Mr. Shawlee was not merely a slide-rule sentimentalist in thrall to recollections of teenage geekdom. He argued that slide guidelines had intrinsic enchantment for a number of causes.
He noticed dignity, for instance, of their solidity and design. In a 1999 profile by The Occasions, Mr. Shawlee described slide guidelines as “the techno-guys’ model of a broadsword.” On his web site, the Slide Rule Universe, he contrasted them with digital know-how. “In 50 years, the pc you might be utilizing to view this webpage can be landfill,” he wrote, “however your trusty slide rule will simply be properly damaged in!”
To Mr. Shawlee, the misplaced sturdiness represented by slide guidelines belonged to a broader narrative of decline. “Once we used slide guidelines every single day again within the Sixties, we had been in a position to ship folks to the moon,” Mr. Shawlee advised The Journal. Chatting with The Occasions, he noticed, “Individuals who develop up with calculators don’t have any quantity sense.”
Joe Pasquale, a pc science and engineering professor on the College of California, San Diego, has taught lessons within the “historical past, principle and observe” of slide guidelines, together with a survey of “the best slide guidelines ever made,” as he put it in a course description.
In an electronic mail, Professor Pasquale defined the pedagogical worth of slide guidelines. Calculators have a tendency to exchange the human thoughts, requiring customers solely to punch in numbers and “blindly settle for” a outcome, resulting in a loss within the consumer’s personal potential to calculate — “and extra usually, suppose,” Professor Pasquale wrote. Whereas slide guidelines demand lively involvement, he added, “extending the thoughts’s calculating potential.”