Slide Rules Are Still Amazing!!

Oh, the Wonderful World Of Slide Rules! Is there nothing they can't do? Oh yea... Add. But still so Amazing! Enjoy!
#calculator #maths #engineering

- Music by Fran Blanche -

[cdorcey]

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.

[WilliamDP]

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.

[thom]

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

[otakuribo]

"I'd thank my dad, if he were still around."
my feels: 😭♥️

[repeat_defender]

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.

[fepatton]

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!

[charlesward]

When you mentioned the abiltiy to detect the intersection of fine lines I immediately thought of using a Vernier caliper (also a micrometer down to 0.0001 inches). My first Vernier caliper was a cheap Chinese one, but I later picked up a nice post WW II West German Helios off of eBay that was like the one my Dad had in his shop. No batteries or electronic circuits to go bad.

I found a Pickett 515T abandoned in an office, and got bit by the bug, and bought a Pickett N-3 ES, a K&E #4081-3 log-log-Decitrig, a Frederick Post 1460 Versalog, and a Dietzgen #1734 Microglide. Presently working to familiarize myself with the various rules and master their use. At age 71.

I loved all of the specialized cardboard rules.

[AcmeRacing]

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.

[chaos.corner]

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.

[michaelcherry]

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!)

[PastorDATM]

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

[pay]

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.

[ThisOldMan-ya]

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.

[jimbaritone]

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.

[coripuckett]

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....

[userjack]

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.

[joestephan]

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.

[lifeisgood]

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

[michaelogden]

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.

[videocouk]

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.