Bill Noble wrote:
I've seen plenty of paper/cardboard calculators for all sorts of things, but
this weekend I ran across a "real" slide rule put out by a hydraulics
company with a couple of scales added for calculating hydraulic/pneumatic
stuff

it's pictured here on ebay ---
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=300289178419

What I'm wondering, since this is the first of this style that I've seen, is
how common was this? Most folks I know who were engineers in the 50s had a
Pickett or K&E slide rule, so I'm kind of surprised that anyone would
actually do much with this, but maybe it was aimed at non-engineers?


I was an electro-optical guy. One of the gadgets we all sought were the
GE "black body" slide rules. You called a GE industrial rep and asked
for one. They had a number of very complex functions, which in some
cases were transcendental equations, very hard to work even with a slide
rule or set of tables.

It was formally called the Radiation Calculator, courtesy of the
Aerospace Electronics Department.

For instance, you could pick two IR wavelengths, and a temperature, and
calculate the power emitted from a surface. It would do units
conversion, find the wavelength of peak emission for a given temp, and a
few other goodies. It also had printed on it a number of constants used
in physics computations.

In the days before desktop computers it was certainly a big aid.