Real Rocket Scientists used slide rules to send Man to the Moon – a Pickett model N600-ES was taken on the Apollo 13 moon mission in 1970. The problem was that these weren’t portable while the slide rule fitted into the breast pocket of your button-down shirt. Slide rules evolved to allow advanced trigonometry and logarithms, exponentials and square roots.Įven up to the 1980s, knowing how to operate a slide rule was a basic part of mathematics education for millions of schoolchildren, even though by that time, mechanical and electric calculating machines were well established. The slide rule is basically a sliding stick (or discs) that uses logarithmic scales to allow rapid multiplication and division. Most notably, the development of logarithms by John Napier allowed Edward Gunter, William Oughtred and others to develop the slide rule.
It made addition and subtraction faster and less error-prone and may have led to the term ‘bean counters’ for accountants.īut that was where the technology more or less stuck for the next 3,600 years, until the beginning of the 17th century AD, when the first mechanical calculators began to appear in Europe. When all the beads had been slid across the first rod, it was time to move one across on the next, showing the number of tens, and thence to the next rod, showing hundreds, and so on.
The principle was simple, a frame holding a series of rods, with ten sliding beads on each. In the very beginning, of course was the abacus, a sort of hand operated mechanical calculator using beads on rods, first used by Sumerians and Egyptians around 2000 BC.
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