At one point in time, the slide rule was an essential tool in a physics/math/engineering education. Built and etched with high precision, they enable a skilled user to perform all sorts of mathematical operations with speed and ease. It’s the power of logarithms in a hand-held device.
Which, if you’re the sort of person who can master a slide rule, means you can also fully grasp the particulars of how one works.
It’s a smidge harder to get there with an everyday calculator. The gulf between the solid-state electronics inside one and the button-pressing interface is enormous.
Concrete blocks: 16″ long.
At one point in time, this beast was a handy demonstration device at the front of the lecture hall. Visible from way in the back, it lets an instructor illustrate proper slide rule use to an entire class at once.
Not that that happens much anymore, but this thing is awesome. If you found one back in the closet, you’d keep it handy, too.
For one lab, run once each academic year, we need about a half teaspoon’s worth of tiny polystyrene pellets, the kind that get pressed together to make the cheapest, crappiest, least environmentally friendly coffee cups around. Altogether, in a busy lab year, that’s still maybe a third of a cup. And we can recover some of them, because we filter everything before pouring the liquid down the drain.
And we’ve got enough of them sitting in storage to last a couple of lifetimes at this rate. Or to fill up a bean bag chair.
But do open with caution. Those little pellets want desperately to stick to everything, to get everywhere.
This odd-looking 8-inch globe occasionally comes out to illustrate the wobbly rotation of Earth’s precession, though it’s a pain to use and too small to see at a distance. Anymore, a gyroscope illustrates the concept more easily, so this old globe lives back in storage.
And when we say old, we mean it.
“Terrestrial Globe.”
Okay, we jest about the “terrestrial globe” part. We have one moon globe around here, plenty of celestial sphere globes, including a big, fancy one also by W. & A.K. Johnston at the Observatory. If you want one of your own, an antiques dealer in Portland, OR is offering one just like ours for $6,500.
It does note copyright, but with no date. So how old could this be?
Clues!
French West Africa existed from 1895 to 1958. Let’s begin with that range and see how much we can trim it down.
1895 | 1958
More clues!
French Indochina existed from 1887 to 1954, so now we’re at:
1895 | 1954
We’re guessing that the big pinkish smear of India is the British Raj, 1858 to 1947.
1895 | 1947
Siam existed well earlier than that – argue for whatever – but changed to Thailand in 1939, so that gets us to:
1895 | 1939
We’re probably missing clues, not being historians!
Persia brings some uncertainty, at least when used by a Scottish cartographer in the window we’re assuming, but let’s put the name change from Persia to Iran in about 1935. It’s a guess, but so is the rest of this.
1895 | 1935
Arabia is also a little vague, so we’re going to assign a range of 1902 (the return of Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and the capture of Riyadh from the Ottoman Empire) until 1930, the founding of the state of Saudi Arabia. We’re more confident about the latter date, but that’s the one that matters more.
1902 | 1930
Because we can also see Transjordan, the British-drawn territory which existed from 1921 until 1946. That further narrows our window to:
1921 | 1930
Shown: one big honkin’ nation-state.
At last, we have one very big clue: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Sure, we remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, but we know the globe’s older than that. We also know, from high school history class, that the U.S.S.R. came about following the Russian Revolution, which trims our earliest date to 1922.
1922 | 1930
So, an eight-year window, making this little globe about a century old. Probably. A lot can happen in a hundred years.
In great big boxes full of boxes, the toys begin to arrive. We stash them in corners, in front of other shelves, any place mostly out of the way before separating, sorting, packing, and distributing.
Three hundred yo-yos, Imperials and Butterflies, in an assortment of colors. Every box is full of surprises!
Remember slide film? Carousels and projectors and hauling out the big screen to see those vacation photos? Are you old enough to remember high school and/or college lectures on slides? The shop techs remember.
Nowadays everyone’s much more likely to use Slides than slides, of course. More portable, for the most part. Easier to edit, up until the last moment. Overall, a lot of advantages. But the old-school ones were pretty cool, too.
One can only hope that back in the days of the Audio-Visual Aids Department (we’re assuming they’ve been subsumed into L&IT, but not ruling out the possibility of a now-defunct academic department), they wheeled these – and film projectors, and VCRs, and hopefully LaserDiscs, too – into your classroom space on the classic steel cart. Embedded YouTube clips just aren’t the same.
This was a quality instrument, we’re supposing. Currently it’s a steel door, with its associated cabinet, apparatus, and everything else unaccounted for and presumed long gone. Any details associated with it have disappeared as well.
But check out that sticker! The Nuclear-Chicago Corporation made a variety of devices for nuclear radiation detection, although a cursory internet search reveals mostly hand-held items rather than cabinet-mounted equipment. Still, have a look through that fantastic mid-century aesthetic! Back in the days when uranium prospecting was what all the cool kids were doing.
They put out the model 2586 “Cutie Pie” in 1954. The Cutie Pie.
At any rate, Abbott Laboratories bought them out in 1964, so whatever device this accompanied goes back to sometime between 1954 – the name change to Nuclear-Chicago – and the 1964 sale. Should we ever stumble across the remains of it, rest assured we’ll make note of it.
Sometimes you just have to love the directness of the manufacturers of scientific apparatus and equipment. “Sensitive Research Instrument Corporation” is not, by any standards, snappy. But it is clear about their product line.
An accuracy guarantee of 0.25%, standardized by Louis Miller on 10/29/62. Charmingly hand-written on this label affixed inside the case. (Sadly, no one marked this one with the price.)
