When I was a bright-eyed bushy-tailed young engineer, no one I knew could afford an electronic calculator and the mechanical slide rule still held sway. Thinking back to those now far-off days, a good ...

Before the smartphone, the laptop and the pocket calculator, there was a powerful mechanical computer. Our new series, Tools of the Trade, begins... The Slide Rule: A Computing Device That Put A Man ...

While some (math-phobics) still may relish the simple beauty and non-threatening functionality of the abacus, there are those who have made the transition to more challenging computing gadgets—many ...

The slide rule, sometimes called a slipstick, was a type of mechanical analog computer. It was and still is, used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as roots, ...

Ever wanted to know how engineers made their calculations before digital calculators were on every workbench? [Richard Carpenter] and [Robert Wolf] have just the thing—a sliderule simulator that can ...

A regular slide rule takes advantage of the fact that you can multiply and divide by adding logarithms. Imagine having two rulers marked in inches or centimeters — it doesn’t matter (see the adjoining ...

The protractor and the Bunsen burner. Playing the recorder in music class. Drawing arcs and circles with a compass in geometry. These tools of the education trade become part of our lives for a ...