Thread: Slide Rules Anyone??

Just wanted to mention one of my other vices.....vintage slide rules. I have a small collection of them dating from the 1930's till their very end in the early 1970's. I got a few from older engineers I worked with over the years and many come from eBay, estate sales and flea markets.
I'm always looking for ones I don't have and would either buy them or trade strops, etc....
On a more modern note I also have a few old Texas Instruments red LED scientific calculators.

Anyone here ever use these in the past?

Tony

My freshman year at Texas A&M (1973-74), my roomate received the first HP calculator (HP-35) from his dad - it cost $625!

I bought one the following year for half that amount.

Although HP still only makes a couple, I'll never give up on using Reverse Polish Notation calculators!!!!!

I've got one around somewhere. Back in '84 in high school, I was carrying it around in my backpack playing around with it and was on my way to my physics final and dropped my TI calculator and smashed it to bits. I wound up taking the final using the slide rule. Made an 'A' too. My first day at Texas A&M I bought an HP 41C calculator. I still use it frequently, and it's still on the original batteries. That thing is a tank.

I believe that Tony H may have some and may even be dealing in'em. Make sure you ask him.

Now I really feel old. I used one not only in high school, but also when I was an electrical draftsman for GE before my military days. I used to draw transformers, lightning arrestors, and reclosers and used a slide rule for a ton of calculations.

I think I'd be lucky how to remember the process for multiplication on one of them these days.

I know I have about 4 or 5 around somewhere, one of them being ivory. They are in a box somewhere in the garage. Finding them is another story. Got to be over a thousand boxes inside other boxes in other boxes after our move.

If I run across them, I'll give you a jingle...

My freshman year (9th grade), my Science teacher, Mr. McDowell, had a slide rule that hung on the wall. It was huge, the kind of slide rule that JL would lust after!

He would give us problems to solve, and work out the solution on that big slide rule as fast or faster than we could with calculators.

Now that I think about Mr. McDowell, he was the kind of guy who would have used a straight razor. RIP!

RT

I've kept my trusty slide rule lo these many years... a Dietzgen, mahogany with nylon glides (it never had a problem on rainy days when most slide rules would bind from the wood swelling, lol). It's still in it's original leather case and looks/works as good as ever. Post was another big name in slide rules in those days. And I, like Bill, would probably have a tough time doing much more than simple mult/div on it, let alone it's real forte of logs and trig functions. I bought it in high school and used it thru college... there were no pocket calculators yet. Like many things from college, I never needed it in my work... I went the computer route and never looked back.

My dad had a little slide rule (maybe 6-inches long, all wood and pretty worn) that he used regularly as a mechanical engineer. I suspect it dated to no later than the depression era and probably wasn't new when he got it... he likely discarded it some years after he retired as I never saw it in his effects. But I still have his circa-1900 edition of Kents Mechanical Engineering Handbook... it's a hoot looking through that! Of course the math tables are accurate (log and trig tables never change), but you'd be amazed at the differences in the electrical and mechanical sections. By today's standards, some of that stuff is just wrong. The sections on wood and steam are fascinating.

Originally Posted by Tony Miller

Just wanted to mention one of my other vices.....vintage slide rules. I have a small collection of them dating from the 1930's till their very end in the early 1970's. I got a few from older engineers I worked with over the years and many come from eBay, estate sales and flea markets.
I'm always looking for ones I don't have and would either buy them or trade strops, etc....
On a more modern note I also have a few old Texas Instruments red LED scientific calculators.

Anyone here ever use these in the past?

Tony

I used a K&E log-log decitrig in college and in an earlier life, when I was an engineer. I still have. Just to give you an idea how long agp that was, it was the only way to do computing. We didn't even have basic electronic calculators.

A cheap scientific calculator has orders of magnitude more power than the slide rule and almost as much more power than the first computer I used without punching cards, the GE time sharing terminal.

Originally Posted by mparker762

I've got one around somewhere. Back in '84 in high school, I was carrying it around in my backpack playing around with it and was on my way to my physics final and dropped my TI calculator and smashed it to bits. I wound up taking the final using the slide rule. Made an 'A' too. My first day at Texas A&M I bought an HP 41C calculator. I still use it frequently, and it's still on the original batteries. That thing is a tank.

Of course, I took all my exams with a slide rule. It was fun to use, but it was too easy to make an error in decimal places.

Originally Posted by azjoe

I've kept my trusty slide rule lo these many years... a Dietzgen, mahogany with nylon glides (it never had a problem on rainy days when most slide rules would bind from the wood swelling, lol). It's still in it's original leather case and looks/works as good as ever. Post was another big name in slide rules in those days.

Mine is like that, but it's K&E Keufell and Esser. That was what seemed to be the most popular with students and later with engineers.

And I, like Bill, would probably have a tough time doing much more than simple mult/div on it, let alone it's real forte of logs and trig functions. I bought it in high school and used it thru college... there were no pocket calculators yet. Like many things from college, I never needed it in my work... I went the computer route and never looked back.

I suspect you could re-learn it in 15 minutes. The first pockrt calculators came within a few years of my graduation from college, they cost a fortune and were only very basic, hardly more than an adding machine.

I used it at my desk as an engineer, but even then non-mainframe computers were beginning to blossom. At work I had access to a teletype terminal that was connected to a GE time sharing service. It allowed you to work and program on the terminal instead of punching cards. Again, it was very basic.

The only way to do "complex" calculations in those days was with an analog computer, which we had at the office. The first useful scientific electronic calcualtor we had was rolled in on a cart. I only was an engineer for about six years and ended up in computers too, but then I went into an entirely different career.

You're a babe in you avatar, but in real life you're an old guy, like me.