John Michael Greer -- The Archdruid Report
Jan. 3, 2007 -- When I sat down to start work on the three narratives of the deindustrial future that featured on The Archdruid Report in the last months of 2006, I didn’t know the first thing about slide rules. In the school district I attended, they went out of fashion just before I reached the math classes where they had previously been taught. My only exposure to them was in the form of a six-foot-long example, a former teaching aid, gathering cobwebs up near the ceiling in a forlorn corner of my junior high school math classroom. Pocket calculators were brand new and fashionable then. Like every other kid at my school, I learned how to make my TI-30 utter the one expletive in its limited vocabulary (punch in 7734 and look at the screen upside down) and blithely forgot about practicing arithmetic.
Curiosity is a powerful force, though, and once the slide rule surfaced as a bit of stage property in my stories, I decided that a calculator that didn’t require batteries or silicon chips might be worth investigating. A few inquiries revealed that most of my older friends still had a slipstick or two gathering dust in a desk drawer. That was how, last Saturday, I found myself being handed a solid aluminum Pickett N903-SE slide rule in mint condition. The Druid who gave it to me is getting on in years and has a short white beard, and though he makes a better double for Saint Nicholas than Alec Guinness, I found myself instantly inside one of the fantasies burned into the neurons of most of my generation:
”This,” Obi-wan Kenobi tells me, “is your father’s slide rule.” I take the gleaming object in one hand, my gaze never leaving his face. “Not so wasteful or energy-intensive as a calculator,” he says then. “An elegant instrument of a more sustainable age.” I press my thumb against the cursor, and...
Well, no, a blazing blue-white trigonometric equation didn’t come buzzing out of the business end, and of course that’s half the point. The slide rule is an extraordinarily simple, low-tech device that lets you crunch numbers at what, at least in pre-computer terms, was a very respectable pace. Even by current standards it’s not slow. I’ve only begun to learn the ways of the Force, so to speak, but after less than a week of practice I can already multiply and divide on my Pickett as fast or faster than I can punch buttons on a calculator.
Beyond its practical uses, however, the slide rule has more than a little to teach about what sustainable technology looks like. It is quite literally pre-industrial technology -– the basic principle was worked out in 1622 by Rev. William Oughtred, though it took many years of evolution after that to produce the handy ten-inch device with multiple scales that played so important a role in 19th and 20th century science and engineering. Set a slide rule side by side with an electronic calculator and certain points stand out.
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