Oughtred Society Slide Rule Home Page.

Please see details of the agenda and how you can participate below in the message sent from Andries, Karl, Leo, and Chris:

The first Slide rule WORKSHOP of last February was a success according to the participants. They asked for more WORKSHOPs during the year.

We, as the organisation, are happy to organise that, because it was indeed a pleasant and interesting meeting and the number of participants was far higher than expected.

We will follow the same program as in February. Not all the UNKNOWNS of last time were discussed, so there are still UNKNOWNs in stock. However, new UNKNOWNs are welcome and needed. That is your initial contribution to workshop. Most, or all, of us have one or more slide rules or slide charts or mechanical, electrical calculating machines which cannot be identified by brand, manufacturer, distributor, or aspects as purpose, strange scales, etc. This WORKSHOP opens the possibility to ask fellow collectors to help you with these questions

You are welcome to take a photo of your UNKNOWN slide rules, and send it to info@rekeninstrumenten.nl before 8 June. We will collect all these UNKNOWN Slide Rules on a page on our home page for international online slide rule workshops: https://www.rekeninstrumenten.nl/workshop

This page already includes some unknowns, so you can look at them before the meeting, to see if you can help to answer the questions. Those marked ”[1]” have been discussed during the first WORKSHOP.

During the WORKSHOP, the owner of the UNKOWN item explains his questions. Your international colleague collectors will help you answering your questions. Some answers could be very simple, just because a fellow collector knows about it.

The Zoom meeting will be at Sunday 15 June from 18.00 CEST (Amsterdam summer time) till 20.00 CEST. So we start at 16:00 UTC, 12:00 EDT, 9:00 PDT and for Eastern Australia (AEST) Monday 2:00 AM.

Please let us know beforehand (ASAP) if you are interested to participate. We will then submit you the Zoom link a few days before the meeting. Please respond to info@rekeninstrumenten.nl and cc to Karl.kleine@eah-jena.de

To all country organizations: Please distribute this Announcement in short term to your members and others who could have been interested. And if you have friends who are potentially interested or need a new hobby, just submit this announcement.

The 2024 Oughtred Society annual meeting was held virtually again this year, and again was held in cooperation with European collectors and enthusiasts. It was hosted by the Dutch Kring group and also included the UKSRC. Attendance averaged over 50 people each day of the two day event, held the last weekend in September, 2024 at a time mutually convenient for both Europeans and Americans. (Somehow a few others from elsewhere around the world also attended, and we were all delighted they stayed up late or got up early to do so!)

Presentations included "your first slide rule" as well as delightful presentations of various collections -- some including extremely rare and interesting items that made everyone wish we could meet in person again soon and get to examine the collections up close -- but that would require travelling thousands of miles from one collection to another! So there are advantages both ways, and many of the presenters were particularly good at giving a virtual journey through their collections.

Slide Charts were one of the topics covered, as well as the history of the word "computer."

Several people were congratulated for their leadership in supporting the history of, and joy of, slide rules and calculating or measuring equipment of all sorts. Leo vander Lucht recieved the 2024 OS Fellowship, and Nico Smallenberg was given the 2024 Oughtred Society Award.

Thank you for attending!

Oughtred Society
Board of Directors