Event Page: https://bit.ly/RPIrates-08Jan2025
Video: https://youtu.be/aWdI9F_JDiI
RPIrates: The RPI Users Group is kicking off 2025 with a special RPIrates Computing History Talk featuring the famous Thacher Computing Instrument, invented by RPI graduate Edwin Thacher. Dr. John Erickson, Director of Research Operations for the Future of Computing Institute at Rensselaer , Chief Instigator of RPIrates and the proud owner of a rare Thacher device, will discuss its history, explain its theory of operation and demonstrate its use!
In 1881, Edwin Thacher, a "computing engineer" for the Keystone Bridge Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received a patent for an improvement in slide rules. Thacher, a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, spent much of his career designing railway bridges. To assist in his calculations, he designed a cylindrical slide rule. Thacher's rule, though it fit on a desk, was equivalent to a conventional slide rule over 59 feet long. The rule had scales for multiplication and division and another scale, with divisions twice as large, for use in finding squares and square roots. There were no trigonometric scales.
RPIrates is a growing community of students, faculty and staff at Rensselaer who gather monthly to support each others' use of the R open source analytics platform. During the Fall and Spring semesters we have monthly in-person RPIrates meetings, usually the first Weds evening of the month. RPIrates also has an email list through which we share information and ask questions: rpi-r-users@cs.lists.rpi.edu
During the Spring 2025 term we will be holding monthly RPIrates meetings at 6p in AE217, featuring great topics, plus pizza, salad and other goodies (arriving at 5:30p).
Resources:
- Thacher's Calculating Instrument Manual (1884)
- Thacher's Calculating Instrument description, Univ. of Toronto Scientific Instruments collection
- Keuffel & Esser 1741 Thacher Cylindrical Slide Rule description, National Museum of American History collection
- Video of this talk: https://youtu.be/aWdI9F_JDiI
Contact John Erickson erickj4@rpi.edu for more information or refer to the RPIrates web site