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
Dunno how I’d have reacted during my teenage years, but today I’d sit down and listen with full attention if he explained the inner workings of a mechanical calculator… Which I might have to watch a video of now. Fuck you for instigating my curiosity!
Looking online it looks like it might have been a Curta mechanic calculator, because I remember he said it could add, multiply, and subtract, but not divide
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.
I’m just old enough that one of my high school teachers had a giant slide rule mounted at the top of the chalkboard. He was as quick with that as we were with our calculators.
He did show us how to use it, but we never practiced.
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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
Dunno how I’d have reacted during my teenage years, but today I’d sit down and listen with full attention if he explained the inner workings of a mechanical calculator… Which I might have to watch a video of now. Fuck you for instigating my curiosity!
Looking online it looks like it might have been a Curta mechanic calculator, because I remember he said it could add, multiply, and subtract, but not divide
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dKN6XatdVkY
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.
I’m just old enough that one of my high school teachers had a giant slide rule mounted at the top of the chalkboard. He was as quick with that as we were with our calculators.
He did show us how to use it, but we never practiced.