The Slide Rules
"I tell you the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls."
Anonymous
"On a slide rule such a problem takes forty seconds, most of it to get your decimal point correct."
Anonymous
An Ode to the Sliderule
From minds to the hands
Numbers glide on wood and steel
Then the big reveal
Old tool, silent yet precise
Truly marvelous device
Nicely crafted slide
Digits dance in quiet rows
Then right answer shows
Figures appear in each glide
The sliderule has never lied
With the awesome tool
Bridges span and buildings rise
Measurements precise
Towers shift at its command
Science shaped by human hand
Blueprints drawn in measured lines
Architects laid grand designs
Great projects engineers launched
With metrics the tool has crunched
But now obsolete
By calculators replaced
In mem’ries erased
Souvenir from days gone by
That progress has left to die
Silent rulers fade away
Bytes and circuits rule the day
In the dustbin of hist’ry
Where sadly, we all shall be
08-30-2024
© Vic Evora
A slide rule, also known as a slide ruler or a lipstick, is an extremely complex ruler that functions as an analog computer. By sliding various components of the ruler to align with one another, a slide rule can compute products, roots, logarithms, and the result of trigonometric functions.
In the mid-1600s, the linear slide rule was invented by Reverend William Oughtred, and the inner slide rule was invented by Robert Bissaker. Until the invention of the pocket calculator. In the 1960s, the slide rule was used by virtually every scientist and mathematician in the world.
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