Slide rule article in today's Wall Street Journal

Hi listmates, some might be interested in this: - Evan K. ========================= Calculating Collector Scours Globe Hunting for Slide Rules By PUI-WING TAM Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL KELOWNA, British Columbia -- Walter Shawlee opened a wooden case and lovingly pulled out a 12-inch piece of Lucite etched with numbers and symbols. "There are only so many of these remaining," he said. To virtually anyone old enough to remember the slide rule, it's an ancient relic that was deservedly consigned to the trash bin. Not so to Mr. Shawlee, 53, who has launched an international hunt for these mathematical instruments that use logarithmic scales to multiply, divide and make more complex calculations. Mr. Shawlee taps his network of contacts from Singapore to Venezuela to check out the back rooms of musty stationery stores and bookshops. He has recruited his wife, Susan, to track down old slide-rule inventories. And he spends up to eight hours a day restoring battered slide rules, and combing the Internet, estate sales and flea markets. He says he makes $125,000 a year reselling slide rules he acquires. "When we used slide rules every day back in the 1960s, we were able to send people to the moon," says Mr. Shawlee, who came of age when the device was still the rule in trigonometry class. Slide rules, which resemble either rulers or discs, were a boon to the mathematically minded and a bane to everyone else. To multiply two times two, for example, the user moves the "zero" of one scale to the number two on another scale. Then the user looks at the number two on the first scale, and above that is the number four. Confused? So were many other people, which is why the slide-rule industry took a big hit in 1972, when Hewlett-Packard Co. launched its first scientific hand-held calculator. Almost overnight, demand for slide rules dried up, wiping out venerable manufacturers such as Pickett Inc. and Keuffel & Esser Co. and leaving boxes of unopened slide rules in stores, warehouses and schools. In the ensuing decades, a flicker of interest in the instruments was kept alive by a small community of collectors. In Emeryville, Calif., enthusiasts formed a society to show off their collections. In Dallas, some collectors still hold an annual competition to see who can make the speediest calculations. But slide rules are more than quirky bric-a-brac to the true believers. Many engineers still swear by them. Some teachers today are reintroducing the devices into classrooms, arguing that they foster more-complex thought processes than electronic calculators do. At the University of California in San Diego, Prof. Joe Pasquale launched a freshman seminar on slide rules in January. "I always felt we lost something when we stopped using slide rules," says Mr. Pasquale. "They're so much more an extension of your mind than a replacement to it." A slide rule made by A.W. Faber Castell Vertrieb GmbH, now discontinued, is one of the most popular models among collectors. The problem is slide rules are getting harder to find. Of the few manufacturers that survived the calculator tsunami, most produce only a few types of slide rules and often in limited numbers. Concise Co. in Japan still makes circular slide rules, for example, but the quantity "has become much smaller," says spokeswoman Chiho Takayama. American Slide Chart Corp. in Carol Stream, Ill., annually makes 25 million cardboard slide-charts, which are similar to slide rules, but they are "largely promotional," says Julie Johnson, the company's president. Thus, many would-be buyers turn to Mr. Shawlee. "He's Mr. Slide Rule," says Ted Hume, a 64-year-old engineer in San Angelo, Texas, who sold off part of his slide-rule collection to Mr. Shawlee several years ago. "Walter knows everybody in the slide-rule racket. He does everyone lots of favors and he'll buy slide rules from you or barter them." Mr. Shawlee's impressive slide-rule stash was on display one recent morning at his crammed office in this Canadian resort and winery town, a 40-minute flight inland from Vancouver. Several hundred slide rules, most in mint condition and in their original boxes, were stacked floor- to-ceiling in a room where Mr. Shawlee also runs a business that repairs and designs engineering equipment. At home, he has another 1,000 or so slide rules scattered across the dining table, in his home office and in his sauna. At any one time, Mr. Shawlee, a transplanted Californian who emigrated to Canada three decades ago, has 1,500 to 3,000 slide rules in stock. He says he acquires about 10% of his inventory through eBay, while the rest comes from private sales and through his extensive network of slide-rule hunters. He resells many of the slide rules for as little as $10. Some models go for $600, depending on the rarity of the rule, and he can sell a truly uncommon one for as much as $3,000. Mr. Shawlee fell into the slide-rule trade shortly after he accidentally rediscovered his old high-school slide rule in a desk drawer in 1992. "My eyeballs snapped open," he says, recalling how he carried his slide rule on his belt as a kid. "There's just something magic about them." He started a collection, setting up an informational Web site on the devices in 1997. He received dozens of inquiries from people asking where they could buy the instruments. TELL ME A STORY Read selected excerpts from the anthology "Floating Off the Page: The Best of The Wall Street Journal's 'Middle Column.' " That was when Mr. Shawlee started amassing stockpiles of slide rules from other collectors. Over a few months, he bought more than 300. "Are you trying to corner the slide-rule market?" his wife nervously asked him as the hoard continued to grow. Mr. Shawlee always puts aside about $5,000 in cash to be ready to wire for a purchase. One of his largest hauls came several years ago from a contact in Singapore, attorney Foo Cheow Ming, whom he met via an e-mail correspondence. After one e-mail discussion with Mr. Shawlee, Mr. Foo went to an old bookstore in downtown Singapore and asked the owner whether he had any slide rules. "How many crates do you want?" the owner replied. In the back room, Mr. Foo discovered 40 unopened crates, containing more than 12,000 slide rules of all types. "I found the mother lode," says Mr. Foo, who had no interest in setting up his own slide-rule dealership and shipped most of the crates off to Mr. Shawlee, who paid a bit more than $8,000 for the lot. "Since then, I've never stopped hunting for Walter. I've gone to Kuala Lumpur to look and still plan to go to Penang, Bangkok and Shanghai to find some," Mr. Foo says. "It's all in the thrill of the hunt."