Big Slide Rule – Hobart

The subject deserves the memorial. For three and a half centuries the slide rule was how engineering was done: logarithmic scales sliding against each other to multiply, divide, take roots and find logs, quickly, mechanically and without electricity. Every bridge, aircraft and rocket up to and including the Apollo programme was calculated on one. Then the pocket electronic calculator arrived in the early 1970s and the entire technology was obsolete within half a decade – one of the fastest and most complete extinctions of a tool in industrial history.

An enlarged one in a mathematics department is therefore closer to a museum object than a joke. It also functions as teaching equipment: a slide rule big enough for a lecture theatre to read is the only way to demonstrate one to a group.

Because it is inside a working university building rather than on public ground, access follows the institution, which is why this record is marked restricted.

Nobody wrote down the height and the installation date.