Walter Shawlee, the Sovereign of Slide Rules, Is Dead at 73

For about 350 years, humanity’s most revolutionary hand-held pc was one thing known as a slide rule. As typewriters as soon as symbolized the author, slide guidelines symbolized the engineer.

These analog calculators got here in steel, wooden, plastic and even bamboo, and so they could possibly be discovered everywhere in the world. Their capabilities included computing higher-order multiplications, exponents and logarithms, amongst different mathematical operations. They had been normally lengthy and rectangular with a retractable center section, and so they featured dense fields of letters, traces and numbers stacked on prime of each other.

They appeared nearly comically abstruse, as in the event that they is likely to be used as paddles within the hazing rituals of a math fraternity.

Non-nerds struggled to make sense of them. Then, within the early Nineteen Seventies, light-weight digital calculators turned broadly out there. The marketplace for slide guidelines collapsed, and manufacturing of latest gadgets basically ceased.

One day, about 20 years later, a middle-aged avionics engineer by the title of Walter Shawlee was wanting by means of a drawer at his house in Kelowna, a midsize metropolis in British Columbia, when he occurred upon his outdated slide rule from highschool.

It was a Keuffel & Esser pocket Deci-Lon, mannequin 68-1130, with a slender Ivorite physique and delicate see-through cursor field. Both had stood the check of time. Mr. Shawlee remembered that as a young person he had spent six months saving up cash to purchase it.

Inspired by this encounter together with his youth, he created a web site devoted to slip guidelines. Before lengthy, nostalgic math whizzes of many years previous got here throughout the positioning. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He started spending eight hours a day researching, shopping for, fixing and reselling outdated slide guidelines.

“Are you trying to corner the slide-rule market?” his spouse, Susan Shawlee, requested him nervously, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2003.

The journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Spectrum, decided in 2007 that Mr. Shawlee had, actually, “cornered the world market.”

“He’s Mr. Slide Rule,” a Texas engineer and slide-rule fanatic advised The Journal. “Walter knows everybody in the slide-rule racket.”

Mr. Shawlee died on Sept. 4 final yr at his house in Kelowna. He was 73. The loss of life was not broadly reported on the time, and The New York Times was notified about it solely final month. His spouse stated the trigger was most cancers.

Mr. Shawlee was not merely a slide-rule sentimentalist in thrall to reminiscences of teenage geekdom. He argued that slide guidelines had intrinsic attraction for a number of causes.

He noticed dignity, for instance, of their solidity and design. In a 1999 profile by The Times, Mr. Shawlee described slide guidelines as “the techno-guys’ version of a broadsword.” On his web site, the Slide Rule Universe, he contrasted them with digital know-how. “In 50 years, the computer you are using to view this webpage will be landfill,” he wrote, “but your trusty slide rule will just be nicely broken in!”

To Mr. Shawlee, the misplaced sturdiness represented by slide guidelines belonged to a broader narrative of decline. “When we used slide rules every day back in the 1960s, we were able to send people to the moon,” Mr. Shawlee advised The Journal. Speaking to The Times, he noticed, “People who grow up with calculators have no number sense.”

Joe Pasquale, a pc science and engineering professor on the University of California, San Diego, has taught lessons within the “history, theory and practice” of slide guidelines, together with a survey of “the greatest slide rules ever made,” as he put it in a course description.

In an e mail, Professor Pasquale defined the pedagogical worth of slide guidelines. Calculators have a tendency to interchange the human thoughts, requiring customers solely to punch in numbers and “blindly accept” a outcome, resulting in a loss within the person’s personal capability to calculate — “and more generally, think,” Professor Pasquale wrote. Whereas slide guidelines demand energetic involvement, he added, “extending the mind’s calculating ability.”

It was Mr. Shawlee’s luck {that a} stunning variety of folks shared these views. In the early 2000s, he was incomes $125,000 a yr fixing and reselling slide guidelines. The enterprise paid for his two kids to go to school, and it despatched considered one of them to regulation faculty. His buyer base took its most organized type in the Oughtred Society, a membership named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister usually acknowledged to have invented the slide rule within the early 1620s.

Mr. Shawlee’s web site developed a subculture of its personal, with a community of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf by means of the mildewed wares of outdated stationery shops and property gross sales and college district warehouses searching for slide guidelines. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the again room of a bookstore and located 40 unopened crates of greater than 12,000 slide guidelines in a number of varieties. On his web site, Mr. Shawlee known as the discover “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo advised The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”

Prohibited by authorities rules from turning a revenue on the products, Mr. Foo bought the slide guidelines to Mr. Shawlee at a reduction. “It’s all in the thrill of the hunt,” he advised The Journal.

Mr. Shawlee’s stock included outstanding artifacts of science historical past. He provided a slide rule made for machine gun operators, with calculations for wind, elevation and vary. He provided a slide rule for measuring metabolic charges, with totally different settings for age, intercourse and top. And he used his web site to discover recondite factors of slide rule-iana, writing, for instance, about slide guidelines made by the U.S. authorities for calculating nuclear bomb results.

“Need to know the optimum burst height for that new nuke you just bought?” Mr. Shawlee requested in a mock gross sales pitch. “How about the high confidence kill zone radius, or temperature at some exact distance from the nuclear weapon that just went off down the block? These babies can answer all those burning questions as you get flambéed into free ions and radioactive dust at about 1,300 m.p.h.”

He additionally bought slide-rule cuff hyperlinks and slide-rule tie clips, which in some circumstances had been made by main slide-rule producers as promotional gadgets throughout what Mr. Shawlee known as “the golden age of slide rules.” The tie clips proved so in style on the Slide Rule Universe that Mr. Shawlee labored with a small foundry to begin manufacturing them himself.

Over time, his clients included a climate station in Antarctica, the place many digital devices couldn’t take the chilly; picture editors accountable for adjusting picture sizes (they like slide guidelines for his or her clear shows of various values for a similar ratio); an archaeologist who discovered that calculators bought too dusty to work correctly throughout digs; the drug firm Pfizer, which gave away slide guidelines as presents throughout a commerce present; slide-rule fans in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee advised Engineering Times in 2000.

Walter Shawlee II was born on Nov. 27, 1949, in Los Angeles. His mom, Joan (Fulton) Shawlee, was an actress identified for enjoying Sweet Sue, the chief of the “girls’ band” on the heart of the movie, “Some Like It Hot” (1959), and for enjoying Pickles Sorrell, a recurring character on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (1961-66). His father was a lodge concierge and painter who specialised in sea scenes.

At 14, Walter labored at an electronics surplus retailer and devotedly learn magazines like Electronics World. He studied engineering and math on the University of California in Los Angeles earlier than dropping out. He labored a wide range of jobs, together with as an assembly-line welder at a Volvo manufacturing facility in Sweden, earlier than establishing Northern Airborne Technology, a profitable aviation communications agency, in Kelowna. He bought the corporate in 1992.

After that, he turned a tinkerer and inventor for rent, serving to corporations design, for instance, machines that might gently apply labels to a wide range of fruits. He fastened and resold devices together with sign mills, high-voltage rectifiers and cathode ray tubes.

He and his spouse first met at U.C.L.A., and so they married in 1971. In addition to her, he’s survived by their kids, Walt III and Rose Shawlee, and a half sister, Angie Barchet.

When The Journal visited the Shawlee family, there have been about 1,000 slide guidelines scattered throughout the eating desk, Mr. Shawlee’s house workplace and the household sauna. “I know my wife would like to get her dining room back soon,” he advised Spectrum journal.

In a cellphone interview, Ms. Shawlee stated that 1000’s of the gadgets had been nonetheless within the household’s house. She stated she deliberate to proceed promoting them. As far as she is aware of, there isn’t any prospect of one other collector-expert-fixer-dealer-romantic like Mr. Shawlee rising in “the slide-rule racket.”