The Day The Slide Rule Died
In those days before the invention of handheld calculators, the slide rule reigned as the engineer's tool of choice. Manufacturers hawked their wares with the fervor of TV salesmen in sharkskin suits, and engineers touted personal favorites like teenage boys one-upping each other with the horsepower of their hot rods.
But was Robert Rickett's Post Versalog really superior to David Bryan's K&E Log Log Decitrig or Billy Huebner's Jason 803?
Leaving Texas Instruments for Arkansas Power & Light Company instantly plunged me into computational dark ages. Our office cranked out daily gas flow calculations on Monroe "comptometers," clattering desktop beasts with 100-plus keys and a jillion whirring gears.
Since the Monroes couldn't do square roots, however, we resorted to tedious lookups and interpolations from mathematical tables--and then inefficiently punched the results into the Monroes.
"Speed up the process!" demanded Louis Grobmyer, the boss. For about $1,000, a new-fangled desktop calculator from Singer Corporation nicely filled the bill. Though possessing the one-touch magical square root key, it couldn't maintain running totals.
Undaunted, Singer bolted an automobile odometer look-alike to the calculator's side. Not a pretty sight, but it worked. The Monroes gradually migrated to the storeroom, doomed by progress. But the slide rule endured.
Unexpectedly, the roundhouse punch of technology knocked the slide rule to its knees in a single day, and death followed shortly thereafter. On February 1, 1972, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-35 (so named for its 35 keys), their first handheld scientific calculator.
We eagerly snatched up one of these $395 marvels to accelerate the tedious vector arithmetic required to balance rotating machinery with downtime costing up to $10,000 per hour. This glorious heritage all but forgotten, they bring but a thin dime at weekend garage sales.
Succeeding years found me punching out decks of computer cards for the FORTRAN programs controlling gas spectrometer analyses and cost of service studies. Infinitely beyond slide rule capabilities, these heavy-duty number crunchers silently hummed along on impersonal, unseen "big iron" mainframes located who knows where.
But despite the persistent onslaught of technology, some engineers clung to their slide rules, familiar friends they knew and understood. Executives John Harton and J.D. Phillips even tucked circular models into their shirt pockets. Manipulated with the thumbs, these curiosities never ceased to wring wonder from curious onlookers in meetings
Unfortunately, I've so hopelessly lost touch that I couldn't help my son figure out how to use his graphing calculator when he entered college. But I occasionally extract my own slide rule, an exquisite K&E Decilon, from its leather case, examine the finely machined scales... and wonder. "What's the use of a dead skill?"
Respecting neither calendar nor clock nor method, a job well done earns a reward that fades not. But like the slide rule, the experience of Youth sometimes loses its relevance before Age figures out what it all means.
Copyright 2004 James McAlister
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