Inventions
Slide Rule
Mechanical Engineering
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A slide rule is a hand-operated mechanical calculator made of slidable graduated rulers, used to perform multiplication, division, roots, logarithms and trigonometric calculations by aligning logarithmic scales. It was developed in the 17th century by the English mathematician and clergyman William Oughtred, building on John Napier's earlier work on logarithms, and for more than three centuries it remained the standard calculating tool of science and engineering until inexpensive electronic scientific calculators, following the 1972 HP-35, rendered it largely obsolete by the mid-1970s.
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