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For about 350 years, humanity’s most innovative hand-held computer was something called a slide rule. As typewriters once symbolized the writer, slide rules symbolized the engineer.These analog calculators came in metal, wood, plastic and even bamboo, and they could be found all over the world. Their functions included computing higher-order multiplications, exponents and logarithms, among other mathematical operations. They were usually long and rectangular with a retractable middle segment, and they featured dense fields of letters, lines and numbers stacked on top of one another. They looked almost comically abstruse, as if they might be used as paddles in the...

Following up on my original post, I've scanned and virtualized my Pickett N4-ES Vector Type LOG LOG DUAL BASE SPEED RULE. That's the most complicated rule that Picket produced. It has 34 scales, which is good, because in the world of slide rule collecting, bigger is better. ().

Weapons Of Math Instruction Intercepted At New York Airport My conservative (I thought) friend K-Squared sent this to my daughter without telling me anything about it. Being the major fan of President Bush that she is, naturally my daughter had to make sure I saw it. Teacher arrested At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, the U.S. attorney general said he believes...

Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Jerry Ross, along with about 200 other Purdue University alumni, have added their slide rules to a new exhibit at their alma mater that testifies to the past mathematical prowess of these computational devices. The permanent display, on the first floor of the university’s Potter Engineering Center, houses the pre-digital analytical marvels, some of which were made in the 19th century and range in length from a few inches to seven feet. "There was a point in time when the slide rule was king," said James Alleman, a professor of civil engineering who began collecting the...

Slides Rule At a gathering of the Oughtred Society, the reckoning may be dead or logarithmic, but the conversation is always right on the mark BY SILKE TUDOR To those born after 1970, the thought of sending someone into space with a slide rule seems ridiculous, but, to early Apollo crews, the mere thought of going up without one would have been a good enough reason to scrub a launch. Slide rules (the Pickett N600-ES Dual Base Log/Log to be precise) were compulsory equipment during our first five trips to the moon; in fact, Neil Armstrong probably determined the distance...

Science genius Stephen Hawkins popped into Stringfellows after Colin Farrell and fell for a blonde dancer named Tiger. Professor Hawking famed for his best selling book, 'A Brief History of Time' watched her during a string of steamy dances.They then shared a cuddle.A guest said, 'Steven watched the girls all night, he said she was wonderful.'