It’s time to bring back slide rules

I romanticize the ’60s. Bob Dylan is on continuous loop in my car.

My favorite Halloween costume as a kid was not the chess piece or Einstein, but the astronaut, complete with paper mache helmet.

I’m so attached to “Mad Men” that when I found out IU cable doesn’t have AMC, I swiftly downloaded it. Legally.

Ah, to return to that age of tailored clothing, social change, great music, and of course, slide rules.

Yep, slide rules. I’m sorry, but that scene in “Apollo 13” when the mission hangs in the balance while Tom Hanks does math just wouldn’t be as hardcore if the guys at Mission Control were gingerly poking their TI-89’s instead of whipping out slide rules.

Back in the day, slide rules were da bomb. One manual, published in 1961 by slide rule manufacturer Keuffel & Enser, was particularly enthusiastic: “A slide rule is a masterpiece of efficiency which, if correctly used, makes solutions to mathematical problems pop up as if by magic.”

Unfortunately for the 10-inch wonder, pocket electronic calculators were introduced in the early 1970s.

Calculators didn’t require lining up tiny markings or practicing locating numbers on a logarithmic scale.

And so The Reign of Terror of the Calculation Revolution began.

By the end of the nightmare, millions of innocent slide rules had gone the way of Robespierre, straight to the guillotine.

Now the species (Calculatorsaurus slide-rulius) is effectively extinct; only a few fossils remain.

An ingenious device, the slide rule works by exploiting a fact about logarithms: “The sum of logs is the log of the product.”

In other words, it translates multiplication into addition and division into subtraction.

Using a slide rule would change your perspective on calculation. Some things you learned in math and physics classes that seemed pointless would actually be extremely useful.

For instance, a slide rule does not tell you where to put decimal points.

Estimating the order of magnitude used would be part of the calculation, not just a double-check mechanism.

Scientific notation, which may seem like only a space-saving notation now, would make these calculations much easier.

My interest in slide rules began when my grandfather recently passed down to me his c.1942 K&E 4083-3S Log Log Duplex Vector slide rule.

Mahogany frame, engine-divided markings on a white celluloid face, orange sewed-leather case – it is a beautiful thing to hold in one’s hands.

The original Keuffel & Esser catalog advertises that this model would be “of particular value to electrical engineers,” which is appropriate since my grandfather got this rule when he was my age and studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois.

Vaguely resembling a dagger in a sheath, it even comes with a metal ring to hang it on your belt.

Now all I want to do is carry it around on my hip, like a monk’s rosary or Clint Eastwood’s .44 Magnum.

From now on, those inverse tangents better watch out, because I’m packing heat.
Go ahead, square root of 347, make my day.