Own a Little Bit of Berkeley Physics History

Five foot slide rules? Brass and Wood balances? Bakelite Metering Equipment. This and more are up on the block as a result of UC Berkeley's physics department wanting to clear out old gear (they need the room). The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about auction. Apparantly, about 20 items will be auctioned in a "test the waters" sales this Sunday, and the balance of the 1000 pieces will be sold July 28th...

Comments

Re:Why?

[Rasta Prefect]

Why did they have a five foot slide rule? Such an item would be utterly pointless.

It's a teaching aid. We used to have one in my high school, hanging in the room where I had Calculus.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear god people, the larger the slide rule the
more accurate it is. IE more decimal places

Re:Whats a slide rule?

[Lars T.]

No. They were mainly used to multiply and divide using logarithms (by adding/substracting them). You have two rules with logarithmic scales on them, one of which you can slide against the other. When you want to multiply the numbers a and b, you line up the 1(.0) on the slide with the a on the fixed rule, and the result is on the fixed rule where b is on the slide. It works because log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b).