Never enough knowledge
Alexander George Thornton founded his business in 1880 in Manchester, took over the Precision Instrument Co in 1901 and in 1967 changed the name of the company to British Thornton. The firm grew to become one of the largest manufacturers of drawing instruments and slide rules in Britain. PIC continued to be used by Thornton…
Cylindrical slide rules exist in two designs – one with a logarithmic scale wrapped in a spiral around the outside of a cylinder (such as the Otis King and Fuller’s rule), the other in the form of bars (Thatcher). Both types provide a longer scale than a straight or circular rule, which can lead to…
Samuel Pepys, the ‘Father of the Modern Navy’, recorded in his Diary 14th April, 1663 ‘I walked to Greenwich, studying the slide rule for measuring of timber, which is very fine‘. It was a Coggeshall slide rule to help measure the dimensions, surface area, and volume of timber having the form of a folding carpenter’s measuring…