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Slide rule
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Slide rule
A slide rule is a hand-operated mechanical calculator consisting of slidable rulers for conducting mathematical operations such as multiplication, division, exponents, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry. It is one of the simplest analog computers.
Slide rules exist in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear, circular or cylindrical form. Slide rules manufactured for specialized fields such as aviation or finance typically feature additional scales that aid in specialized calculations particular to those fields. The slide rule is closely related to nomograms used for application-specific computations. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not meant to be used for measuring length or drawing straight lines. Maximum accuracy for standard linear slide rules is about three decimal significant digits, while scientific notation is used to keep track of the order of magnitude of results.
English mathematician and clergyman Reverend William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. It made calculations faster and less error-prone than evaluating on paper. Before the advent of the scientific pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The slide rule's ease of use, ready availability, and low cost caused its use to continue to grow through the 1950s and 1960s even with the introduction of mainframe digital electronic computers. But after the handheld HP-35 scientific calculator was introduced in 1972 and became inexpensive in the mid-1970s, slide rules became largely obsolete and no longer were in use by the advent of personal desktop computers in the 1980s.
In the United States, the slide rule is colloquially called a slipstick.
Each ruler's scale has graduations labeled with precomputed outputs of various mathematical functions, acting as a lookup table that maps from position on the ruler as each function's input. Calculations that can be reduced to simple addition or subtraction using those precomputed functions can be solved by aligning the two rulers and reading the approximate result.
For example, a number to be multiplied on one logarithmic-scale ruler can be aligned with the start of another such ruler to sum their logarithms. Then by applying the law of the logarithm of a product, the product of the two numbers can be read. More elaborate slide rules can perform other calculations, such as square roots, exponentials, and trigonometric functions.
The user may estimate the location of the decimal point in the result by mentally interpolating between labeled graduations. Scientific notation is used to track the decimal point for more precise calculations. Addition and subtraction steps in a calculation are generally done mentally or on paper, not on the slide rule.
Most slide rules consist of three parts:
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Slide rule
A slide rule is a hand-operated mechanical calculator consisting of slidable rulers for conducting mathematical operations such as multiplication, division, exponents, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry. It is one of the simplest analog computers.
Slide rules exist in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear, circular or cylindrical form. Slide rules manufactured for specialized fields such as aviation or finance typically feature additional scales that aid in specialized calculations particular to those fields. The slide rule is closely related to nomograms used for application-specific computations. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not meant to be used for measuring length or drawing straight lines. Maximum accuracy for standard linear slide rules is about three decimal significant digits, while scientific notation is used to keep track of the order of magnitude of results.
English mathematician and clergyman Reverend William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. It made calculations faster and less error-prone than evaluating on paper. Before the advent of the scientific pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The slide rule's ease of use, ready availability, and low cost caused its use to continue to grow through the 1950s and 1960s even with the introduction of mainframe digital electronic computers. But after the handheld HP-35 scientific calculator was introduced in 1972 and became inexpensive in the mid-1970s, slide rules became largely obsolete and no longer were in use by the advent of personal desktop computers in the 1980s.
In the United States, the slide rule is colloquially called a slipstick.
Each ruler's scale has graduations labeled with precomputed outputs of various mathematical functions, acting as a lookup table that maps from position on the ruler as each function's input. Calculations that can be reduced to simple addition or subtraction using those precomputed functions can be solved by aligning the two rulers and reading the approximate result.
For example, a number to be multiplied on one logarithmic-scale ruler can be aligned with the start of another such ruler to sum their logarithms. Then by applying the law of the logarithm of a product, the product of the two numbers can be read. More elaborate slide rules can perform other calculations, such as square roots, exponentials, and trigonometric functions.
The user may estimate the location of the decimal point in the result by mentally interpolating between labeled graduations. Scientific notation is used to track the decimal point for more precise calculations. Addition and subtraction steps in a calculation are generally done mentally or on paper, not on the slide rule.
Most slide rules consist of three parts:
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