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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...
I was just thinking how much i wanted to learn how to use a slide rule.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
When they start selling the stuff owned and used by the nobel prize owners, then I'll pull out my wallet
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--E.C. Stanton
Why did they have a five foot slide rule? Such an item would be utterly pointless.
The only advantage that slide rules have over log tables is the speed with which they can be used, but a five foot slide rule would be far too cumbersome for easy use anyway.
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This is great... but I believe LSD loses its potency after sitting around in those dusty basements for so long...
Maybe I can find an already built potato cannon for sale :)
I sure prefer science-related antiques to crumbly old chairs, tables, lamps, etc. When cleaning out my great-grandparents' home after they both had died we discovered some cool wooden globes. Even one of those solar system model thingamajigs, with wooden planets and iron gears, where you turn the handle and the planets spin and rotate around the sun, the moons orbit the planets, etc.
The chairs, tables, lamps, etc. went to goodwill. My parent's kept the solar system.
I'm a Berkeley student and working at the labs here for the summer, and we do in fact throw most of the stuff out. However, things have to be accounted for before being discarded. However, the really old stuff is still sitting around. In fact, there's a really old particle accelerator sitting in one of the hallways in the physics building. I'm not sure if it still works, and it's dusty as hell, but it's pretty neat looking.
.sig now open source
This
There's no sig like SIGSEG
grams? for the physics profs at berkley? you must be smokin some really good green if you think they would trade the history of their school away for mere grams of pot.
they deal in whole pounds only.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Someone at Harvey Clar's had a bit of auction on the brain when entering this one.
:)
1071 Wood cased resistance selector, probably 1930's and a Bakelite cased relistance selector, probably 1940's
Note that 'L' and 'S' aren't even remotely close to one another on the keyboard.
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
UC Berkeley is clueless. They are selling a treasure!
In contract, check out this university's Scientific Instrument Museum.
OK, it's really just a few display cases, but the online exhibit is extensive.
Kear Lsalgkot Reaker, ,an't uell left from right.
Re, 'L' and 'S' aren't even remotely close to one another on the keyboard.
Lure they are. They're e.actly oqqosite each other, ohich makes them conceptually equivasent to the qart of your brain that
--ti.mg;vmg;v
Aside from nostalgic Berkley physics major alumni, a great idea would be for some udnerfunded school districts to pick up some of this stuff. I'm not a physics teacher, but I'd imagine a good quantity of it would be great for the high school level.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
You must be thinking of sodium or potassium, not magnesium.
Sort of destroys the credibility of your whole post, besides the fact that any science lab would want stuff like that, you can do a lot of interesting experiments with sodium or potassium.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Remember now -- this is the age before computers; i am certain this slide rule -- like all the other rediculous liquid-nitrogen cooled P4 reaching three and a half GHz -- is a compensatory device for... erm... certain shortcomings.
if you don't believe me on the "shortcoming" part -- ancidotal (sp?) evidence: Newton died a virgin.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Not to mention that sodium or potassium in pure metal form are never by-products of industrial manufacturing processes. They react with nearly anything willing to accept an electron, so any "waste" sodium or potassium are going to be in compounds, usually salts.
The parent is also correct, nobody stores magnesium in oil. Usually it is stored as a metal ribbon resembling a roll of tape. It oxidizes and generally has a white magnesium oxide layer on the edges. Before an experiment, a chemistry teacher will steel wool the ribbon down to make it shiny.
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Is this at the auction house place (on telegraph ave.) or some place on the Berkely Campus?
Thx.
S
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I'm a UCB physics grad student. The primary motivation for the sale isn't to make money or make room for new gear. They actually have to do it because the part of the physics building is scheduled for a seismic retrofit, and the temporary building can't accommodate all the old stuff in the attics.
Some material will be kept for display and for gifts to retiring faculty.
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).
Lars T.
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"...you can do a lot of interesting experiments with sodium or potassium."
Experiments, hell. I used to work for a guy that kept sticks of sodium submerged in kerosene. When the groundhogs got uppity, he'd drop a few sticks down the hole, stand 20' away, and hit it with a garden hose. A satisfactory kaboom, and the groundhogs kept a low profile for a while.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
'L' is right above 'S' on a dvorak keyboard.
Yes, I know, Berkeley really is an old school but still... using a local auctioneer?
Had they used Ebay, the entire world could have bid which would have maximized the price Cal fetched for the equipment. And just perhaps, by posting pictures on Ebay, some of the equipment might have been identified that even their "ace in the hole, Shugart" couldn't identify.
Strange call on Cal's part. Then again, this is Berkeley we're talking about.
Just to second this, I'm a high school physics teacher. Our chem guy will routinely accept "donations" of noxious, terrible stuff from companies. Of course, coming with no documentation (MSDS) and sometimes even in unlabelled glassware, the stuff is actually quite useless from a pedagogical viewpoint. Then, after it sits in our stockroom for a few years, we have to pay to dispose of it anyway. Meanwhile, the company not only avoided disposal costs
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There will be at least one person who goes to the auction and says:
Brass and wooden balances? I thought it said Bras and wooden balances....
Now, sometimes large slide rules were made for doing precise calculations -- for example some used in navigation. These are quite interesting and worth collecting. However, the giant classroom slide rules are not particularly precisely made. They're just big so that the class can follow the calculations the teacher was making.
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