Walter Shawlee, the Sovereign of Slide Rules, Is Dead at 73
Used by engineers for centuries, they were displaced by pocket calculators and all but forgotten until Mr. Shawlee created a subculture of obsessives and cornered the market.
Walter Shawlee displayed some of his slide rules at his home in British Columbia in 1999. Beside him was a reproduction of Robby the Robot, a character in the movie “Forbidden Planet.” Ms. Shawlee called it “our unofficial mascot.” It’s unclear if the robot knew how to use a slide rule
One day... a middle-aged avionics engineer by the name of Walter Shawlee was looking through a drawer at his home in Kelowna, a midsize city in British Columbia, when he happened upon his old slide rule from high school.
It was a Keuffel & Esser pocket Deci-Lon, model 68-1130, with a slender Ivorite body and delicate see-through cursor box. Both had stood the test of time. Mr. Shawlee remembered that as a teenager he had spent six months saving up money to buy it.
Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math whizzes of decades past came across the site. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He began spending eight hours a day researching, buying, fixing and reselling old slide rules...
...“He’s Mr. Slide Rule,” a Texas engineer and slide-rule enthusiast told The Journal. “Walter knows everybody in the slide-rule racket.”
...In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s...
Used by engineers for centuries, they were displaced by pocket calculators and all but forgotten until Mr. Shawlee created a subculture of obsessives and cornered the market.
Walter Shawlee displayed some of his slide rules at his home in British Columbia in 1999. Beside him was a reproduction of Robby the Robot, a character in the movie “Forbidden Planet.” Ms. Shawlee called it “our unofficial mascot.” It’s unclear if the robot knew how to use a slide rule
One day... a middle-aged avionics engineer by the name of Walter Shawlee was looking through a drawer at his home in Kelowna, a midsize city in British Columbia, when he happened upon his old slide rule from high school.
It was a Keuffel & Esser pocket Deci-Lon, model 68-1130, with a slender Ivorite body and delicate see-through cursor box. Both had stood the test of time. Mr. Shawlee remembered that as a teenager he had spent six months saving up money to buy it.
Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math whizzes of decades past came across the site. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He began spending eight hours a day researching, buying, fixing and reselling old slide rules...
...“He’s Mr. Slide Rule,” a Texas engineer and slide-rule enthusiast told The Journal. “Walter knows everybody in the slide-rule racket.”
...In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s...
(And where are they now?)
