How many of our students would believe that the inventor of logarithms, had it in his mind tomake their calculational life easier? Or how about this quote almost 300 years later from FlorianCajori:
“Of the machines for minimizing mental labor in computation, no device has been of greater general interest than the slide rule.”
2
I would venture to say that now almost 100 yearsafter Florian, some might comment that with our electronic calculators and computers, that“mental labor” (or thought) in computation has been all but eliminated. Just look at the confusedclerk, next time you provide them $11.01 for a $5.46 purchase. Napier’s invention was first published in 1614, though there is evidence that he privatelycommunicated his work to a Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, in 1594.
3
Napier’s inventionconverted the operation of multiplication to addition and the operation of division to subtraction-- as long as you had a table of logarithms. Probably doesn’t seem like much of a step forwardfor the multiplication of single digit numbers (
3
×
6
), but think about the multiplication, by hand,of two six digit numbers (
123456
×
654321
). His initial set of logs were based on a geometricdefinition rather than a specific base (though it can be related to our natural logarithms
3
noted by
ln
in the equation
NAP
=
10
7
ln10
7
N
, where NAP is the Naperian logarithm and N is the number of interest).Henry Briggs, a geometry professor at Gresham College in London and later at Oxford,collaborated with Napier and is given credit for developing the base 10 logs or common logs weuse today. In 1617, Briggs published tables of fourteen place logarithms for counting numbers 1to 1000. In 1624, the sequel to this effort was published, fourteen place logarithms from 1 to20,000 and from 90,000 to 100,000. And in 1628, a Dutch Bookseller, Adrian Vlacq, publisheda set of ten place logarithms for numbers 1 to 100,000
4,5
filling in the gaps of Briggs’ tables.As much of a help as this was, it was still cumbersome to carry the table of logarithmswherever you went. In 1620, Edmund Gunter, an astronomy professor also at Gresham College,developed a two foot long rule where the distances between the numbers were proportional totheir logarithms. To multiply two numbers, the user would use dividers to step along the scale toadd or subtract as necessary, much like addition and subtraction on a number line discussed in
2
Cajori, Florian; A history of the Logarithmic Slide Rule; The Engineering News Publishing Company, London, 1909
(the first sentence of the preface)
3
Thompson, J. E.; The Standard Manual of the Slide Rule, Its History, Principle and Operation, Second Edition; D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.; Toronto, New York, London; 1952
4
Boyer, C.B., revised bu Uta C. Merzbach; A History of Mathematics, Second Edition; John Wiley and Sons, 1989.
5
Clason, C. B.; Delights of the Slide Rule; Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, New York; 1964.
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