From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Walter Shawlee, the Sovereign of Slide Rules, Is Dead at 73   
   By Alex Traub, Feb. 8, 2024, New York Times   
   For about 350 years, humanity’s most innovative hand-held computer was   
   something called a slide rule. As typewriters once symbolized the writer,   
   slide rules symbolized the engineer.   
      
   These analog calculators came in metal, wood, plastic and even bamboo, and   
   they could be found all over the world. Their functions included computing   
   higher-order multiplications, exponents and logarithms, among other   
   mathematical operations. They were    
   usually long and rectangular with a retractable middle segment, and they   
   featured dense fields of letters, lines and numbers stacked on top of one   
   another.   
      
   They looked almost comically abstruse, as if they might be used as paddles in   
   the hazing rituals of a math fraternity.   
      
   Non-nerds struggled to make sense of them. Then, in the early 1970s,   
   lightweight electronic calculators became widely available. The market for   
   slide rules collapsed, and manufacturing of new devices essentially ceased.   
      
   One day, about 20 years later, a middle-aged avionics engineer by the name of   
   Walter Shawlee was looking through a drawer at his home in Kelowna, a midsize   
   city in British Columbia, when he happened upon his old slide rule from high   
   school.   
      
   It was a Keuffel & Esser pocket Deci-Lon, model 68-1130, with a slender   
   Ivorite body and delicate see-through cursor box. Both had stood the test of   
   time. Mr. Shawlee remembered that as a teenager he had spent six months saving   
   up money to buy it.   
      
   Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to   
   slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math whizzes of decades past came across   
   the site. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He began spending eight   
   hours a day researching,    
   buying, fixing and reselling old slide rules.   
      
   “Are you trying to corner the slide-rule market?” his wife, Susan Shawlee,   
   asked him nervously, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2003.   
      
   The magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,   
   Spectrum, determined in 2007 that Mr. Shawlee had, in fact, “cornered the   
   world market.”   
      
   “He’s Mr. Slide Rule,” a Texas engineer and slide-rule enthusiast told   
   The Journal. “Walter knows everybody in the slide-rule racket.”   
      
   Mr. Shawlee died on Sept. 4 last year at his home in Kelowna. He was 73. The   
   death was not widely reported at the time, and The New York Times was notified   
   about it only last month. His wife said the cause was cancer.   
      
   Mr. Shawlee was not merely a slide-rule sentimentalist in thrall to memories   
   of teenage geekdom. He argued that slide rules had intrinsic appeal for   
   several reasons.   
      
   He saw dignity, for example, in their solidity and design. In a 1999 profile   
   by The Times, Mr. Shawlee described slide rules as “the techno-guys’   
   version of a broadsword.” On his website, the Slide Rule Universe, he   
   contrasted them with digital    
   technology. “In 50 years, the computer you are using to view this webpage   
   will be landfill,” he wrote, “but your trusty slide rule will just be   
   nicely broken in!”   
      
   To Mr. Shawlee, the lost durability represented by slide rules belonged to a   
   broader narrative of decline. “When we used slide rules every day back in   
   the 1960s, we were able to send people to the moon,” Mr. Shawlee told The   
   Journal. Speaking to The    
   Times, he observed, “People who grow up with calculators have no number   
   sense.”   
      
   Joe Pasquale, a computer science and engineering professor at the University   
   of California, San Diego, has taught classes in the “history, theory and   
   practice” of slide rules, including a survey of “the greatest slide rules   
   ever made,” as he put    
   it in a course description.   
      
   In an email, Professor Pasquale explained the pedagogical value of slide   
   rules. Calculators tend to replace the human mind, requiring users only to   
   punch in numbers and “blindly accept” a result, leading to a loss in the   
   user’s own ability to    
   calculate — “and more generally, think,” Professor Pasquale wrote.   
   Whereas slide rules demand active involvement, he added, “extending the   
   mind’s calculating ability.”   
      
   It was Mr. Shawlee’s good fortune that a surprising number of people shared   
   these views. In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and   
   reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to   
   college, and it sent one of    
   them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the   
   Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican   
   minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early   
   1620s.   
      
   Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of   
   slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr.   
   Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and   
   estate sales and school    
   district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant,   
   Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened   
   crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website,   
   Mr. Shawlee called the    
   find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal   
   that it was “the mother lode.”   
      
   Prohibited by government regulations from turning a profit on the goods, Mr.   
   Foo sold the slide rules to Mr. Shawlee at a discount. “It’s all in the   
   thrill of the hunt,” he told The Journal.   
      
   Mr. Shawlee’s inventory included remarkable artifacts of science history. He   
   offered a slide rule made for machine gun operators, with calculations for   
   wind, elevation and range. He offered a slide rule for measuring metabolic   
   rates, with different    
   settings for age, sex and height. And he used his website to explore recondite   
   points of slide rule-iana, writing, for example, about slide rules made by the   
   U.S. government for calculating nuclear bomb effects.   
      
   “Need to know the optimum burst height for that new nuke you just bought?”   
   Mr. Shawlee asked in a mock sales pitch. “How about the high confidence kill   
   zone radius, or temperature at some exact distance from the nuclear weapon   
   that just went off    
   down the block? These babies can answer all those burning questions as you get   
   flambéed into free ions and radioactive dust at about 1,300 m.p.h.”   
      
      
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