NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: James F. Campbell
Date: 2013 Mar 27, 17:32 -0700
To those born after 1970, the thought of sending someone into space with a slide rule seems ridiculous, but, to early Apollo crews, the mere thought of going up without one would have been a good enough reason to scrub a launch. Slide rules (the Pickett N600-ES Dual Base Log/Log to be precise) were compulsory equipment during the first five trips to the moon; in fact, Neil Armstrong probably determined the distance between one step for man and a giant leap for mankind by using his trusty pocket-size Pickett. Prior to 1972, no feat of modern engineering was undertaken without a slide rule. The space shuttle, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the atomic bomb, the Panama Canal, and the Empire State Building (which, by the way, survived a head-on collision with a 10-ton B-25 bomber in 1945 with nary a tremble) were all conceived and completed using a slide rule, an instrument invented in the early part of the 17th century
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