I am eighty years old. For forty-one years I designed electrical switchgear in Pittsburgh: the big steel cabinets of breakers and bus bars that stand between the power company and a mill, a hospital or an office building. I made drawings for a living, and I still think in them.

When I retired, I said I would never draw another thing. Then in 1997 I borrowed a book on HTML from the public library and found that a Web page is a drawing after all. It has parts, the parts have dimensions, and a careful man can write down why each one is there. So I have. This page is Sheet 1. Sheet 2 is its HTML, every line numbered and noted, and Sheet 3 is its revision history.

SHEET 2: The HTML, line by line
SHEET 3: The revision history

GeoCities.us has no picture of a slide rule, so here is a calculator, the machine that put the slide rule out of work. I find it a fair substitute, and a fair warning.

A slide rule multiplies by adding lengths. The C and D scales are the same logarithmic scale, one printed on the slide and one on the body. To multiply 2 by 3, set the 1 at the left end of C over 2 on D, run the cursor to 3 on C, and read 6 on D under the hairline. The rule gives you three figures, sometimes four. It does not give you the decimal point. You carry that in your head, which is the best habit an engineer ever learned.

The log-log scales raise numbers to powers. A number on LL2 sits exactly over its tenth power on LL3: 1.2 is over 6.19. We used them at work for heating and cooling curves, and at home for the interest on the mortgage.

I own 27 rules. My working rule for thirty-six years was a Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Decitrig, model 4081-3, mahogany with white faces, bought new in 1946. It is on the desk beside me as I type. The Picketts are all aluminum, and most are painted the yellow Pickett called Eye Saver. The young engineers liked them. I stayed with mahogany.

My wife, Frances, and I were married in June of 1947. She taught the third grade for twenty-six years, and she corrected my spelling for nearly forty-nine. She died in March of 1996.

She checked my work. Every letter I wrote, she read before it went in the mail. On an engineering drawing there is a box marked CHECKED, for the initials of the man who looked the drawing over before it went to the shop. You will find that box at the bottom of this page. I have left it empty.

The bench is in the basement. The top is a solid-core door I bought for four dollars in 1953 and set on legs of two by four. Above it are three shelves of coffee cans, each labeled on masking tape: wood screws, machine screws, washers, fuses, tubes, and one marked MISC., which is where everything goes in the end.

I fix lamps, toasters and radios for the neighbors, and lately a good many computer mice, which mostly want their little rubber balls cleaned. I built an oscilloscope from a Heathkit in 1958. It still works.

Visitors to Sheet 1:
Correspondence: [email protected]
Last updated September 18, 1999