Walter Shawlee, the sovereign of slide rules, has died

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.

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.

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'"

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.

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.

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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/