(Roughly) Daily

And now, thanks to Theodore Gray, they have their own taxonomy…

… The arrangement follows loosely the characteristic of the regular periodic table: tools with similar functions in each column, getting heavier as you move down the rows. The diagonal line between metals and non-metals on the right side becomes a line between drills and wrenches. The fiery 17th column, the halogens, is a column of tools that use heat, including soldering, welding, casting, and 3D printing…

Find a zoomable version here. See (and buy) this beauty and his other posters and books here.

And for a satisfying companion piece: “Let a Hundred Mechanisms Bloom,” a lovely celebration of 19th Century apple parers.

* Vita Sackville-West

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As we do it ourselves, we might spare a thought for Edmund Gunter; he died on this date in 1626. A clergyman, mathematician, geometer, and astronomer, his mathematical contributions included the invention of the Gunter’s chain, the Gunter’s quadrant, and the Gunter’s scale.

But he is best remembered for creating the forerunner of that once-ubiquitous tool, the slide rule (IYKYK)…

Known as Gunter’s Rule, or simply a “Gunter”, [it was] the invention of Edmund Gunter (1581-1626), a London scholar and contemporary of John Napier, the Scottish inventor of Logarithms. Napier published he first table of logarithms in 1614, and armed with it one could replace multiplication and division with addition and subtraction of the equivalent logarithms — a clear benefit if you have to calculate by hand, as they certainly did in the 17th century. Still, it was one boring and laborious task, which Gunter did away with.

Gunter’s rule has many scales, but the revolutionary one is the one marked “NUM”, which has the numbers from 1 through 100 laid out as a two-cycle logarithmic scale. Now, instead of looking up the logarithms in a table, adding them and looking up the result of the multiplication, all you had to do was use a pair of dividers to add the lengths representing the two multiplicands on the NUM scale; the result could be read right off the same scale.

The true slide rule, invented by William Oughtred shortly afterward, is simply a pair of Gunter scales juxtaposed to allow adding the lengths without the dividers.

“Gunter’s rule”