Posts Tagged ‘slide rule’
“Tools have their own integrity”*…
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”
“He’s a pinball wizard”*…
Mark Frauenfelder talks with Tanner Petch, the creator of play-able pieces of art: an arcade full of handmade pinball machines…
Sinkhole is a backwards game that borrows from the aesthetic of early pinball, particularly “wood rail” games from pre-1960s. The fact that it tilts away from you changes your experience a lot more than you’d expect and came from trying to question what were some of the very core aspects of pinball that could be tinkered with. In addition to the wooden components, the art style, playfield design, and overall theme were inspired by the esoteric nature of early games (at least compared to what we expect today)…
Prometheus was the first game I made and is based on the part of the myth where an eagle eats Prometheus’ liver every day after it regenerates. In the game, the player is the eagle, and the only objective is to hit four drop targets which represent four bites of the liver. You do this as many times as you want to, or until you lose. Rather than an individual score, the display shows the cumulative number of livers eaten as long as the machine has existed…
More at: “Check out Tanner Petch’s weird homebrew pinball machines” @tpetch via @Frauenfelder in @BoingBoing
* The Who, “Pinball Wizard,” Tommy
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As we finesse the flippers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35, a calculator with trigonometric and exponential functions. The model name was a reflection of the fact that the unit had 35 keys.
It became known as “the electronic slide rule”– a device that it (and its successors, from both HP and TI) effectively replaced.
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