Anthony Dorey: Calculations- the Slide Rule

"When I first went into the design department, there were no electrical or electronic aids to design of any sort. The slide rule is what we used and we had super things called barrel slide rules. It's called a Fullers Calculator, that's its sort of pukka name, and it was incredibly useful to us in shipbuilding.

So anyway, all the calculations which we had to do, and there are a lot of them in naval architecture - just finding out whether a ship will float or not requires quite a lot of very mundane calculations of volumes and weights and this sort of thing. Very basic stuff but you have to do it, and in the days when I started you had to do it longhand. And it was done on paper with a slide rule or a barrel slide rule and that was it, and by adding and subtracting. And I spent months doing absolutely and completely boring calculations because they just took ages and ages."