Slide rule

This rather specialist post will interest those over 70 or with an interest in the history of technology. As it has happened in my lifetime and I’ve been much involved I’ve chosen to write about it. A slide rule is a rather simple device consisting of a ruler marked in logarithmic numbers with a sliding central portion also marked logarithmically and with a sliding transparent bar on the outside of the ruler ( the cursor with a marked line ). This device enables multiplication and division to be done approximately but quickly. It also, depending on the complexity of the rule, enables other calculations such as reciprocals, squares, cubes and others.

It works simply as a way of adding or subtracting logs or otherwise manipulating them.

When I was a young man the slide rule was the mark of the professional scientist or engineer. It enabled quick approximate calculations which could be followed up if necessary by more precise calculations.

I was started early by the gift of a six inch slide rule by a distant relative. I was very proud of it. My second ( maybe third ) cousin Jarve was an engineer with Dorman diesels at Stoke. His actual first name was Jarvis; a name I’ve never seen elsewhere. We lived near several relatives and he would arrive for a few days visiting all in turn. Toys were in short supply in the post war years and he had made things like a model farmyard for me when I was younger. I was about 11 when he gave the slide rule and fortunately could follow the instructions to get what seemed rather magical results. It was not really acceptable at school, certainly not until sixth form, which required laborious but precise calculation.

Most professional slide rules were 12 inches and I felt very much a second class citizen in the sixth form until on visiting Birmingham with Annette on our first day out together I took the plunge and bought the cheapest 12 inch rule available. Really all gave similarly approximate results but more expensive rules were had more scales and were made of better materials.

I used this new rule all through my undergraduate days. Even during my industrial experience with Bostik, calculations were done on rotary calculators which were simply large  slide rules wound into a cylinder; ours was equivalent to about 36 inches I recall. The accuracy was felt to be sufficient for our purposes. I remember being slightly surprised. The slang name for a slide rule was guessing stick.

When I started into a fairly prosperous lab in the late 60’s electronic calculators were just starting to replace large mechanical or electromechanical calculators. At first these were the size of large typewriters and rather expensive. I recall agonising whether our budget could stretch to a calculator which would compute square roots. With hindsight whatever we decided our purchase was premature

Within a very few years electronic calculators fell rapidly in price and size. As a research student at a poor institution I was reduced to old fashioned mechanical calculators for a while. At the rich company there were even calculators with programmable memory and even memory storage. These latter were expensive and demanded programming in machine code. I wasted many hours programming. I had little success with high level languages like FORTRAN but this seemed like fun.

 Meanwhile slide rules became things of the past. By the time my children were into their teens I found somewhere selling off slide rules at ridiculously cheap prices.  I bought several  but my children were not interested. A fairly cheap electronic calculator would produce accurate and precise calculations for a few button presses and they were quite uninterested in anything else.

Tidying up I came across my cache of bargain slide rules. I tried Alice ( 11 ) and Ben ( 8 ) and they showed some interest. I made the mistake of showing them the most complex and they  found the range of scales confusing. They have taken the ruler away but whether they will ever use it I doubt. They are true members of the  digital generation and a bit of engraved plastic pales before their tablets and games consoles.

Slide rule picture

Various: Darwin, Book Club

Darwin and Lamarck

Darwin and Lamarck were nearly contemporary.. Both had ideas about the overarching structure of all life. Lamarck thought life changed by conscious changes passed on to children whereas Darwin thought that gradual evolution led to increasing chances of survival with the survivors outbreeding the less suited .The difference is clearer by an example. Lamarck thought that a giraffe had a long neck through preceding generations trying to reach higher with that passed on to their children. Darwin thought that giraffes that fortunately had long necks could reach higher, feed better and outbreed those that couldn’t.

We now know that evolution by natural selection, the Darwinian view, is correct and a huge mass of data supports its truth. In contrast Lamarck was wrong and that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. This contest was decided in the 19^th century with in fact the main opposition to Darwin coming from creationists.

There was to be a curious repeat of the 19^th century controversy in the 20^th century. For some reason Lamarck was held to be in line with Marxist-Leninist philosophy and Soviet scientists were instructed to adhere to its teaching. Much fruitless effort was expended trying to show the effect of acquired characteristics. This was unsuccessful and the futility of trying to use political thinking to influence scientific truth was shown ( Trump could draw a lesson from this ). Darwinian ‘s evolution by natural selection has been stunningly successful in explaining much.

Ironically Lamarck’s ideas recently seem to apply in some small and limited circumstances. The study of DNA, the molecule which lays down life’s recipe, has shown that it can be modified. This area is very much the subject of ongoing work and we can expect developments.

Village Book Club

One of the few organisations I still attend is our village book club. I feel a certain responsibility as I’m almost the only villager left as a member and I nominally organise it. I say nominally as a member collects and returns our book to the local library. We take our books mainly from the reading group sets provided by Staffordshire County Library. Occasionally, perhaps twice a year, we decide on a book outside the sets and rely on every member to procure a copy.

We occasionally arrange events outside the normal monthly meetings. The latest was to attend the film about Freddy Mercury at Tamworth open air pop up cinema.

Our latest meeting was absolutely extraordinary. Over the years we have come to know quite a bit about the personal life of members. Quite a bit of the interest in the club has come from hearing about the latest events. We were both pleased and rather sad that a stalwart member has taken a job in, and is moving to Paris. We were able to toast her success and wish her well.

Less good news came from two others. One is splitting from her husband after thirty five years. Another after just becoming a grandmother which she was thrilled about finds that baby’s father is leaving her daughter. Newly retired and a divorcee herself she was settling down to enjoy her lively hobbies and interests and now she is faced with helping her daughter over the shock of the separation. Naturally both were eager to talk about their troubles so there wasn’t much book discussion. Hopefully this discussion was therapeutic.

In the midst of all this I was reluctant to share the surprise news that our elder daughter is to marry again( her second marriage ) next year.

Still the next meeting saw a former member re-join. She had left to look after grandchildren while her daughter was treated for cancer. She was also able to say her daughter’s treatment had been successful and , as she put it “I’ve got my life back”

Internet

There is no doubt that the transforming introduction in society during my lifetime has been the internet. To be strictly accurate I’m mainly talking about the web which is part of the service carried by the internet. Of course the internet was enabled by the fast evolution of microelectronics. When I was a young man electronics was enabled by electronic valves. These must seem items from a bygone era as they were glass vacuum tubes which enabled electric current through them to be controlled.

When I was still a young man ( I guess in the 60’s ) the transistor introduced solid state electronics. This enabled valves which were large, expensive, power hungry and inflexible to be replaced by components which were none of these things. However transistors were discrete devices and to begin with were largely used to replace valves. From a consumer perspective radio evolved from a large heavy appliance tethered to a power lead to a portable battery powered one. I well remember having a transistor radio in the early 60’s listening to music in a park. In fact the “trannie” radio became a badge for some young people, carried on the shoulder, speaker to the ear.

Very quickly ( or so it seemed to an outsider) transistors were being put together on a silicon mount to make integrated circuits containing many transistors which have since evolved with great rapidity. Computing power grew quickly and became much cheaper.

The other enabling technology for the internet was rapid evolution of telephones. When I was a young man telephoning was quite expensive. Satellite telephony enabled some advance but it was the widespread use of optical fibre which made a massive difference. Instead of one wire per call in a big bundle an optical fibre carried the equivalent of many, many wires.

The internet then used these plus another novel idea. This was packet switching. Instead of the conversation being continuous down one wire effectively information was chopped up into small pieces each one carrying the address of its destination. These could travel any route through the telephone network being reassembled at their destination to reform the original. This made much more efficient use of telephone networks although demanding a lot of computing power to route and reassemble them. This became available at reasonable cost with microelectronics.

After universal standards were written the world wide web was introduced on the internet. Like Martin I was fascinated by microcomputers. His university had a large open access lab containing machines linked to the nascent internet. At that time ( early 90’s ) the internet was being discussed but was rarely available. I didn’t have access anywhere else. Using this lab I was astounded to be able to post a message ( about the TV series Northern Exposure ) and get a  response from someone in the US.

I was immediately a fan.

I was on a telecommunications working group in Castrol and an experience day was organised with BT setting up temporary lines at the HQ in Swindon. I made great use of this and was convinced of its utility for the company. My enthusiasm ( and many others) was however insufficient to convince the company IT department. Even after I joined a European wide ( EU organised ) research group I couldn’t use email like most others but was reduced to faxes.

At that time the only way an individual could use the internet was by ADSL, an early method of using the existing telephone wires. Frustrated at work when I left on retirement at the end of 1996 I purchased a modem, registered and paid a service provider and got connected. Although I got the fastest possible home connection at that time it was still painfully slow. Most of the source servers were in the US and I soon learned that the best time was when the US was asleep.

I was very pleased ( and not a little surprised ) when fibre broadband came to our village. We were the lucky spin off from an exchange upgrade at a nearby town. Not long before we had the great frustration of a new backbone cable between two local towns passing outside my house but no access of course.

The full internet benefits are getting to be beyond me now- I don’t use Instagram, Snapchat. Tik-Tok etc which seem so popular. The one newer application I do use is What’s App where we have a family group ( only immediate family ) useful for keeping in touch. I have used internet banking for a long time and only recently have had trouble with changed security arrangements. This is more an irritation than a real problem.

Unlike most people nowadays I still do most of my internet transactions on a desktop computer rather than a smartphone.

It was Arthur C Clarke who said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If  I had been told about a smartphone when I was at school I would have thought it magical.

I now spend a lot of time on the internet, very little of it on social media, roaming around while comfortably seated at my desk. I can readily keep abreast of many of my interests without moving from my house. I was thrilled to watch the Falcon Heavy rocket launch in real time.

Coal Miner

I am the son of a coal miner. Nowadays there is a sentimental view of mining communities. You will know the TV picture, one for all and all for one , living in terraced houses, listening to the colliery brass band, going to the miners social club. Perhaps once a year going to Durham Miners Gayla ( Gala ) to listen to socialist speakers and parade with the union banner. Well my life was nothing like that at all. I strongly suspect the popular view, or at any rate the TV view, is sentimental drivel.

I don’t claim my view of mining is anything but one person’s sight. I grew up in a community that was some miles from a coalfield and although many miners lived there is was more of a rural community based around farming and the land. We were even more distanced from mining by living about a half mile from the nearest village among just a couple of houses. There was none of the TV rubbish about a tight knit community.

My father had started as a miner as a young man ( I think you had to be 21 to work underground ). This was in the 1920’s; a good well paid job for a fit young man with no skills. As time wore on  that fitness eroded. While miners were exempt from conscription the wartime pressure was high which resulted in my father’s health cracking up in the late 1940’s. After many months “on the box” as he called being off work, he was transferred to lighter work on permanent afternoon shift. This shift was devoted to repair and replenishment as it was day and night shifts which produced coal. My father referred to afternoon’s as “the old men and cripples shift”

By this time my father was embittered at his loss of pride and yet for an unskilled labourer there was little alternative. He had never taken any interest in miners social life. He was friendly with some but rather despite the mining connection than because of it. One friend he would accompany on driving lessons. This was absolutely bizarre as he couldn’t drive although he held a full driving licence because he was an early motorcyclist. This meant he had a full licence and could legally accompany a learner driver.

At that time in the 40’s and 50’s Britain was even more class ridden than it is today. In the social hierarchy miners were at the bottom.  This he felt very keenly although I have to say that with only one exception it never impinged on me. It was unfortunate that the exception was the snobbish head of my secondary school. Looking back he didn’t do me much harm in the long term although he certainly tried.

Shortly before my father retired we moved to a small town. Part of  the motivation was to be near the mine where he worked. When it closed he retired. There were many miners in the town. Although there was a thriving miner’s social club he always declined to join; in fact I doubt he ever entered it. He did however make friends in the mining community although the fact they were miners was incidental to some other facet of their life.

I have been trying to understand my father’s attitude. He always felt outside the main run of miners who he thought were less individualistic and less inclined to think for themselves. He wasn’t a clubbable man, very rarely going to a pub. I wouldn’t say he looked down on fellow miner’s but rather he saw himself as to one side.

I never had much career advice from my father but the one thing he was adamant about “ I don’t care what else you do, but don’t go down the pit “.

Looking back at that time I find it astounding there are no deep mines left in Britain. The North Warwickshire coalfield was still thriving when I was a boy  with 4 mines around the small town where we moved in 1960.

I married a miner’s daughter  because she was the girl I fell for, although I have to admit it did make our courtship a bit easier than it might have been to have somewhat similar backgrounds. Although he worked all his life in the coal industry my father-in-law always worked on the surface ending up as winder; that is controlling the colliery lifts..

What happens to duck’s before they grow up?

They grow down.