1840s calculator! Palmer's Pocket Scale Review / HowTo

Palmer's Pocket Scale, printed in 1844.
This is episode 63 of my video series about old calculating devices.
Google book link for Palmer's Pocket Scale: books.google.com/books/about/...
Articles by Feazel are:
Bobby Feazel, "Palmer's Computing Scale", Journal of the Oughtred Society Vol 3 No 1, p 9-17, 1994.
Bobby Feazel, "Palmer's Computing Scale - Revisited", Journal of the Oughtred Society Vol 4 No 1, p 5-8, 1995.
My straight slide rule is a K&E Beginner's Slide Rule N4058W
My circular slide rule is a "Calculator" (also called "Controler") model 75W.
End song inspired by "Hotter than a Molotov" by The Coup.
Chris Staecker webarea: cstaecker.fairfield.edu/~cstae...
#sliderule #frustrum

[@Laundry_Hamper]

The answer to "what's the oldest physical object you own" is inevitably: a rock

[@johnsrabe]

I collect new rocks and am letting them age before I use them.

[@GreggDurishan]

i watched something a while ago, i forget what, that made interesting arguments about early jewish concepts of creation meaning something more along the lines of "being arranged into some purposeful order". so kinda in the same way that chris probably meant "oldest man-made object", god making existence, it argued, was more of a bringing order to chaos kind of thing.

[@GreggDurishan]

"it's the bubbles" is a supremely succinct answer to the question that immediate pops into one's head when hearing there's wine gallons and beer gallons.

[@unspeakablevorn]

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” - Alfred North Whitehead

[@johnsrabe]

Said the guy named for a zit? Or vice versa? No thanks!

[@warped_rider]

Damn, math teachers were lying about how we won't have a calculator in our pocket all the way back in the 1800s.

[@omegasalmonfish]

Nothing beats a cool Aaron Palmer on a hot summer day

[@circle9nerd]

I think American children growing up in the 1840's learned a whole different kind of division. Cool book and awesome video! Original!

[@ninam6826]

Legitimately the funniest and most informative videos on KZbin 🙏

[@someonespadre]

An acre is the amount of farmland a single plowman could plow in a day. 1 furlong (10 chains or 660 feet) by 1 chain (66 feet). A furlong is the distance a team of oxen could plow before resting the team then they would be turned to go the other way. Another fun fact, if you know the size of a tract of land in chains x chains then (chains times chains)/10 equals acres.

[@Vallee152]

My head is surely spinning from all those examples

[@akda5id]

7:39 Aww, you missed a great chance to hold up one of your pocket mechanical calculators here (perhaps the Arithma Addiator).

[@nashvillain171]

Frustrum makes an appearance AGAIN

[@ChrisStaecker]

The algorithm loves it

[@rogerrabbit80]

@@ChrisStaecker All hail the Supreme Algorithm!

[@Laundry_Hamper]

Would it blow your mind to find out there's no second R in that word? I read, wrote and said it wrong for eons. Even Palmer missed that one!

[@ChrisStaecker]

@@Laundry_Hamper You're blowing my mind! I'm not sure I can give up the second R...

[@AndyLundell]

1:30 "foremost of all the calculating machines and ready reckoners" I had never heard the phrase "ready reckoners" before. What a great phrase. Looking it up, it seems it mostly means a lookup table? I knew lookup tables were a big deal in the olden days. Didn't realize they had a fun name.

[@gordoncouger9648]

I still use ready reckoners in lookup tables for trig functions and other floating-point calculations when writing fast code on small slow CPUs. The tables are scaled to match the magnitude needed for the process. Often I only need a very narrow range of angles with 2 decimal places of precision when calculating the state 16 switches. Most operations on a 68HC11 take 1 to 4 clock cycles. A division takes 47. It all but dies from my point of view when the floating point library is loaded. Ready reckoners as lookup tables solve many of those problems.

[@pierQRzt180]

One thing that is important in doing calculations (every now and then) is to get a feeling of the numbers. A device can be defective or incorrect. If chatGPT replies "35 x 76 is 37563" one may not bat an eye and consider it correct if actually one is not aware that at most the product should have 4 digits.

[@antoniocorona2433]

5:50 "Man if I has a nickle for every time..." I really like this little joke for a clearly unrelatable math problem.

[@assert_justice3783]

Frustrum is such a fun word.

[@DeGuerre]

The word is "frustum". Surely I'm not the only sad nerd who read that and got immediately annoyed. Anyone? Please?

[@TheNadOby]

Really like your channel, and slide rules are fun.

[@badasson8825]

Is that truly a portrait of Mr. Palmer or just a fake out for representation? So high quality of an image for an invention from just 20 years before

[@gordoncouger9648]

A circular slide rule outperforms many computer calculators in finding the percentage of each nutrient each component of the ration contributes to the whole. One never runs off the end of a circular slide rule. Unless the calculator is programmable it takes longer to enter the numbers than to set up the slide rule and write down the numbers.

[@terenceokane]

Cool vid! Like the dive into an old piece of tech! Just FYI I'm 99% sure youre showing pics of ARNOLD Palmer, NOT Aaron Palmer. You might be being cheeky so if so, I'm just a dummy!

[@AndyLundell]

Request : Do you have a nice-resolution photo of the calculator itself? I'd like to print one off for my own use. I'd use the one on Google Books, but some preservationist helpfully wrapped the back cover in cloth.

[@ChrisStaecker]

I just put it here: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palmer%27s_pocket_scale.jpg

[@AndyLundell]

@@ChrisStaecker Awesome. Thank you. And thanks for the quick reply!

[@LANless]

Love it!

[@r0bhumm]

Since this video is about circular slide rules I thought it appropriate to comment here. I have just managed to acquire both an old is King helical pocket sniper wolf and a fuller calculator. Both of these are cylindrical or helical slide walls but very different yeah just King is a device that looks like it could be used by one of the men in Black, wealthy Fuller is more like some sort of ancient scroll from the library of Alexandria even though it was manufactured in the 50s. I hope to be able to demonstrate them at our local schools for a bit of cross learning maths history computing perhaps even engineering.

[@johnsrabe]

Missing pages can equal a lot of missing dollars for fastidious collectors who won’t make do with a scan.

[@TomCarlson]

There’s a Computing Scale and Time Telegraph bundle on eBay right now for 350 bones!

[@ChrisStaecker]

Nice… never seen those for sale

[@TomCarlson]

And here my wife wasted her Xmas gift money on a Nintendo Switch. Won’t she feel silly if I pick them up with mine!

[@colinstu]

You would have one nickel.

[@rogerrabbit80]

Where did you get that metal circular slide rule we see at 3:30?

[@ChrisStaecker]

I got it randomly at an estate sale in Connecticut. It seems to be rare? I can’t find much info about it online but it is the same as ones branded “controller”.

[@friedrichrutzen1705]

The lead sphere problem has its application in ammo: how large is the ball for a three pound gun and how big is a 12-gauge shotgun (1/12th of a pound of lead and make balls from that)

[@_beel]

Chris what's the name of the soundtrack in the video intro?

[@ChrisStaecker]

It’s one of the stock jingles in iMovie. “Breakbeat”

[@_beel]

@@ChrisStaecker Thanks

[@antiphlex]

Another classic episode. Man, if you had a comedy show, I'd buy the season pass.

[@arturomateo3920]

Nicee

[@OldManBOMBIN]

Hey no joke I do need that last part sometimes. But, yeah. I just use my phone.

[@rlamacraft]

Doesn't a circular slide rule have the advantage that it wraps around?

[@ChrisStaecker]

On a circular slide rule, you’ll never have a calculation that goes “off the end”, which is possible in theory on a straight slide rule. (I assume this is why Palmer called it the "endless computing scale", although he didn't invent the concept of a circular slide rule.) I’m not a slide rule expert but I believe that going off the end on a straight slide rule is always avoidable if you’re doing it right- so I don't think this is really a big deal. But I could be wrong about that...

[@rlamacraft]

@@ChrisStaecker I’m no expert on them either and what you’re saying sounds reasonable given the continued use of the traditional slide rule long after the circular’s invention - if the circular one was that much better it would have supplanted the linear one

[@timharig]

That is EXACTLY the advantage of a circular slide rule. You never have to reposition the slide for going off the end. You just go around the scale and add a zero every time you pass the origin.

[@timharig]

​@@ChrisStaecker Going of of the end is unavoidable on a straight slide rule -- especially when doing multiple serial calculations. What you do when that happens is work the sliderule backwards indicating the result in the opposite end of the slide rule and adding a zero to the result. For instance, if I want to multiply a number by four, I would move the 1 on the C scale to the four on the D scale. But if the other number is greater than 2.5 it goes off of the end of the scale. So instead, I move the 10 (labeled 1 on the opposite side) on the C scale to the 4 on the D scale. I then read backwoods to find the number I'm multiplying by. Whenever you go around the scale like this, you have to add another zero to the result. For a single calculation, you should already know which way to slide the rule. This usually happens during a series of calculations. You save the result of the calculation using the cursor and reposition the slide as necessary. The circle slide rule saves having to figure out which direction to move and read the slide. You just keep going around the circle. You have to remember to add another zero each time you pass the origin.

[@timharig]

​@@rlamacraft Contrary to what was stated in the video, straight slide rules were consider more portable. There were slide rule holsters that you could attach to your belt. They were the pocket calculators of their day. Circular slide rules were more like the form factor of a book. They were generally larger models that you kept on your desk and optimized the scale size to get as much precision as possible.

[@pauljackson3491]

A review I didn't see! Now I can stop rewatching old ones; they are still funny though. How long did it take to flip through the book before you sped it up?

[@ChrisStaecker]

Took a while I guess- I was going slow so I wouldn't hurt the pages.

[@alexanderarnold6202]

Seems like the examples may have use in like architecture or engineering? Some kind of design stuff. Pretty arbitrary nonetheless

[@pyglik2296]

8:20 How can you not know this off the top of your head!? Do you even watch the show?

[@ChrisStaecker]

I must confess I pulled this example randomly off the wiki as something that I assumed would seem to the layman like an obscure triviality. When I showed it to my kid she informed me that it wasn't nearly obscure enough to be believable as something that needs to be looked up. Sorry!

[@christopherneufelt8971]

The picture is not of 1844. Also the clothing. The picture is of around 1950-1960. In addition, in the past the calculation of commodities was the principle issue of small trade. Also the mathematics of mechanisms and mechanics were already 80 years old. There was a good reasoning of computing these strange things.

[@ChrisStaecker]

Yes I agree many of these calculations would have been useful to lots of people. And yes the photo is not from 1844- I’ll leave it to the interested viewer to try to figure out the joke. IYKYK

[@mitch5297]

@@ChrisStaecker Why didn't you show the function for which it was invented? To calculate the perfect ratio of lemonade to iced tea.

[@ChrisStaecker]

THIS guy gets it!

[@johnsrabe]

@@mitch5297 There is now no living person with a common drink named for them. Roy Rogers, Shirley Temple, Arnold Palmer, Martin I … they’re all gone.

[@OldManBOMBIN]

*This* is what they were doin' in the 1840s? 😂