NavList:

Brad,

I don't disagree very much with your analysis of the marine marketplace issues. I am not as surprised that mechanical slide rules devices didn't find widespread use in the Navy or merchant marine as I am that they didn't find more widespread use in aircraft applications. I don't think I can agree that economics were as relevant to the limited adoption among air navigators as you suggest.

As one piece of anecdotal evidence I offer another example of what the US Air Force was willing to spend in this regard. In 2008, D. Walden posted a link to information regarding the Fairchild-Maxson line of position computer (message 6151). That seems a better example of a device that clearly was limited by economics. I would venture that the development cost alone would have been enough to produce several thousand Bygrave/MH1 type slide rules. Clearly there was a market for a way to quickly reduce sights mechanically even if the solution was much more expensive than a set of printed tables.

From my understanding of the instrument, a Poor slide rule would have been about as quick to use as a Bygrave but the shorter effective length would have made solutions in the 5-10 arc minute range about the best that could be obtained. It looks to me like the Poor slide rules were produced more expensively than necessary and that alone may have been the downfall. However, by the post WWII years the navigating population knew that they had been put forward as a workable solution (all the post war Bowditch editions I've seen mention the device in the sight reduction section) and, I believe, someone could have mass produced them then for about the same cost as any of the circular slide rules that found widespread use in aviation for dead reckoning. Circular slide rules for dead reckoning calculations found almost universal adoption among aviators. What prevented someone from successfully entering the market with a Poor type slide rule for sight reduction?

I don't completely discount your argument about the differential in cost but I think the answer should more directly address the question of whether enough people were aware of these devices and whether they were give a fair trial by working navigators.

There's a popular but perhaps apocryphal story tossed around in marketing classes that the Betamax format for video tapes was "technically superior" to VHS. The story goes that Sony just failed to understand how to successfully market their product. I don't know much about either about video technology or the truth to this story but it serves as useful analogy to frame my ongoing questioning. Were the Bygrave, MH1 and Poor slide rules like the legendary Betamax - a nice bit of technology that never found the right champion to bring them to the marketplace - or were they given a fair chance and did they just fail to attract users from real practical shortcomings?

Chuck Griffiths

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