard to learn/teach
I don't recall using a slide rule or a calculator in middle school or high school. We were in the "new math" curriculum, and I was born in '61.
you missed it all by 10 years
I was born in '69 and I don't remember using a calculator very much in grade school or middle school (at least not inside the school classroom, but I had a TI-1250 at home for my homework problems). By the time I was in H.S. in the mid 80's I do remember using a calculator in the classroom.
I got into slide rules entirely by chance. I'd used one briefly and not terribly successfully at school. As an adult, not a lot of years ago, I came across some slide rules on a car boot sale table and bought them. I tinkered with one; an ancient K&E from the 1930s, then I lost them all in a burglary. I was mightily brassed off that some bozo should steal my slide rules, when he perhaps wouldn't even have a clue as to what they were, so I made a resolution not to be defeated; to get another one and actually learn to use it. EBay came to the rescue. I now have several, and use them for most of my calculations. Fun, and mathematically illuminating, especially given that I need pencil and paper, a calculator or a slide rule to make up for my awful mental maths!
I definitely think schools should at least have a club for slide rule, logarithms tables, and trig. I want to bring those in Mexico, like academic rally, where teams could go solving problems with Slide rules and log tables and accumulatings points. I don't know if a larger application would be posible, but at least a seminar would do some good to those shinny new brains.
Sounds like a great idea, having competitions using slide rules.
You could also add another analog calculator called the "Magic Brain Calculator" as a part of the competition. I made a little video showing a basic example of multiplication using the Magic Brain Calculator and how much faster even an early electronic calculator from the 1970's like the TI-1250 does the calculation, check it out if you have time : th-cam.com/video/IPIzQ1H6rTY/w-d-xo.html
I call the slide rule and abacus "emp-proof calculators" lol
8:17 "Will I ever be able to understand all those functions and what they do?" That may be a needlessly intimidating question. Students need to understand the functions they are expected to use in their class.
When looking at the available functions in Excel, it is not important to me whether I will "ever be able to understand *_all_* those functions and what they do." I may or may not ever have a need to become familiar with one of the functions I don't already know how to use.
Before today, I never heard of Excel's DOLLARFR function. Now that I see what it does, I don't feel bad that I didn't know about it before.
I cleaned out a closet at work and found a Pickett Cleveland Electronics School 10” rule, but after watching some of Prof Herning’s videos, I bid and won a very good condition Pickett N-3 ES for about $50 delivered to my mailbox. The top stock was a little out of register, but all it took was a couple of light taps on the stock for everything to line up, and then tightened two screws on the end brackets. For $8.00 I got a 500 page collection of slide rule manuals off of Amazon from the Slide Rule Museum that I can read on the Kindle app on my iPad. A fine blend of new and old school when I solve trig problems with Khan Academy.
After using the sliderule for a while and understand the principle, I have a better understanding of numbers and they relations. This understandig I have never get from school with calculators. So I would like to see that the kids nowadays starts the math with the sliderule before they use a calculator.
slide rules feel more fun
Yes
Hay, we're lucky if the kids today know their multiplication tables without the use of a pocket calculator.
I’m 10 and got a slide rule from my grandpa and when I tried to teach my parents, neither of them understood multiplication with the slide rule.
@@jangamecuber Good for you! Keep it up.
@@theinspector1023 thanks!
I was right at the cusp. My older sister (6 years older) did all of her high school math on a slide rule, and I did all of mine on a calculator. I was grateful back then. But now here I am learning slide rules, and buying 50+ year old tech on eBay. What amazing machines! Still, I don't think we should make slide rules mandatory learning--even for engineers. I remember my instrumentation class in college (Mech Eng) and learning not just significant figures for a single calculation, but propagating the errors and precision all the way through all of the calculations and measurements we obtained in the corresponding lab. What an eye opener on our final project when the error analysis showed greater than +/-100% possible error!!! Very valuable class that went much further than just a slide rule for making one appreciate the importance of getting precise measurements. And if you can measure more than 3-4 significant digits, you can use them on your calculator, rather than losing them to a slide rule.
Just picked up a K+E 4055 (K&E Favorite, Trade Mark), serial number 731854, probably late 1930s. Very similar but no CI scale. It has Sin, Tan & Log scales on the back plus conversion tables along with slide rule settings. Looks like mahogany, it’s beautiful. $40. They had another one, different brand but I passed on it. Also scored a manual Monroe calculator at a thrift store for $8, not expecting that one, just sheer luck. Came around a corner and holy heck will you look at that.
With this Sun Hemmi slide rule it´s possible to read the sin function without turning the slide.
Of course any of the scales on the reverse can be read using the rear windows, but you have to change the way you do the setting in order to solve a triangle. Looking back I'm not sure why I didn't use the T scale. When flipped, S and T on this slide rule can be used in the same way you use S and T and fancier duplex slide rules like the Versalog or 4081. Using the S scale like this you can, for example, solve a triangle using the law of sines, only setting the slide once and without reading the value of either sine function.
In mid 80-s I was only one in my univercity using slide rule and.. I was faster in my calculations than many of my classmates.
What would have been the original retail price of that Hemmi Sun 42A
Have the 4041 and 4058W great vid Not sure how to use the back yet, though The person said their dad bought the 4041 new in the 40's But, looking at what I found it looks to be olderDid they make the 4041 after the N came out in 1925?
I'm old, bald, fat and on my 3rd retirement - but IMHO a section of time on how to use a Log-Log slide rule would give students insights to trig and logs and relationships to each other and between logs and non-log numbers, they are very unlikely to ever get that insight using a calculator. That kind of insight is useful and gives a "leg up" in chemistry, physics, electronics, calculus, and other classes and disciplines.
I think that schools should return to slide rules, it makes you think about what you are doing. I am currently having issues with my daughter's maths teacher. Her notes are lists of answers for work she did online along with glued in worksheets. There are no worked through examples. She is needing to be reminded how to do things that should be second nature. I told him a year ago that she was bored and he was losing her. She comes home with doodles on her hands and books because he lost her. Her previous teacher had her doing great working 3 to 4 years ahead.
I was raised on tables and then a slide rule. Two years before I left school a new exam was introduced that had a mandatory calculator paper. Only one person had a calculator and it was a Sinclair. We had to get a Casio M-1, which cost nearly a week's wage for my father. It ate through batteries as well.
A year after I left school I had to buy a scientific calculator for college, Casio fx~510 which I still have and it works but not as well as my HP Prime or Matlab/Simulink.
yes, teaching the difference between theoretical values/calculations, and real measurements and the true limitations of accuracy and accounting for error.
I get enough of a ribbing by showing up at work with my HP RPN calculator, but at least I can show it is demonstrably superior to everyone else's stupid algebraic device. Now imagine showing up with a slide rule!!! There is definitely something to be said for analog devices showing you when you are chasing after fairy-tale numbers and meaningless precision. I am old enough to remember when people switched from analog to digital electronic multimeters. The analog meters, because the galvanometer itself required a small amount of power to be driven, gave an immediate look and feel, in addition to the numeric value to be read off a scale. The new digital meters give multiple decimal places of "precision", but if you are not careful these could be multiple places of fiction. I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen technicians record "fake" voltages, when they are recording only radio waves captured through the stray reactance in a circuit, making an antenna. An analog meter would have shown the correct value - 0 - because of the meter's own input impedance.
Addition and subtraction are possible with slide rule
Hahaha, you know what I mean. Actually I cover a method for addition using the trigonometric scales in this video: th-cam.com/video/2rQ9WDbD2qk/w-d-xo.html. That could actually be used on this slide rule. Do you mean that or something else like the L scale?
I mean using just C and D scales to add and subtract, but i guess it requires some kind of ""hack": nsg.upor.net/slide/sradd.htm
Simeon Georgiev Well it requires adding 1. Definitely all addition tricks on the slide rule are "hacks" in the sense that slide rules are not designed for adding.
I agree with you that addition and subtraction aren't something one will do with slide rule, but it's good to know that type of "hacks", that impressed me when I first saw it was possible to add with slide rule
Simeon Georgiev Have a look at my trigonometric method. It actually doesn't require you to add at all!!
with, or without, the slide rule in the picture, logarithms are still useful. this is a failure of math to teach them sooner, to teach them properly. Logs are part of the triangle of power, and are needed to solve exponentials. They have been used for hundreds of years and are as equally important and useful as Sine or Cosine can be. Just depends upon what you are doing. Students would understand logs if they were introduced to them at a younger age and had more years practice using them.
Let the dead rest. I'm part of the last group in high school that learned and bought a slide rule (still have it; it is a collecter's item). Three digits was hell for me: more like 2.5 digits. Basically I use HP calculators: Fix 4 is the defeult (4 digits after the period/comma). HPs are the calculators of choice by engineers and scientists: they know about accuracy.
I'm a Mechanical Engineer. Never learned how to use a slide rule until just recently (self-learning it). Learning on a slide rule can be important and useful, not in that everyone needs to Rely upon them, but in the sense that when Learning math, using the slide rule will improve your math skills, understanding, and intuition. I teach middle school, high school, and college students math all the time, at all different levels. I have learned a lot about what works in teaching math by doing it, and had many years to observe the degradation of math skills, as well as figuring out why that is and what is causing it, as well as how to fix it (I have demonstrated my ideas work many times in real world practice and demonstration, and continue to refine my ideas based upon how well they work or not).
Another person noted, "Using a slide rule for complex calculations requires learning to approximate the result in order to find the correct power of ten. It teaches the user to be able to calculate in approximate terms without the aid of any tools but their mind. This is a very useful skill."
In reality the above is an important skill for engineers. Just because you can design to 4+ decimal places, does not mean that you should or can manufacture it. Higher precision costs more, and wears out faster. It also results in more rejects and waste. Lower tolerance engineering design results in lower costs, less waste, and more durable and long lasting designs that are easier to maintain and repair.
Also, more intuition with math enables engineers to work faster and more efficiently. The younger engineers are coming into the job lacking practical skills in calculus, algebra, triangle trig, GD&T, etc. and we're having to teach them from scratch. The further they are from the reality of math by relying upon software tools and graphing calculators and calculators that solve calculus problems for them, the less they can do as an engineer on the job.
HP calculators are certainly nice (I had a 15-C in college and being able to do RPN felt like a superpower).
But but they were/are expensive, so have been using TI-30 variants for work. They get the job done (they indeed have a fixed precision setting), and for $10-15, it's no great loss if they get messed up or "walk away" at a jobsite. I have a bunch.
YES!!!
Using an electronic calculator provides more exact results but teaches less about the calculation done than the slide rule.
School is supposed to be about teaching...