Walter Shawlee, the sovereign of slide rules, has died

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/science/walter-shawlee-dead.html

by sohkamyung • 2 years ago

141 57 2 years ago

I still have my old slide rule (aluminum) and my Dad's (wood). I love the things, but had no idea somebody had built a web site and a company around them. After the zombie apocalypse, there will be no batteries and calculators won't work. But we'll be able to rebuild society with slide rules. If we can find any.

RIP.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

Walter was also a fixture in a small but active community of devotees of old-school HP and Tektronix test equipment, and I think he was active in 80s-era HP computer user groups as well. His storefront is still maintained by his wife: https://www.sphere.bc.ca/ .

Not to be missed is the 'classic' version of the site they maintained for years: https://www.sphere.bc.ca/oldsite/index.html

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

That website is a gem. I have a 2235 here that I just can't part with, it has long since been replaced by a digital one but I'd feel like a complete traitor if I sold it.

tgv2• 2 years ago

De mortibus and all that, but their prices for slide rules are pretty high. I bought an Aristo in good conditions for €10 last month.

monero-xmr• 2 years ago

In a post-catastrophe society that totally destroys our networks, knowledge is so dispersed and so many computers and electricity generation mechanisms exist, that I find it impossible to believe Wikipedia and a library of ebooks won’t be preserved in some fashion. From that point it’s a land rush to establish new companies and factories to get us back to prior glory.

bitwize• 2 years ago

I'll be ready to go for the apocalypse too. I recently scored an abacus at an antique shop -- a Japanese soroban that looks like it was made in the 50s or 60s. I call it the most retro piece of computing equipment I own.

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

I love the fancy Japanese abacus I bought at a thrift shop, it's very nice and simply elegant.

I also really enjoyed learning to use it, it was surprisingly easy. I also really have enjoyed learning more about "abacus culture". There are students so good with them that they don't even need abacus' anymore. They just use "air abacus'"

chongli• 2 years ago

My solar Casio will keep working after the zombie apocalypse: no batteries in it. Works great, even in low light conditions.

divbzero• 2 years ago

Does anyone have recommendations for what to look for when buying a slide rule? Are there certain features or materials that make it easier to use?

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

That it wasn't used daily by an engineer in anger, you want one that isn't worn to the point where the accuracy suffers. A slide rule is a precision instrument, the cursor and the scales should be free of scratches, the cursor should slide freely but without play across the outside ways and the slides themselves should slide with some friction but never so much that you need to apply force. Low quality ones may have discolored to the point that using them is harder, the better quality ones came in a cover and should have been stored there. I'd probably avoid wood as the base material, it's too unpredictable.

Dirt is fine, damage is not and slop is to be avoided.

In Europe Aristo made nice and affordable ones that sold in a hard plastic casing, if you can find one of those in the original sleeve it should be fine even if it has been sitting for three decades or more. Other good brands: Faber-Castell, Ahrend, Hemmi. You can find them for $10 or less if you look around for a bit. In the USA 'Pickett sliderule' on ebay, from $5 to $300 for NIB...

kurthr• 2 years ago

I am no damn expert, but I've used them. If you're actually going to use it:

   Choose a size that you can read and fits in your hands
   Choose a smooth sliding Indicator (some have magnifiers) and Slider without slop
   Choose scales you'll use (typ 2 linear and 2 log, some have trig roots etc)
   Choose one with the precision you think you'll need

I think most of them are plastic, but some feel better in the hands. There are of course metal, wood, and I think ivory. There are cylindrical ones, and all sorts of historical examples. If you're going to carry it around you'll want a case (or a pocket protector) to put it in.

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

Coincidentally I'm making one right now. I never knew about Walter and his passion but I totally get it, sliderules have a magic all their own. Ostensibly just a couple of passive pieces of material but the power of logarithms turns them into universal calculators. A radio amateur that I knew was faster with his slide rule than I ever was with a calculator! The calculator produced more digits but most of those were useless.

mixedmath• 2 years ago

That's super cool! What are you making it out of?

I always wondered how they made the markings on the high quality slide rules of yore. Were they engraved? Were there machines that would scribe them? Now we might laser engrave, but that feels too recent. Maybe some sort of acid etching? I don't know!

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

For now out of wood, it will be 'oversized' so I get enough accuracy because I can only inscribe 0.4 mm lines, though I have an idea on how to improve on that for just this job.

The ones that I used to have were plastic and the lettering seemed to have been superimposed on top of the base material, Pickett's were definitely printed, not engraved. But older ones were engraved and I'm super curious about the process they used, I'm imagining a reversed pantograph or something like that.

euroderf• 2 years ago

but most of those were useless.

Has anyone ever made a calculator that manages significant digits ?

Edit: I mean, if (e.g.) both inputs to a binary operation have 5 digits of which only 3 are significant, then does said calculator grok this.

SonOfLilit• 2 years ago

My high school Casio had eleven significant digits. You just wouldn't know it unless you read the manual.

jwr• 2 years ago

HP calculators will only display the number of digits you specify and there is an RND function which will round the number to that number of digits.

While it doesn't fulfill the criteria of "managing significant digits" (you still have to know at each point how many significant digits you have, which isn't obvious with calculations like logarithms), it does make things significantly (ahem) easier in most common cases.

hilbert422• 2 years ago

I'm so sorry Walter Shawlee is no longer with us, we need advocates and enthusiasts like him to carry on historical knowledge of practices and traditions especially so when they were so deeply embedded in engineering culture as was the slide rule.

As I type this my Faber Castell Novo-Duplex 2/83N slide rule is sitting on my lap—it's same model as shown in the article and prised by Walter Shawlee. I still use it regularly as it's often quicker than using a calculator. Also, it has one great advantage over a calculator in that its scales are visual and often I can look along them to read off multiple solutions to a problem without even having to reposition the slide. That is, it has properties that not even calculators have.

This 2/83N is also a prised possession of mine, it used to belong to my mechanical engineer father who bought it in the 1960s. It's a wonderful tool and it's in still perfect condition along with its case, instructions and its quick reference table (shame I can't post a photo of it here).

I believe tools of this quality have historical value and I—as its temporary custodian—have a duty to look after it carefully.

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

Some lines from 'The Dark Tower' spring to mind, your dad would no doubt be very proud of you. I hope my kids will value my tool collection in the way you do. I have very few hard connections to the past of my family, and those I keep close to me. Now the challenge will be to convince your children if you have any to keep that slide-rule in honor, I really like your view of tools. Too often they are seen as 'wear items' rather than as things to last for much longer than a single life time.

7thaccount3• 2 years ago

He has not forgotten the face of his father :)

In a similar vein, my father came from a generation a little after the commenters to where he used HP calculators in college and later got an HP15c when he graduated. I bought one of the re-released ones and learned to use it just to have a better understanding of the engineering culture he came from. Those old calculators were stack based (RPN) and programmable in a day when practically nobody had a personal computer, so you could often do your assignments on it, instead of waiting in line to do it in Fortran. I think he lucked out and fully missed the punch card era to where they had terminals by that point. The manuals on the HP15c were also fantastic and had lots of example problems like a mini textbook.

hilbert422• 2 years ago

"I really like your view of tools."

Thanks for your comment. My philosophy is that if it's functionally efficient and still works then continue to use it. Throwing something away just because it's old is not paying due respect for the human effort and ingenuity that went into both designing and making it. Also, it's ecologically wasteful to do so, similarly so is planned obsolescence (a pet hate of mine).

This applies to many things we own, but it's especially so for well-crafted objects such as musical instruments and many hand tools, which have long evolved to the point of near perfection, thus replacing serviceable tools with new ones serves no useful point other than perhaps they look somewhat more 'pretty' or current.

For example, I have a large collection of woodworking tools that are much older than I am by many decades, yet they still remain perfectly serviceable and very reliable (I'm aware of their history but I treat them as functional tools that I actually use—not simply collector's items). I have near several dozen hand planes of different sizes most of which easily predate WWII, the oldest was manufactured in 1907 and some of the highest quality ones date from the mid 1930s (Stanley planes and ilk are very easy to date accurately).

The traditional bench plane as used by woodworkers is a quintessential example of a well evolved tool; its near perfect ergonomic design together with its intrinsically very robust construction has meant that its design has changed only marginally since Leonard Bailey patented the first modern plane design in 1867¹. And after some further perfecting by Justus Traut in 1885² and a few later manufacturing tweaks its design has essentially remained static since at least the end of 19th Century to the extent that many of its parts are often fully interchangeable despite the fact that a plane could have been built at anytime over the past century—in fact, Stanley continues to sell screw sets and parts that fit any plane built over this period whether it's for their own product or that of their competition—for instance the Record Planes company³. Moreover, all modern manufacturers of hand planes use the same naming and size nomenclature as did (and does) Stanley, the design was such a success that the moment the patents ran out other manufacturers followed original designs to the letter.

Like the famous/classic Darmstadt slide rule design and that of my Faber Castell Novo-Duplex 2/83N, the Bailey plane is design classic, it's not only very functional and rugged but it has remained so over many generations. As mentioned, with its now-timeless design one shouldn't consider possession of a Bailey-style plane simply as just ownership but rather as its temporary custodian. That millions of planes are still in existence and functional after having outlived multiple owners is testament to the fact.

I see no conflict or clash between using and or paying due homage to old technology when it is relevant and makes sense to do so and yet still being up to speed with modern tech. No doubt, in many instances newer technologies bring many advances and efficiencies over their older counterparts but as we've seen from the Bailey plane example we shouldn't simply abandon a technology just because it is old. Whilst the Bailey plane is a clear-cut instance of older tech winning out over much newer designs, my point is that we often abandon older technologies and processes either out of prejudice or because they've fallen out of fashion rather than because of demonstrable reasons such safety or that they have become impractical considering newer technology, and or they are now too costly to maintain.

True, whilst the latter points are often very valid reasons for abandoning old technologies all too frequently we use the former excuses to kill them off and often this results in negative consequences (for instance we regularly delete great swathes of information about older tech from modern textbooks, so the younger generation remains ignorant of them despite their intrinsic importance). Fact is older technologies are frequently much more functional than our prejudices are prepared to allow us to admit and we dismiss them to our disadvantage. Often older tech possesses certain properties and features that cannot be easily replicated by its replacement, or that various aspects of it can be used in new ways not previously thought of.

That said, I do not want others to misconstrue what I have said about the value older technologies or for some to consider my words as that of a Neo-Luddite, so below I provide an example of technology that many in my own profession of electronics have long deemed obsolete and long dead—specifically that of vacuum tube electronics, which I would maintain is definitely far from being dead!

Electronics is a broad and rapidly evolving field that has required my constant attention to keep abreast of ongoing developments such as semiconductor design, imaging, electro-optics and recently quantum dot tech has been increasingly competing for my attention, so it's very tempting to dismiss parts of the field that one perceives as no longer useful.

The trouble is things are never that simple. If one examines textbooks on electronics one will find that many never mention vacuum tube electronics, and those that do usually give it very scant attention, so why do I claim it's important? Well, whilst vacuum electronics is now essentially nonexistent in much of our modern tech including home appliances, computers and many other devices—even in TV sets and monitors the cathode ray tube has given way to solid state replacements, but that doesn't mean the tech is dead. In fact, it's still very much alive in many industrial processes. Microwave ovens continue to use vacuum tube magnetrons, so does RADAR along with klystrons. Our famous and truly remarkable Voyager spacecraft use TWTs (Traveling Wave Tubes), high-powered radio and television transmitters use vacuum tetrodes and electron microscopes and many other scientific instruments use vacuum technology some of which can never be replaced with solid-state electronics due their intrinsic characteristics—an electron microscope for instance.

Excluding vacuum tube technology from electronic courses has another serious negative effect in that a whole branch of physics is being neglected, and it goes without saying that if one doesn't understand it then neither does one fully understand solid-state (and more broadly condensed matter) physics. The vacuum and vacuum physics is a crucially important aspect of physics, and particle physics would be nonexistent if physicists didn't understand how particles move in a vacuum.

This brings me back to the importance and necessity of having a good understanding of the historical background/developments of any tech one is working with as there's always a cross-fertilization between the old and the new that not only contextualizes the technology but also leads to a much better understanding of it. Whilst many would disagree with this assessment, I would claim that many others and I have gained much useful knowledge from these historical concepts, so it's little wonder that I am rather annoyed that teaching them is not considered relevant and or a compulsory part of electronics training. I have lost track of the many times I have had to inform my younger staff about relevant connections between certain concepts that to them are seemingly unrelated, had their syllabuses included historical information about their subjects then said connections would have been obvious.

Have you ever noticed how physicists have an unusually rich to excellent knowledge of say the historical background and development of quantum mechanics? This is not without good reason as they've found that in that working through the thinking processes of their forefathers greatly improves their understanding of this complex field. Unfortunately, as mentioned, that so little attention is paid to historical aspects in many engineering courses is clearly demonstrable as a quick glance at many a modern engineering textbook will attest.

My apologies for such a long rave but experience has forced me into developing such strong views.

_____

¹ https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/leonard-bailey

² Justus Traut was a prolific inventor, he was often known as the Patent King of New Britain, CT: https://www.handplanepatents.com/no-319039-bench-plane-justu...

³ https://www.record-planes.com/history/

seoulbigchris• 2 years ago

Sad to hear this. I bought quite a few slide rules from the years from him. I even had an outstanding wish-list (of one) for a particular circular slide rule I had been dreaming to own.

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

It might be worth naming it here, it may just be that someone on HN has one lying around.

ZeljkoS• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/r0uuX

Pinus• 2 years ago

This is probably slightly irrational, but it pains me to see how many slide rules go unsold at auction sites, and probably end up being thrown away. Admittedly, most of these are school rules of which there are thirteen in a dozen, but I see a fair number of nice ones as well. The collector in me wants to buy them all, but the rational Pinus says that I already have a few, and unlike the gentleman in the article, I do not wish to fill my home with slide rules...

To put a programming angle on things: Using a slide rule feels a bit like assembly-language programming on something like the Z80. Since operations can only take their input from certain places, and only leave their output at certain places, you need to try to arrange things so that any intermediate results are in a place where they can be used as input for the next step.

jacquesm17• 2 years ago

You're lucky, you have that with slide rules. I have it with musical instruments, specifically pianos. It's been the subject of some domestic friction ;) I'm pretty sure if I would switch to slide rules that the reaction would be one of great relief.

kjellsbells2• 2 years ago

You've just given me an idea for a slide rule that takes a key and provides easy visuals for the chords around that key and how to translate to another key. Eg "oh if you started on c maj bit you wanna play that in F? You're gonna need these sharps and flats my man". Might be a fun educational tool for learners.

pfdietz• 2 years ago

Antique items become valuable because most of them have been destroyed.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

some subplot to this mystery could be that a collector buys them all up to artificially create the scarcity to inflate the value of the collection. kind of like the housing inventory after the '08 collapse

Tycho• 2 years ago

The famous real estate developer Gerald D Hines used a slide rule constantly - it gave him time to think of answers to questions while clients watched him go through the motions of some calculation. It also helped him quickly do actual sums to scope out the major dimensions and costs of a project, further impressing clients. This was before pocket calculators, of course, but slide rules were probably more mesmerising to watch in action anyway.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

One of my favorite scenes is from Apollo 13 where Jim asks Houston to confirm his numbers he calculated by hand, then it cuts to all of mission control using their slide rules to confirm his results.

slowhand09• 2 years ago

That's sad and unfortunate. Experts and dealers of such equipment are a dissapearing breed. I have 2 slide rules; a super cheap plastic unit from high school days, and a full-sized Dietzgen I bought for a dollar (leather case and all). It was in a junked car at a pick'nPull yard. My skills have gotten very rusty, so now I prefer my HP-15c handheld or my HP-42c emulators on my iPhone.

TedDoesntTalk• 2 years ago

I inherited a small collection of them and have no idea what to do with them. I have no interest in keeping them but throwing them away seems wrong.

saalweachter• 2 years ago

Yeah, I occasionally have that problem -- I don't want to be the custodian of these items with minor collect-ability, they aren't particularly valuable (to have an easy market to get them into the hands of someone who does), but I also don't want to be the person to just discard little bits of history.

cafard• 2 years ago

Last weekend I was on a block where a store probably has them, and I didn't think to stop in. Shoot.

asdefghyk• 2 years ago

A related tool ( to slide rules - a way to make multiplication and division easier ) I recall using logs to do calculatios. I recall using the lookup table booklet of logs

Log tables for multiplying and dividing

ie From Google of phrase "....using log tables ..."

1900s.org https://www.1900s.org.uk › logarithms Logarithms provide an easy means of multiplying and dividing using just simple addition and subtraction together with lookup tables.

kjellsbells2• 2 years ago

My older sibling and I spanned the boundary between lookup tables and calculators. Her math exams came with booklets of sin and cos and log tables. Mine didnt because I was expected to use a calculator. I think the tables all evaporated in under two years around 1984 (or maybe thats just as far back as I can recall)

makeset• 2 years ago

Once the Great Flood was over, Noah let all the animals off the Ark, and told them to go forth and procreate. And so they did, except the snake couple. So Noah made some wooden furniture for them, and thus the snakes were able to procreate.

You know, because the snakes were adders. They needed log tables to multiply.

sn9• 2 years ago

I've long wondered why people haven't started milling or 3D-printing slide rules.

All the good used ones seem to be extremely expensive for some pieces of plastic. Surely we could do better?

sohkamyung• 2 years ago

I found this at Instructables: "Slide Rule for the Modern Day"

[1] https://www.instructables.com/Slide-Rule-for-the-Modern-Day/

Walter Shawlee, the sovereign of slide rules, has died

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