Going through Engineering School with a slide rule was the norm prior to about 1975. Since there were no affordable calculators, we just did it. I’m thankful for that ingrained, second nature training it provided to work out the calculations.
The instructions for my K&E, originally my Father-in-Law’s, was printed in 1945. The Pickett in 1960. The Post that I purchased in my first year of College in 1966 I no longer have the instructions to.
The bottom guide of the slide for the K&E is broken, but otherwise functions. The Post is in perfect condition, and bends automatically when I tilt my glasses. The metal Pickett seems to be indestructible, and the plastic piece of crap has a cracked slide window.
@Latexman: my 12.5" Post Versalog extends to 22". Does that count?
And I think the first hand held calculator I saw in the engineering office where I worked was around 1971. I purchased a simple one a couple years later, and my first real engineering handheld in 1980 with the HP41 series. I still use its child, the HP41C today. My brother-in-law still has an HP35 with the gold circuitry - a real heavy calculator for its size. He used to be an EE with Hewlett Packard, but is now retired.
My high school physics teacher, who had taught me advanced chemistry the year before, and had been a Pratt & Whitney mechanical engineer, held me after class the first day of physics (in 1989) and tossed a case and a book on his desk. He said “You finish my tests too fast, you have to use that this year.” It was a slide rule and a book on how to use it.
I learned to appreciate the importance of significant digits and scientific notation, and the power (no pun intended) of exponents and logarithms. It was a fantastic learning experience, and by the end of the year I had gotten faster at the tests than most of the students using calculators. I’m thankful he did that.
Yeah, he changed my life. I thought I was going to be a wildlife biologist.
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After Mom and Dad passed and us four kids started going through their stuff, I found they had kept the Texas Instrument SR-50 (“slide rule calculator”) I bought the second half of my senior year of high school (1975):
I could NOT buy it earlier because Mr. Phillips, who taught Physics and Chemistry, made us use a real slide rule the first half of the year.
I had no idea Mom and Dad hung on to this so long. I was amazed!
It was my first engineering calculator. 
My God, it’s 44 years old! 
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Sliderules were common when I started engineering and it wasn’t for 2 or 3 years before electronic calculators became available. Our Grade 12 Physics teacher did not permit the use of them… he figured we didn’t know how to use them.
I was helping my grandson with his Grade 12 Math and I asked him about sliderules… he had never heard of them. They no longer taught logarithms. My common calculator is a graphing TI Nspire CX CAS… does just about everything but talk to me… programmable, but with two serious limitations… you cannot plot a line from P1 to P2 and you cannot call a function from within a function. BIG handicap… My backup is an HP 48GX with memory… I don’t have a problem with RPN and Algebraic logic for keystrokes.
I still have my 4 sliderules, and showed a couple to my grandson and explained how they worked. My sliderules include a 6" Hemi (bamboo) that I used because the 10" one was too slow to use.
Dik
@Ron,
It taught me the importance of significant figures. Modern day calculators and computers report results to great precision, but in most engineering applications, the input is no better than slide rule accuracy, i.e. two, maybe three significant figures.
You might have added that the output of 3 decimal figures is likely OK for most stuff.
Dik
@dik,
We would read the slide rule to three significant figures and recorded results the same way. As you said, good enough for most problems.
It reminds me of a lecture in soil mechanics by R. M. Hardy in my third year of engineering at the University of Alberta. He was smoking a cigarette with a very long ash nearly ready to drop on his dark blue vest as he performed a calculation with his slide rule. He pronounced “1.99, close enough to 2” then paused and said “By God, it is 2” as he noticed a simplification in the expression he had written on the board. Then the ash fell. Thunderous applause followed.
@BAretired…your post reminded me of my statics and dynamics professor. Back then, students and professors could smoke in class. The professor was a chain smoker and he smoked all through the lectures. He would place the finished butts standing up on the edge of the lecturn. It was like a clock to us. When he finished the 6th one, class was usually over!
I recall the late Dr. Ken McLachlan from the U of Southampton picking up his sliderule and with a ‘faked’ German accent doing a calculation. He’d say, " Und two times two equals three decimal nine eight, ve’ll say four."
Ken was one of the exceptionally bright engineers I’ve encountered.
Dik
I can’t access the links you posted, so may be the following this link is double (virtual slide rule)
http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-es.html
I have never used a slide rule.
I hadn’t ever seen a slide rule in real life until I was around 22 years old. I found it among my grandmother’s possessions after she passed (I believe it belonged to her father). I kept that one for a while with a little pamphlet on how to use it for sentimental reasons, but I’m not sure if I even have it anymore.
Thanks. The links are broken, because “In June 2019, ThinkGeek announced that it would be discontinuing its online store, and integrating its e-commerce operations into a “curated selection” of GameStop’s online operations.”
Recently have gone down a Rabbit hole of learning about, collecting, and using slide rules.
They are wonderful tools and being from a generation that had computers and calculators at our disposal have found myself starting to get a better handle on order of magnitude of results mentally.
One use I have daily is scaling documents can easily set a constant ratio with the C and D scales and along with CF and DF you can have a measurement key for any arbitrary scale.
If anyone has an interest the international slide rule museum website is currently running an “adoption” program, selling off duplicates to raise funding, several popular models are available.
https://sliderulemuseum.com/ISRM_FundRaiser.htm
Edit:
Recently found reference to a concrete beam slide rule, http://www.sliderules.info/collection/specialised/9917-aristo939.htm
In my Advanced Math class as a senior in high school (1975), Mr. Eagle had a slide rule that was about 5-6 feet long that hung in front of the class so he and others could demonstrate how to use a slide rule. Did anyone else have this big demonstration model slide rule in school?
Use a slide rule… of course. Bought mine, a top of the line Pickett N4-ES as a college freshman in 1966. Had to teach myself how to use it… quickly. Engineering students were expected to already know how to use a slide rule… but small town southern public high schools did not teach that type thing.
Took the EIT with the Pickett in 1969, worked my fist job with it, and the PE in 1974. Obtained a basic calculator (Texas Instrument Model SR-10) in early 1974. On the PE exam, that calculator was of limited value. Not only could it perform only a little more than the arithmetic, but the rechargeable battery was good for “4 to 6 hours”. With nowhere to recharge at lunch time, had to “ration” calculator time (for power reasons) during the 8 hour exam. Switched it on only to do the addition and subtraction that a slide rule cannot perform; used the Pickett for everything else.
Still have the Pickett, pull it out every now and then for a demonstration.
Here is virtual Picket N4-ES, try your had at, say, taking the fifth root of 4,573.
Lesson Learned: Maintaining Sharp Instincts