[AT] OT NCSU

[David Bruce]

I'm a bit younger than Charlie but my roommate was in engineering when 
we were at NCSU  (see we were past the cow college days - then called 
Moo U) and I remember him mentioning Houck and Hammond (probably 
Hilliard also but I'm not sure).  I was in Textile Chemistry so math was 
a constant thing.  By the time I was there calculators (mid to late 
1970's) were everywhere (instead of engineering students walking around 
with slide rules clipped to their belts they had calculators). I was the 
same however I found a slide rule for sale at the student store for $5 
so I bought it and carried it as a backup - Post as I recall..
David
NW NC
who should be out on the MF 35 mowing the jungle (crabgrass grows here 
even with no water).


Larry D Goss wrote:
> [WAY off topic.  Delete if not interested in a bunch of trivia.]
>
> Marshall plays things pretty low-key.  You have to modify the URL to bring
> up the homepage and then go searching.  Way down in the middle, you will
> find him listed along with the fact that he started the website.  But you
> have to know to look for his name or you won't find it.
>
> Small world, Charlie.  I knew Houck, Hammond, Hilliard, and all those other
> guys in Raleigh.  Back in the 60's, the "route to teaching" in the eastern
> schools was for a retiring military officer (particularly graduates of West
> Point and Annapolis) to apply for a position in the Graphics department.
> Over the years, all the faculty in that department have been my professional
> colleagues and personal friends.  They still are.  It's been less than 24
> hours since I communicated with some of them by email.
>
> I still have my original sliderule too (a Pickett)  but I sold most of my
> collection to Bear on his way to the Portland show with H. L. about six
> years ago.  I have a six-foot Post Versalog hanging on the wall above the
> computers in my office.  I used that to teach students how to use a
> sliderule for the first fifteen years I was in a classroom, but by the late
> 70's that technology was pretty much left in the dust.  None of those big
> engineering tool companies you and I have mentioned are still in business.
>
> What's really strange about what was taught in introductory engineering
> courses is that Gasparde Monge (the father of Descriptive Geometry) had
> enough influence over Napoleon Bonaparte that he got that discipline
> incorporated into the curriculum at the military school for French officers
> at Meziere (sp) over the objections of all the other staff military officers
> Napoleon had in 1803.  All the other military officers wanted to use
> calculus-based instead of algebra-based science in the curriculum, but Monge
> insisted on the latter, particularly using geometry to calculate the
> ballistic trajectories of cannon balls so that "test volleys"
> didn't have to be used.  The bottom line is that the Western
> world continued to use algebra and geometry for more than 150 years beyond
> the time that it should have been used.  MIT was the first US university to
> make the complete conversion to calculus back in 1955, and other engineering
> schools have slowly followed suite.  The split that developed between 
> engineering and engineering technology is fundamentally based on the 
> difference in how sciences are taught.
>
> Descriptive geometry was a military secret during and after the Napoleonic
> wars.  We were so desperate to have it taught in this country that an envoy
> traveled to France and hired Claude Crozet (student of Monge) to teach it at 
> West Point, sight
> unseen.  When he arrived, he discovered to his dismay that West Point was 
> "in the sticks" and none of the
> cadets spoke or understood French well enough to understand what they were
> being taught.  He ended up writing the first text for the material in 
> English (1821).  His wife was so upset at living conditions at West Point
> that Crozet quit a few years later and he moved his family to Virginia where 
> he
> supported himself by surveying and investing in schemes to build a water
> passage from the east coast to the Ohio river (up the Potomac across to the
> Gauley, down to New River, the Kanawha, and into the Ohio at 
> Gallipolis-Point
> Pleasant.)  There are still a few of those first edition books on 
> Descriptive geometry floating around.  I have seen one in Texas and one in 
> Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  It's a large book with fold out pages, bound in 
> leather, gold-leaf printing on the cover, etc. -- pretty nice looking for a 
> government publication by today's standards.
>
> In among the equipment that I sold to Bear were a couple of special 
> sliderules from the Korean war era that were used for aiming Howitzers.  As 
> late as that time, our military was still making regular use of the 
> technology "forced" on us by Gasparde Monge.
>
> Enough already.  Let's talk tractors.
>
> Larry
>   
>