Slide Rules, OK? - a photo on Flickriver

Slide Rules, OK?

            While I'm in the mood for tabletop photography, here are some ghosts of "Napier's Bones"... 
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Stop Press.  After the initial upload I found a fascinating resource, International Slide Rule Museum (ISRM).  There I learned four things that amazed me. 

1) 2022 is the 400th anniversary of the invention of the slide rule by William Oughtred!  

2) ISRM indicates that 1901-1902 Nestler models were stamped on the slide cavity with just the manufacturer's initials, AN, plus a design patent number.  My grandfather's rule here clearly shows that.  So it is now identified as a Nestler, and about 120 year old. It might be quite rare. It is longer than the maker's 10" rules, and shorter than their 20" models, yet it has the same graduation density as the larger ones.  I haven't yet seen any the same. (See also last paragraph below, and images in comment thread.)

3) Various web sites claim that the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun acquired in the 1930s two Nestler slide rules, the only ones he ever used, including while heading the NASA Moon landing program. Albert Einstein is also claimed to have used these rules. They must have had a stellar reputation! 

4) In my youth I'd believed that Faber-Castell was the only brand, yet one of the favourites of the ISRM was made in my home town of Melbourne, and I had never heard of the maker!  

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On acquiring one of the first scientific calculators available, someone in my wife's family ceremoniously flung his slide rule into the rubbish bin. But I was sad to see them slip ignominiously, from ubiquity in technical computation settings, into museum status.  (My wife recovered that rule and it is in this image.)

I remember when, as a schoolboy, I unwrapped my first model, and, using only its own scales and cursor, immediately fell to verifying a hunch that its principle was based on logarithms. "Duh!", anyone with a maths background might say.  But at the time, I felt that I had cracked a code and let myself in on an esoteric language that was openly inscribed in runes on this magic wand, yet which had been hiding from me in plain sight all along. 

I have lost that one, which had scales on both sides, a Faber-Castell Darmstadt 2/82 -- but the one nearest the top of the frame here is a grander version of that.  This latter was the most sophisticated I ever owned (with a useful πX  scale), and it was made right at the end of the ready availability of these devices locally. But I hardly ever used this replacement because I only bought it in case I'd never get another chance. To me, they were and still are strangely beautiful so-called "objects of virtu".  They are the very physical manifestation of that wonderful abstraction of the human mind, logarithms.  (Something remarkable and elegant is vital to the practicality of a slide rule, although it can be conceptualised in other ways.  Since the full scale length represents log(10), any internal position X must divide the scale length in the ratio log(X):log(10/X).  That enables both multiplication and division to be performed with either left or rightward slide shifts as appropriate, and so allow a single decade to suffice -- but at the cost of requiring users to keep track of the decade they are notionally in.)

The rule lying diagonally above the others here was the first I ever knew, as a small intrigued boy, long before I understood what it was for. It has lost its (glass) cursor, while some of the scales have peeled away from the wooden substrate. Because the material looked and flexed like the struts in my mother's corsets, I always assumed it was whalebone! The device had belonged to my maternal grandfather, who had been a civil engineer in Austria. He might well have used it in calculations required for a bridge he built over the River Inn (see a very early comment below).  My mother and I tried to see that in 1996, but it had already been consigned to a rubbish bin for bridges... Tempus fugit.

Taken on: July 7, 2022

Tags:

Oughtred

3D illusion

Mathematics

Calculation

Instrument

Scientific

Slide rule

Slide ruler

Logarithms

Tabletop

Arithmetic

Natural light

Window light

Curio

memento mori

Scientist

Mathematician

Engineer

Shadowing

Faber-Castell

Hemmi

Computation

Analog

Device

Nestler

Antique

Old

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Camera: Apple iPhone 8 Plus, f/2.8, 1/120 sec, 6.6mm, ISO 250 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Apple iPhone 8 Plus
Aperture:	f/2.8
Exposure Time:	0.008 sec (1/120)
Focal Length:	6.6mm
ISO:	250
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	15.1
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