Handbags   (The sad, the bad and the ugly. Non-productive stuff here.)

I guess that I can still do the straightforward multiplication, division, square, and square roots. My last slide rule was a Thornton's model designed for Engineers/electronics. It has numerous specialist scales and functions: trig, hyperbolic functions, quadrature (difference of two squares). I no longer retain the knowledge of how I once used these.

My very first slide rule, which I gave to a friend when he went to Uni, would make a good collectors piece. Proprietary label was 'Griffin & George', no doubt was manufactured for them by a third party. The engine-divided scales were on white vellum, glued and pinned to a substrate of very dense wood. (Could have been Lignum Vitae.)

It had a wonderful fragrance, and definitely the appearance of an instrument from a bygone era.