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I remember our maths teacher once brought to school a mechanical calculator to impress us, and we were all like “uhh, sir? what is this even”
I can’t remember his reaction to our lack of enthusiasm at the time, but I often think about that marvel of engineering and what he tried to share with us
One of my teachers brought in a slide rule but didn’t teach us how it actually worked, just talked about its history for a while. It got to me because I actually was excited, and I wanted to see it in action.
If anyone is wondering, slide rules use logarithms to turn addition into multiplication and subtraction into division. So think about how you would do addition with two rulers, if you were adding 2+3 you would line up the rulers so that the 0 on one was at the 2 on the other. Then you would see that the 3 on that one would be lined up with the 5 in the first ruler. If you follow that procedure in a slide rule then you will have done multiplication instead.
This is a great explanation for someone who hasn’t used one, thank you :)
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