SLIDE, KELLY, SLIDE

Time was when engineers used slide rules to earn their living. Now, such instruments are quaint reminders of a bygone era. No one needs one, never mind two of them. This yarn describes why I happen to have that many and what purpose they may now serve. 4/22/2016

SLIDE, KELLY, SLIDE

Hoboken, my hometown, celebrated its 150^th birthday in March 2005 with a variety of events and activities, including a reenactment of the first organized baseball game played there in 1843, years before the 1870 founding of my alma mater, Stevens Institute of Technology.

Neither my purse nor my schedule permitted me to attend this event. Had I done so, I would have skipped the game and meandered around the campus reflecting upon the circumstances that led to my enrolling there and ultimately earning a Mechanical Engineering degree.

Stevens granted me a partial scholastic scholarship based upon my outstanding high school record. I had attained a grade of  90 or better in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Algebra, Plane and Spherical Geometry, Trigonometry, and Aviation Mathematics. I had made the honor roll every semester, easily passing Latin, Spanish and English classes with marks upwards of 100. However, these classes did not prepare me adequately to meet the rigorous grind of Stevens course work. The school prided itself on being called “The Old Stone Mill.” It wore down students.

   Today, Stevens mandates that entering freshmen have a computer. When I started, the tools I needed included a t-square, a box of drawing instruments, and a Log-Log duplex slide rule, preferably one made by Keuffel and Esser, the world’s largest manufacturer of such instruments, and whose plant happened to be located in Hoboken. I used that slide rule daily.  By the end of my senior year, it showed its age, battle-scarred and warped. The flap of its leather carrying case had disappeared along the way.

   I used this tool of the trade in the workplace until 1954. Then, my job duties switched from engineering to administrative and it went into dead storage where it remains, a quintessential white elephant.

A relevant joke: A man who lives in a Manhattan apartment refuses to buy a white elephant for $100, but when offered two of them for $150 exclaims, “Now you’re talkin’!”

   After moving to Arizona from California, Angie came to know a widow whose husband, Edward Kelly, had been the VP of Engineering for Chevrolet. When she learned of my engineering background, she gave me his K&E Log-Log duplex slide rule. Now you’re talking, said I, the proud owner of two useless relics of the past.

   To read a slide rule, one needs good vision. It provides answers accurate to two decimal places. Once, a classmate used it to solve a math question that had numerous twists and turns, but ultimately required only the multiplication of 2 x 2. Impishly, he wrote, 3.99, “slide rule accuracy.” Not funny, said the Prof, who gave him a zero on this question. You didn’t mess around at the old Stone Mill.

   My class will celebrate its 60^th Alumni Reunion in June 2010 without me. I had attended the 40^th Alumni Reunion in 1990 where I felt like a fish out of water, long removed from the engineering field.

   To illustrate the chasm that now exists between me and my peers, an old college chum and his wife visited me recently, their first trip to Arizona. They wanted to see the nearby community of Fountain Hills noted for the stream of water it pumps some five hundred feet into the air to attract tourists and home buyers. On the day of their visit, the display revealed a rainbow in its cascading flow.            

“How beautiful,” his wife remarked.

“I wonder how much horsepower it takes to pump the water that high?” he asked.

I had to restrain an urge to hit him over the head with both of my slide rules. That would be the best way for me to use them these days.                      

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