A short tale of the short story of the sliding rule

Andrea Bacciotti

Abstract

The ideation and the design of scientific instruments for measuring and computing have been (and actually they are) often promoted by motivations of strong social and economic interest. In turn, the improvements of instruments influenced the development of new theories. An emblematic example is the story of the sliding rule. In this note, we illustrate the historical origin of the sliding rule, the underlying mathematical principle, and how it can be used to perform arithmetic computations.

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IMEKO-TC4-METROARCHAEO-2019-95.pdf

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IMEKO TC

TC4 - Measurement of Electrical Quantities

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