Slide rules to Industry 4.0: All tools of the trade in metal manufacturing
I have a set of old ivory drafting tools sitting on my desk. My late grandpa gave them to me when he retired. A slide rule, a protractor, and an old scale with an attached sticky note: Bought this in 1957 (January) for $0.68. Very good scale.
Memories, sentiment, and wonder are wrapped up together in these otherwise mundane-looking items. It means something to me that, after my grandpa emptied out his desk for the last time, he gifted his decades-old tools to his grandkids. These artifacts tell a story about change. My grandpa walked into a store somewhere and bought that old scale only three years after the first transistor radio was released. And who knows how to use a slide rule anymore? It’s a sort of arcane curiosity from a different era.
Back then, engineers like my grandpa designed everything by hand. It’s hard to imagine that process—no computers, no internet, just a library of datasheets, reference manuals, knowledgeable colleagues (one hopes), and a drafting table with paper. Yet it hasn’t been that long. We are only a generation or two removed from those days.
We all have the privilege of living through unparalleled change. Computers, the internet, and mobile phones have become so ubiquitous and convenient that it’s hard to imagine a world without them. I’m relatively young, but I still recall being floored when a friend pulled out an old Blackberry phone with a map and a GPS location on it. I didn’t have a cell phone until college. Even so, today I can barely imagine a world without the convenience of instant connectivity. We’ve become accustomed to change so quickly that it’s easy to forget just how different the world has become.
