People often fear (or dislike, or get stressed out about) change—in culture, in fandom, in fiction, in science… and they like to make their displeasure known. For the record, I find complaining that the inexorable passage of time has transformed fandom or other realities as ludicrous as assessing people by their preferences in slide rules… but I suppose shouting at clouds fills the empty hours.
Still, it must be said: slide rules are pretty cool and way important to the history of science fiction, as evidenced by the ray gun and slide rule toting space pirate on the cover of Astounding Science Fiction.
Like so many of us, I cut my teeth on a Pickett1.2 Pickett made fine slide rules and I still know where mine is. Hence you may be surprised to discover that the slide rule I have used most often was not one of my Picketts. It was this magnificent embodiment of the Cold War:
This circular slide rule was included in Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s popular children’s book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which along with classics like Hershey’s Hiroshima and Lapp’s The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, made growing up in the 1960s the delightful, carefree experience it was. Why fret over grades or fitting in with the school’s social hierarchy when at any moment a Russian bomber (or missile) might reduce one to a shadow on a wall?
Of course, as Effects and that delightful gem of a calculating device made clear, instant incineration is a fate only a small fraction of the casualties would enjoy. A few twirls of the slide rule drove home the fact that one was much more likely to be smashed by a falling wall or burn to death in a blazing building. If one was lucky, one might find a refuge in which to wait out fallout decay. (If one were even luckier, the refuge would be stocked with succulent neighbours.)
The one downside of Effects and resources like it is that they ruin works like On the Beach for informed readers. Fallout does not act as Nevil Shute has it act, nuclear bombs are a lot more expensive than he supposed, and while his tale of people grappling with their inevitable mortality is still engaging, one has to wonder why nobody tried to dig a fallout shelter. Familiarize oneself with the actual effects of nuclear weapons and the fictional accounts often disappoint.
Of course, authors could familiarize themselves with the facts of nuclear weapons before writing post-apocalyptic tales, but that might be asking too much.
Time marches on. We still live in a world where even now a Russian or American ICBM may be on its way to rearrange our living room whilst transforming us into a singed Jackson Pollock painting. It’s quite possible that some picayune dispute in the Middle East or Asia might balloon into a catastrophe that would leave us in a state of permanent Mad Max cosplay. That’s still true. What has changed is that books that were formerly only available on paper are now found online. My beautiful circular slide rule has been turned into software.
Alex Wellerstein did Effects’ slide rule one better by combining the models behind it with modern mapping software. No more wrestling with paper maps, measured lengths of string, and markers! Thanks to Nukemap, you can select a city, a yield, the effects that you want to track, then click detonate and, voilà! Results in less time than it would take for a thermonuclear detonation to bring the house down around you. It’s an addictive experience, as proved by the fact people have used the site over 177 million times.
Isn’t the future a wonderful place?
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Literally. My dad was a mechanical engineer and the toys provided to baby me included a slide rule. Kind of an odd toy, I guess, but a lot more fun than the razor turned out to be.
[2]Actually, he was composed mostly of water and some other materials, rather than being mechanical in any useful sense, but his field was mechanical engineering.
That is a perfect illustration.
@1: If pirates ever master the technologies of pockets or toolbelts, we’re all doomed!
2: Pockets are a frequent topic of conversation front of house at the theatre. The men’s usher shirts have pockets large enough to hold a flashlight, keys, or scanner. The women’s do not. We’re a half century post-Marilyn Hacker’s comments on pockets but women are still expected to make do without pockets. This astounds me far more than the absence of Moon colonies, antipodal passenger rockets or house-to-house baby hunts.
Was that illustration re-used for the paperback release? I know I’ve read that Leinster story in book form, and I think it had either that cover or a similar one.
Hmm… the internet suggests I’m probably thinking of the Ace Double, which had a somewhat similar cover, but without the slide rule: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10878503-the-pirates-of-zan-the-mutant-weapon
My dad too was an engineer and also passed down his slide rule to me. I still remember when he bought his first calculator, a TI, with *LED* display, and how much my mom complained about the cost. It’s a great time for me to dig it out as my own daughter is going into the third grade next year. I only hope I still have the little book for looking up the logarithms.
I loved how precise and smooth the sliderule felt. It was so futuristic to little me. When I studied engineering in my own turn, the instruments and tools I bought felt cheap and disposable in comparison.
About the only calculator I had with the same durability as a slide rule were my beloved HPs. Reverse Polish notation for the win! My HP11C died of old age but happily I was given a very convincing replica.
There have been lots of post-Apocalyptic role playing games over the years but Morrow Project had a fun twist where the Game Master got to allocate a fraction of the nukes that fell during the War. As I recall, they pointed out targets could include places like “towns where the GM was once given a speeding ticket.”
@3, Women have purses. Quite large purses. I don’t see how men manage with just pockets.
@8: when I go to cons, I carry a don’t-call-it-a-purse-but-it’s-totally-a-purse.
I have a Pickett (handed down from my father) around somewhere, which I took to my office in late 1999 and set on my desk with a note saying “Y2K Backup System”.
That’s not my everyday slide rule, though. (I have a slide rule with me at all times since one’s integrated into my watch bezel.)
That cover illustration has been reprinted many times, thanks to the wonderfully evocative spirit that Kelly Freas brought to all of his work. And it captures the spirit of the book it illustrates, where an inventor uses his creativity to win fortune, fame, and the hand of his true love.
I never owned a slide rule of my own until I went off to college, instead slipping downstairs when I needed to use my dad’s K&E. I used a plastic one during college, but instead of buying a better one when I graduated, I bought one of those newfangled calculators.
@8, @9. It’s a “Murse”, or “Man-purse”. Sometimes a camera bag or a messenger bag gets used that way.
I remember checking “Effects” out of the Dolley Madison library sometime in the late 70’s. When I went to check it out again later it was MIA.
My HP11C went on some Army field exercises with me, but it wasn’t as tough as a PRC-77, so it didn’t survive.
@2/AndyLove: The slide rule might fall out of the pocket during the climb. And it would take too much time to get it out in an emergency. When I go caving, I sometimes carry my flashlight in my mouth. I would never put it in my pocket.
@8/Roxana: Pockets are fine if you only carry keys and money. I was quite content with pockets when I was young. These days, I carry habitually keys, money, reading glasses, a smartphone, and sometimes an e-book reader. This means I need a bag or a purse now.
Aside from pockets (about which there is lots of feedback) our uniforms have to be uniform. This is why I have to wear a belt at work and not suspenders. Well, uniformity and the risk that since I have a beard and no social skills to speak of, suspenders would make people think I was a UNIX programmer.
Unless EMP turns out to be an unexpected hazard, in which case you’ll wish you had the slide rule version.
H-Bombs really took the fun out of international atomic exchanges. 100 kt on Kitchener at King and Victoria I could conceivably survive. 1 megaton and oh, well. Buildings down and on fire from Freeport almost to Erbville.
Funny story: we had to do speeches in grade seven. I came up with a really cool idea of doing one on what prompt effects a 1 MT airburst over Kitchener would have on my schoolmates, specific to each person and how far their house was from GZ, For some reason, my teacher nixed the idea.
@3 Gosh RPN Hewlett Packard that takes me back.All my engineering lecturers had them in the old PDP 10 days.
Slide rules in scifi films were shorthand for “boffin”. Just as spectacles on a woman made her “academic”. Now glasses are a fashion statement. But somehow slide rules never achieved this.
I stopped taking mine to nightclubs.
“The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon” by Ralph Eugene Lapp; there’s also a book Of same title of 1981, possibly British, that seems to be fiction about Vietnamese refugees. Whereas your one appears to be about Japan getting nuked again. And again and again. And FACTUAL.
@13: Pocket technology should include buttons or zippers to ensure no loss of contents (and the same for toolbelt technology). I agree that rapid access to a flashlight can be necessary, but it’s kind of hard to imagine a similar situation for a slide rule (even if the passcode to the ship’s computer is “arctan 2,” you’ll probably have time to take the slide rule out).
@13,
One uses a slide rule holster, not a pocket!
I used to have a very nice bamboo slide rule I got for being a student volunteer at the American Power Conference in 1972 or 1973. I also had a not-so nice plastic slide rule. The good one got stolen when my apartment was burglarized.
@6,
My HP-15C and HP-16C are still going after about 35 years. No TI crap for me ;)
I have wanted to buy a slide rule for a long time, in order to learn how to use one. They’re surprisingly expensive these days. Early in my search I learned that you can get a smart phone-based emulator but I couldn’t do that. It was just too damn meta for me.
@19: one thing I demand of a jacket is pockets inside and out, and at least some of them zippered.
I still have my Pickett stashed somewhere, but was lucky enough to find a fine 7′ K&E classroom demonstrator in a pile of scrap lumber at RISD. It hangs from the rafters in my kitchen now – tried to insert a photo here, but I guess I’m still too analog to make that work…..
@16 I find that this was a great idea
@7: This power explains why, in the backstory of Babylon 5, San Diego had been nuked.
very cool, love these forgotten books![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@13,JanaJansen, I’ve noticed how the amount of stuff one needs to carry around with you seems to increase with age.
When I was in middle school I acquired a circular slide rule that fit in my shirt pocket. It wasn’t as accurate as a real slip stick. But it fit in my pocket.
How did kids experience life in the ’50? There’s a clue in this ditty I wrote at the time. It was sung to the tune of Toot, Toot Tootsie Good-by.
Some old school SF rejected Terra and Terran in favor of Tellus and Telurian.
Tell, Tell, Tellus Good-by!
Tell, Tell, Tellus don’t cry!
The rocket ship that takes me
Away from you is fall-out proof so I ride safely.
Blow, Blow, Blow up and then,
Do it over again.
The Americans won.
They’re rare, not well done.
But while the Cold War lasted
They sure had lots of fun.
Tell, Tell, Tellus Good-by!
Tell, Tell, Tellus don’t cry!
@12/wiredog
Terminologically, there’s also “satchel” (Ford Prefect-style), “messenger bag” and “shoulder bag”, and reportedly fanny packs have made a comeback. I was ahead of the curve, carrying toys in a shoulder bag in the early ’80s before age eight — my mother called it a “man-bag”.
My constant travel-and-expo companion is an “excursion bag” in which I carry pens, pad, e-reader, tissues, toothbrush, hand-sanitizer, snacks, water bottle, binder clips, hand-towel (’cause I’m a hoopy frood), mirror (as a heliograph, obviously), flashlight and spare camera batteries (the camera itself is a compact, in a belt-pouch with magnetic closure). If classic SF has taught me nothing else, it’s that you might at any moment be swept away to another world, and those survival supplies are the difference between victory and eternal despotism.
I’ve never really used a slide rule; I get the idea, it’s obvious once you know what logs are, but calculators have been pocket-sized since only slightly after I was born.
My first real calculator was an HP-35, then one of the programmable scientific ones (don’t recall the model), then an HP-48 SX, and finally now I just use PCalc on my phone, which is a very convincing replica of the 35 in RPN mode, though it’s not as programmable as the 48. So for that I use Pythonista, which is a full Python interpreter including numpy, matplotlib, and a bunch of other serious programming libraries. Poor Slipstick Libby, anyone technical can make a program to solve any of his problems faster, with nice graphs, so nobody needs him anymore.
There’s a few older stories with pocket computers or wrist phones (my watch also does phone calls, and can run a subset of PCalc), but most utterly missed miniature portable computers with radio communication.
No matter how piratical I am, tho, I wouldn’t hold a glass phone in my teeth. Instead I have pants with many pockets, many shirts with a pocket or two, and a ScottEVest jacket with a dozen extra pockets.
@28 Fernhunter
As a child, I had only ever known of Terra being a name for earth and was endlessly confused by Doc Smith’s Tellus. I was undecided for years about whether that was a separate planet from the Earth or not and in those pre-Internet days had nobody to ask or discuss it with.
@@@@@ 31, vinsentient:
Tellus was an earth goddess, associated with agriculture and Ceres.
E. E. Smith was a chemical engineer, specializing in the commercial production of pancakes, doughnuts, pastry flour.
When the Doc wrote about Tellus and Tellurian, he may have had his tongue firmly in cheek.
Ah, yes . . . the mystical slide rule.
Both my mom and dad seemed quite proficient, and I was fascinated by the tiny numbers and the slip ‘n’ slide design long before I had a clue about its true purpose. I couldn’t wait until I *had* to use it for high school math. Unfortunately…as I discovered to my endless disappointment…one needed to actually be able to do some math in order to successfully use a slide rule, but apparently all the math genes from mom and dad had been apportioned to my siblings. So . . . the slide rule remains a mystery for me.
My dad had a tiny pocket slipstick, about four inches long with a clip on it, which he kept in his pocket protector with his pens and mechanical pencil. He used it for rough calculations. I’m not sure where it went. But I still own his slide rule tie clip, silver plated, and about two inches wide, which actually works.
I’m just a few years too young to have used the slide rule seriously – but I taught myself how to use one in 1977 or so, and have a couple of my own (including one my uncle gave me (who was old enough to use the them professionally)). I’ll need to get it out when I read “The Calculating Stars.”
My first experience with a slide rule was that very one from “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.” (It’s the only one I’ve ever used, actually, to much amusement.) Until this article, I had no idea that anyone else had even heard of that book, let alone seen or owned it.
As for calculator discourse, I’m a TI-86 person and have my original one from 22 years ago (bought for 8th grade in the summer of 1997) and a couple of spares since there isn’t an easy way to back up the internal memory to another computer in the days after Windows 98. (I’ve got 20 years of science and math class notes and programs on it; I’m not giving those up!)
@7 James:
Sort of a more personal version of what Steve Jackson Games did in their Car Wars/GURPS Autoduel setting: The limited US/Soviet nuclear exchange had a remarkable hit rate on places with competing game companies, (with Lake Geneva, Wisconsin getting special attention).
I still have (and sometimes even use) the Keuffel & Esser given to me by my dad!