I love slide rules. They are one of the most impressive non-electronic inventions of the last half-millenium. I don't have a K&E, which is supposed to be the gold standard of slide rules, but I do have a Lafayette that's older than I am. I also have an Isaac Asimov book on how to use slide rules (see below for almost-entertaining vignette).
As a former Army Air Defender, I like stories about military aircraft--after all, I trained to shoot them down. So when I saw this story about Russian "fighter pilots" using slide rules, I thought I should give it a read.
Something wasn't right, though. Read the first few paragraphs, did you catch any errors?
In the tense skies over Central Europe, where Russian and U.S. planes patrol opposite sides of the Belarus–Poland border, Russian military video shows their pilots using slide rules — raising the risk of accidental collisions or other midair tragedies.
Slide rules, which perform multiplication and division, and can calculate different logarithmic scales, largely disappeared from U.S. military bases and college classrooms in the early 1970s, replaced by pocket calculators. That’s why it’s surprising to see the Russians using them in 2021 while traveling hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of feet above a violent border dispute.
In the video, shot aboard a Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber and released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, a crew member appears to operate a slide rule for a calculation. The incident took place on Nov. 11 during “patrols” in which the nuclear bombers were escorted by a pair of Su-30SM fighters of the Belarusian Air Force, the ministry said in a statement.
First, a strategic bomber is not a fighter. Additionally, the person using the slide rule is clearly not the pilot. And later in the article, the "slide rule" referenced by the Air Force Academy spokesperson is not a mathematical slide rule, but a "slide-rule-style flight computer". *sigh*
Gotta love civilian journalists.
Vignette: At the first school at which I taught, staff meetings were held in the library. During one such meeting my attention wandered to the nearby books, including an Asimov book on slide rules. I looked through it and noticed that the last time it had been checked out, it was due on my 10th birthday. It was copyrighted the year I was born. After the meeting I took it to the librarian and asked if I could check it out, and she just coded the book out of inventory and gave it to me. A book does no good in a library if no one checks it out.
3 comments:
Hmmm…the picture in the linked article of the crewman looks like he’s using an actual let’s-do-math slide rule, but the Chair Force academy spokesman is clearly talking about a Jeppeson-style flight computer, like what just about every US civilian and military pilot has, and which no self-respecting pilot would call a “slide rule”. Sigh.
I’m in my 50’s, and my high school trig class (the highest math my high school offered) spent a few weeks on slide rules, and I still have one, but I never used it in real life - I got an HP-41CV before the senior year of my engineering undergrad, which is the Sistine Chapel ceiling of scientific calculators; I used it every day of my subsequent engineering career, until tools like MATRIXx and Matlab became commonplace in the early ‘90s. (I used a TI-58C that I got for high school graduation my first three years of college, until it cost me an A in one class because the display was tiny LEDs, with spherical magnifying lenses in front of them so you could sort-of actually see them, and the decimal point got lost in an final exam answer, in a class where the professor refused to give partial credit because “you don’t get partial credit in the real world”, which just shows you how stupid some professors can be.)
Sometimes I browse the used slide rules for sale on eBay and other sites though; “…an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
Sad aside from librarians. Did you know that most school libraries, in order to maintain their official status, must purge works ten years and older? Even if the book is a classic, they have to find a newer version of it. Before I retired my librarian had to get rid of all the encyclopedias, many art reference books (which I rescued) and numerous fiction and literature books by well known authors. It's wasteful. And who is to say older versions are not closer to the writer's original intent? Would you jettison a first folio of Shakespeare just because it was old?
When my current school got its most recent librarian, she determined that the "average publishing year" of the books in our library was the mid-80s (I don't remember the exact year). She began a purge--not necessarily to get rid of old books, but to get rid of books that students haven't checked out in forever. Some she gave away, others she sold--like a set of Shakespeare's works from the *18*90s. One of our English teachers paid well for that.
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