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Slide Rules
- supernova87a 6y agoWhat would be even cooler is if the website could turn some of the most interesting examples into spinnable (?), controllable animations to let you use them.
- kqr 6y agoYou night already know about this: https://www.sliderules.org/react/pickett_n909_es.html https://www.sliderules.org/react/pickett_n909_es.html There are more of them on that site.
- jonsen 6y agoThis reminded me that I have the iOS app “Digital Slide Rule”. It’s well done and fun to play with.
- sxp 6y agoIf you're interested in old-fashioned computers, http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php#nomograms http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php#n... is another good reference of mechanical and paper computers in the context of pre-computer spaceflight.
- OnlyOneCannolo 6y agoSpeaking of paper computers, I recently discovered Nomographer on YouTube, who does a great job of explaining how to make them. https://youtube.com/channel/UCOLYtsL4ge6QfaAvBDeG1IA https://youtube.com/channel/UCOLYtsL4ge6QfaAvBDeG1IA
- bombcar 6y agoThe E6B is probably the last slide rule in “common” usage - even if only as a technicality anymore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
- jcrawfordor 6y agoThe image of Spock using a "whiz weel" in TOS is somewhat famous amongst aviation instructors...
- retzkek 6y agoA number of watches are still sold with flight computer slide rules in the bezel, including my current favorite the Citizen Nighthawk, which is a chrono-less sibling to the Navihawk, which is something of a budget homage to the Breitling Navitimer. I find it quite handy in daily use, for example converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit, kilometers and miles, and currency conversions when traveling. I'll even use it sometimes when calculating a tip (the F<->C conversion of 1.8 conveniently aligns with a typical tip of 18%).
- anateus 6y agoThis page links to a physically unremarkable Soviet slide rule used for calculating things like the volumetric flow rate in irrigation canals used in Uzbek SSR for growing cotton, their primary cash crop [1]. Unfortunately, there are no scales on it for "evaporation" and "shitty construction", or the Aral Sea[2] might still be there. [1] https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?string1=misc&string2=2151 https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
- _Microft 6y agoSlide rules seem very anachronistic but this is only because of the their form but not their purpose. They are low-tech, continuous (vs. discrete, as in "tables with values in a booklet") lookup "tables" for functions that would have been too time-consuming (or error-prone?) to compute at "runtime". And they even allow parameters to be taken into account. These things are absolutely ingenious inventions.
- anilakar 6y agoI wish they had included various submarine attack disks that incorporated both slide rules and angle calculators.
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- _Microft 6y agoThese seem to be great resources: Explanations on slide rules: https://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/sliderules/ https://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/sliderules/ A "slide rule creator" program that allows you to generate slide rules for arbitrary functions that are computable with slide rules: https://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/sliderules/SRE.html https://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/sliderules/SRE.html
- throw0101a 6y agoThe YouTube channel "Professor Herning" has some good videos on how to use them, as well as discussions on various designs: * https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorHerning/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorHerning/videos
- weinzierl 6y agoIf you happen to be in Munich the "Deutsche Museum" has an excellent collection of mechanical and analog computing devices.
- _Microft 6y agoThis is an awesome recommendation. The "Deutsches Museum" is a place one can easily spend days at and still discover interesting things. https://www.deutsches-museum.de https://www.deutsches-museum.de https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Museum
- Karto 6y agoAnd if you talk about Germany, there's a whole museum dedicated to those in Bonn. The "Artihmeum". In the city center, by the university. It's huge, fascinating, and I believe I was the only person inside when I visited last year... They even let you use some of the originals. https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/ https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/
- lesquivemeau 6y agoI have inherited one of these. It seems to be a AW Faber 360 v2. Tbh i never really looked into how it's used but after reading some comments i might consider learning it, it seems really useful !
- kqr 6y agoIt is incredibly useful in the kitchen still. That's the one place I'm actually surprised it isn't part of standard equipment. If you have a series of numbers you want to scale by a known fraction, you can just set the slide rule so that the numbers in the fraction are over and under each other, then leave it there and even a two-year old can read off scaled numbers like it's nobody's business. What does this have to do with the kitchen? The recipe calls for 50 g of butter, but you want to make as much as possible and you are constrained by owning 85 g of butter. Set slide rule to 85/50, then read all other ingredient amounts off the slide rule, scaled by the same amount.
- cafard 6y agoI have a cheap one from high school chemistry. My wife may have had one, though she would have called it a "proportion wheel"--people doing print production used these well into the 1980s and perhaps beyond to calculate the reduction need to make photographs fit on a page. In my view, the great think about slide rules is that they do not encourage false precision. Too many calculator users will copy all those decimal points without considering how far they are meaningful.
- bregma 6y ago> In my view, the great think about slide rules is that they do not encourage false precision. Too many calculator users will copy all those decimal points without considering how far they are meaningful. This is by far the biggest loss from leaving the slide rule behind. People now confuse a greater amount of data with having more information. We have generations who believe they're being more accurate because they appear have greater precision, but in reality they're just more confident in their innumeracy. Hearing more lies (as in the the extra digits) doesn't make you more right. This truth does not just apply to arithmetic, but at least it's more measurable with numbers.
- ghaff 6y agoThere were a bunch of both linear and circular devices that were basically slide rules customized for specific purposes. I'm sure I used one of the print production ones. This sort of thing stayed around for a while after slide rules themselves largely went out in the late 1970s.
- bregma 6y agoI love the specialized instruments. The "Astrology Slide Rule" for calculating horoscopes and the "Bio Dial" for biorhythms. What a wonderful cross-over between hard science and fantasy. One thing I've learned over the decades is it often benefits the craftsman to use a specific tool for a specific job. Sometimes a general-purpose digital computer is not the most appropriate tool when a simple hand-held analog device will give you the right answer every time without batteries or reception, in the rain or damp or cold. I learned to use a slide rule as a youth because it was an important part of the high school science curriculum (how else were you going to calculate all those Ksp values in chemistry? Long hand?). I also have a pile of them I've collected over the years. Long may they, uh, rule.
- fuzzfactor 6y agoWithout computers, or at home away from the mainframe, we really had slide rules for just about everything you would need to routinely calculate. A lot of them are sponsored or provided by corporations or trade associations, TRW provided the ICBM Effectiveness & Survivability model which looks really useful: https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?string1=nuclear&string2=2079 https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?... Even more handy would be the Ground Zero/Bomb Damage slide rule: https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?string1=nuclear&string2=2089 https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?... This is an outstanding black slide rule and its maker has remained anonymous, it's pretty dark but I guess a bright enough flash of light is expected to be available when you need to do this calculation.
- smoyer 6y agoBeautiful! ... I used some version of the CTCS-552 from 10th to 12th grade (and still have it around here somewhere). The slide-out card has trig tables and quite a few formulas. I also have one of my father's slide rules which he used for the first 1/3 of his EE career. There was a huge benefit of using a slide rule - it reinforces your "mental math" since you're keeping track of the magnitude of your calculations in your head. When I later started using a calculator, it was really obvious if I'd mistyped part of a calculation.