My First Teaching Gig

I took a break from entries to the Newsletter for a bit, but have some new stories coming up, starting with one that takes us way back.

I have written several times about the seminars I presented during my years at Bruel & Kjaer and how much I enjoyed these activities.?I was reminded recently of my first teaching experience when showing my grandson my old college slide rule (that's the antique in the picture above) and trying to explain its operation.

During high school and college, I spent summers working in New York City at various companies, jobs I had landed through a cousin who was an ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) officer.?Several times this involved working in hot warehouses, sorting, shelving, labeling and “schlepping” (moving) racks of (typically winter) clothing.?One summer, I worked in the mailroom of S.S. Kresge.?I spent the day in this small basement room with three other regular employees. Here duties included mail sorting and delivery (we’ve all seen the guy with the little cart going from office to office in films), copying (using a mimeo machine) flyers for distribution and making periodic subway trips to major banks to bring checks to deposit in?Kresge accounts. I remember, the largest check being just shy of a million dollars.?My last summer job, in 1969 was a promotion of sorts. This job was in an office, not a warehouse or a cubby in the basement.?I actually sat at a desk where I spent the day filing and working with pre-computer bookkeeping calculations (is there a retronym* for a paper spreadsheet?).

One day, my supervisor asked me to work on markdowns of inventory items, that is, calculating the new price of items after they had been discounted by various percentages.?To do this, I was provided with a comptometer.?Invented in the 1880s by Don Felt, these mechanical, key driven calculating machines were still being used into the 1990s, as electronic calculators and computers were taking over these operations. Initially they were only capable of addition or subtraction, with multiplication and division later becoming possible.?In the case of markdowns, this involved a somewhat obtuse set of key punches to enter the original price and the percentage (100 – markdown) multiplier to calculate the final price.?Once the result was entered into the ledger, the numbers were cleared by pulling down a handle on the side of the comptometer. These operations ?had to be repeated for each individual calculation after clearing the previous calculation.?It was tedious, time-consuming labor and took a lot of keypunches.

It immediately struck me that I could carry out these calculations much more rapidly using a slide rule.?Once the top scale was aligned with the percentage, the cursor could be moved to the original price to yield the markdown price on the lower scale. While the slide rule did not provide a result to the penny, prices were always rounded up to values like $14.99 or $8.49 so this limitation wouldn’t be a problem.?In any case, slide rules were used in the design of the Apollo moon mission, they could certainly be used to set prices for shirts and pants. ??The second day of my assignment, I brought my slide rule to work and knocked off the rest of my initial assignment before lunch.??

My supervisor was astonished and after checking some of my numbers, quizzed me as to how I had done it (slide rules were mysterious items to the non-engineering public).?He asked me where he could buy slide rules and I directed him to an office supply house I knew carried them. I was then given a new assignment.?I was to run a short seminar for the secretarial pool on how to use a slide rule to do markdowns.?Several days later I was in a meeting room with half a dozen women of various ages, in office attire consistent with the time. ??This was in contrast to my bell bottom jeans and likely a paisley long collared shirt.???They were all looking, with more than a little skepticism, at this long-haired mustached hippie for guidance. My life as an instructor had begun.

*Retronym – a word or phrase modifying an old term that now needs clarification as its original meaning has changed. Example - acoustic guitar is used ?to describe a non electric guitar previously just called a guitar.

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