The way we were: the slide rule

My father gave me my first, and only, slide rule. It was a big deal back then. I was in the last year of high school, and my father – a civil engineer – proudly gave me, his daughter, his work slide rule because I was the only one in the family going onto university to study mathematics. It was like getting a car!

Calculators weren’t around then, but I did have an abacus. With an abacus and a slide rule I could do anything!

I am reminded of my first slide rule because I saw one on display in a museum recently. It was a Russian slide rule. Mine was a German model, the Faber Castell – unbreakable. Mine was a rectangular ‘ruler’ of about 13 or 14 inches long and about 2 inches wide with a see-through plastic ‘slide’ and a red line ‘cursor.’ It was stored in its own bottle-green case. The top and bottom part of the ‘ruler’ didn’t move, but the part in the middle would slide along so that it could be lined up with the scales for performing calculations, such as multiplications, divisions, square roots, and logarithms to two decimal points.

William Oughtred made the first slide rule in England in the 17th century. It was a standard calculation instrument until calculators were introduced in the early 1970s. I was allowed to use a calculator in my mathematics exam, but I didn’t have one because I couldn’t afford it – not a scientific one anyway. Besides, by the time I learned how to use one, it was faster doing the calculations in my head – or on the slide rule. I did eventually move onto the calculator, but it was a real nuisance because it needed batteries, making it costly to maintain. Slide rules last for centuries and no batteries are required.

And if a slide rule was good enough for Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, to calculate whether he had adequate fuel for the shuttle landing – on the moon, that is – then it was good enough for me.

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