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For about 350 years, humanity’s most innovative handheld computer was called the slide rule. Just as typewriters once symbolized writers, slide rules symbolized engineers.
These analog calculators were made of metal, wood, plastic, bamboo, etc. and could be found all over the world. Those functions included calculating higher-order multiplication, exponents, and logarithms, among other mathematical operations. They were usually elongated rectangles with a retractable central section and featured dense fields of letters, lines, and numbers stacked on top of each other.
It was so comically incomprehensible that it looked like it was being used as a paddle in a math fraternity ritual.
Non-nerds had a hard time understanding them. Then, in the early 1970s, lightweight electronic computers became widespread. The market for slide rules collapsed and production of new devices virtually ceased.
One day, about 20 years later, a middle-aged avionics engineer named Walter Shorey was rummaging through a drawer in his home in Kelowna, British Columbia, when he happened upon an old slide rule from his high school days. Ta.
It was a Keuffel & Esser pocket Deci-Lon, model 68-1130, with a slender ivory body and a delicate see-through cursor box. Both have stood the test of time. Shorey recalled saving up for six months to buy one when he was a teenager.
Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math gurus from decades past appeared on the site. Shorey’s inbox was flooded with emails. He began spending his eight hours a day researching, buying, repairing, and reselling old slide rules.
“Are we trying to corner the slide rule market?” his wife, Susan Shorey, nervously asked him, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2003.
Spectrum, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, determined in 2007 that Shorey had indeed “cornered the global market.”
“He’s Mr. Slide Rule,” a Texas engineer and slide rule enthusiast told the Journal. “Walter knows all the slide rule racket players.”
Shorey passed away at his home in Kelowna on September 4 of last year. He was 73 years old. The death was not widely reported at the time, and the New York Times only learned about it last month. His wife said cancer was the cause.
Mr. Shorey wasn’t just a slide-rule sentimentalist reminiscing about his geeky teenage years. He argued that the slide rule had an inherent appeal for several reasons.
He found dignity in its solidity and design, for example. In a 1999 Times profile, Shorey was quoted as describing the slide rule as “a techno guy’s broadsword.” He contrasted them with digital technology on his website The Slide Rule Universe. “In 50 years,” he writes, “the computer you’re using to view this web page will be in a landfill. But your trusty slide rule will be completely broken!”
For Shorey, the loss of durability represented by the slide rule belonged to a broader story of decline. “When we used slide rules every day in the 1960s, we could send people to the moon,” Shorey told the Journal. “People who grew up using calculators have no sense of numbers,” he told the Times.
Joe Pasquale, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, teaches a class on the “history, theory, and practice” of the slide rule, which includes an investigation into “the greatest slide rule of all time.” It says that there are. It is stated in the course description.
Professor Pasquale explained the educational value of the slide rule in an email. Calculators tend to replace the human mind, forcing users to simply type in numbers and “blindly accept” the results, leading to a loss of their own computational ability, and “more generally, the ability to think.” Yes, he wrote. A slide rule requires active involvement, but “expands the computational capacity of the mind,” he added.
Shorey was fortunate that a surprising number of people shared this opinion. In the early 2000s, he was making $125,000 a year repairing and reselling slide rules. The company paid for his two children to go to college and sent one to law school. His customer base is most organized in the Oughtred Society, a club named after William Oughtred, an Anglican minister widely credited with inventing the slide rule in the early 1620s. Ta.
Mr. Shorey’s website has developed its own subculture, with a network of slide rule fanatics from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia buying moldy items from old stationery stores, real estate sales, and school district warehouses on his behalf. I dug into it. Slide rule search. In Singapore, civil servant Fu Sheo Ming went to the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened boxes containing more than 12,000 slide rules of various types. Shorey called the discovery on his website “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Hu told the Journal that it was the “mother lode.”
Because government regulations prohibited him from making a profit on the product, Mr. Hu sold the slide rule to Mr. Shorey at a discount. “It’s all about the thrill of the hunt,” Fu told the newspaper.
Mr. Shorey’s inventory contained remarkable relics of the history of science. He provided a slide rule made for machine gun operators that could calculate wind, altitude, and range. He provided a slide rule for measuring metabolic rate, with different settings depending on age, gender, and height. And he used his website to explore the oddities of his slide rules, writing about slide rules built by the U.S. government to calculate the effects of nuclear bombs, for example.
“Do you want to know the optimal detonation height for the new nuclear weapon you just purchased?” Shorey asked in a mock sales pitch. “What about the temperature at the radius of the high-confidence kill zone, or the exact distance from the nuclear weapon that exploded just blocks down? While exposed to free ions and radioactive dust at approximately 1,300 miles per hour, these babies We can answer all your burning questions.β
The company also sold slide rule cuffs and slide rule tie clips, which were produced by major slide rule manufacturers as promotional items during what Shorey called the “golden age of slide rules.” Tie clips were so popular in the slide rule universe that Mr. Shorey started manufacturing them himself in partnership with a small foundry.
Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica whose many electronic devices could not withstand the cold. Photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (I like slide rules that clearly show different values ββin the same proportion). During an excavation, an archaeologist noticed that his calculator was collecting dust and stopped working properly. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer distributed slide rules as gifts during the exhibition. Slide rule enthusiast from Afghanistan and French Polynesia. And “the NASA guys,” Shorey told Engineering Times in 2000.
Walter Shorey II was born on November 27, 1949 in Los Angeles. His mother, Joan (Fulton) Shorey, played Sweet Sue, the all-female band leader who was a central character in Some Like It Hot (1959), and a recurring character in the film. She was an actress known for playing a certain Pickle Sorrel. “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (1961-66). His father was a hotel concierge and a painter specializing in seascapes.
At age 14, Walter worked at an electronics store and was an avid reader of magazines such as Electronics World. He studied engineering and mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, then dropped out. He held various jobs at the Volvo factory in Sweden, including as an assembly line welder, and founded Northern Airborne Technology, a successful aviation communications company, in Kelowna. He sold his company in 1992.
He then became a tinkerer and inventor for hire, helping to design, for example, a machine that gently applied labels to various fruits. He repaired and resold equipment such as signal generators, high voltage rectifiers, and cathode ray tubes.
He and his wife first met at UCLA and married in 1971. In addition to her, he is survived by his children Walt III and Rose Shorey, and her half-sister Angie Burshe.
When we visited the Shorey home, there were about 1,000 slide rules strewn about the dining table, Mr. Shorey’s home office, and the family’s sauna. “I know her wife wants the dining room back soon,” he told Spectrum.
Shorey said in a phone interview that thousands of devices are still in family homes. He says he plans to continue selling. As far as she knows, there’s no chance that a collector-expert-fixer-dealer-romantic like Mr. Shorey will ever appear in the “slide rule racket” again.
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