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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 2, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

IBM slide rule ad 1952

Edwin J. Chamberlain

"The Slide Rule: 350+ Years from Napier through the Manned Apollo Missions"

Still have your slide rule? Bring it!

ABSTRACT -- The slide rule -- a simple yet ingenious computing device -- was used by many engineers, scientists, and mathematicians as their primary means of computation for over 350 years, until the appearance of the electronic calculator in the mid-1970s. It was used in the design and construction of buildings, bridges, rockets, and even in the design of the electronic calculator that would ultimately replace it. This talk will cover the history of the slide rule, from its beginnings with mathematician John Napier, through its use at NASA, including the Apollo missions, where they were used by both engineers and astronauts.

SPEAKER -- Edwin J. Chamberlain, P.E. is a 1961 Civil Engineering graduate of Michigan Tech, where his senior paper in soil mechanics was a study of the surface soil conditions on the Moon. He did his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkley and McGill University, Montreal in geotechnical and structural engineering. He worked most of his career at the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he conducted research on cold regions geotechnical engineering problems.

Mr. Chamberlain has worked on a number of projects during his career, including working on the team that took the first deep ice cores of the Greenland ice cap, which returned a 100,000 year climate record. He also worked on the review teams for the pile supports of the Alaska pipeline, for the foundations of the Over the Horizon radar stations, for the first off-shore pipelines in the Beaufort Sea, and for underground storage facilities for nuclear weapon materials in Russia. He is the author of more than 120 reports and papers, served as Chairman of the organizing committee for International Ground Freezing meetings, served on committees for the American Society for Testing Materials, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the International Permafrost Association. He has twice received the Army Corps of Engineers highest honor for research and development. Among his many current activities, he collects, researches and writes about slide rules, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Oughtred Society, an International slide rule collectors club.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov