Florian Cajori, the great historian of mathematical notation, here settles the ancestry of the engineer’s oldest tool. On the History of Gunter’s Scale and the Slide Rule during the Seventeenth Century follows the logarithmic line from Edmund Gunter’s scale through Oughtred and Delamain — whose bitter priority quarrel Cajori adjudicates with documents in hand.
It is a compact masterclass in how instruments, ideas and injured pride tangle together in the history of science. Download the free EPUB for the true origins of the slide rule.