

David's calculating sticks: collection of slide rules - mcguire
http://www.sliderules.nl/

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kephra
I've mailed him about the E-6B flight computer missing in his database and
collection. The E-6B is still in production and widely used, not only for
pilot training. I'm using it for sailing, and have not yet found any other
intuitive modern calculator for drift/vector calculations(1). Smartphones have
big problems with sunlight, and with wet fingers. Not to talk about the
problem that most smartphones dislike water.

(1) Lets say your boat runs 7 knots, you have a current of 2 knots from 123⁰.
What course do you talk to reach a target 321⁰. Those type of calculations are
trivial on the backside of an E-6B. And the frontside contains all those
practical conversations between imperial, nautical and metric systems, e.g.
whats the weight of 10 gallons of fuel in metric tons would be a question that
is trivial to answer on the frontside.

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japaget
I didn't see any Keuffel and Esser slide rules listed. They were one of the
leading brands back in the day. Here's a link for those who are interested in
exploring more slide rules:

[http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/ke-
sliderule.html](http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/ke-sliderule.html)

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brinker
About a month ago I got an old slide rule from my Grandfather that he'd used
in engineering school. It's a little thing, but it's amazing to hold something
that was some decades ago the standard tool for certain types of computation.
It really puts into perspective just how far we've all come in such a short
time.

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cafard
I still have the one I got for high school chemistry.

A bit of trivia: slide rules survived into the 1980s and maybe beyond as
"proportion wheels" used by graphic artists to calculate the reductions needed
on images. I'm sure that most of these folks had no idea that these were
essentially circular slide rules.

