K&E Slide Rule

[Bennie]

My grand kids and great grand kids want to know, what is a slide rule.

 

[Mitch Dufour]

Tell them it is the new Eco-friendly "Green" calculator!

 

[Bennie]

In the 50's, every engineering student had one hanging from his belt. Don't remember many female engineering students back then.

 

[T-Rigger]

Adds logarithms sliding one scale past another... and then guesstimating the result to too few decimal places. Nightmare abacus-like, non-electric device of the 1960's. Yuk!

 

[Cbt]

"Nightmare abacus-like, non-electric device of the 1960's...."

That made the calculations that sent men to the MOON!
It was a pretty nifty device but it required KNOWING your multiplying and division cold.

 

[ffamularo]

It was "Open Carry" too..... Looked "Bad A.."

 

[folivier]

I occasionally used one in college but didn't appreciate the accuracy until when I worked offshore and started using a circular slide rule. No more flipping it over and trying to remember where my mark was.

 

[Cbt]

We used a circular slide-rule called an E6B in the cockpit of light aircraft for fuel, time/distance, weight-and-balance calculations and other flight operations. That was before handheld calculators became specialized, and of course now it's all done from iPads and such ~ just drop in numbers and spit out a Go/No-Go ... but not nearly the "understanding" of what is happening.