🎧 351: Before the war . . .

BEFORE THE WAR, the best slide rules had come from Germany. Now the need for slide rules — for calculating artillery trajectories, plotting courses, calculating wind drift, figuring time to target, and the like — was great and pressing. The production of slide rules became a defense industry, and domestic slide rule manufacturers scrambled to meet the nation’s computational needs. In Hargrove, the town to the east of Babbington, Hargrove Slide Rules faced a critical situation: to meet their quotas they had to double production. Where would they find people with the skill and talent for the fine, exacting work that slide rules required? They appealed for help and guidance to the mathematics department at Hargrove University, where the department secretary, Kitty Kern, suggested that they try recruiting among jewelers, and that’s how they found Lorna.
     One afternoon, after she had been with the Hargrove Slide Rule Company for three months, Lorna was sitting alone in the company cafeteria, bent over a slide rule, absorbed in calculating the interior volume of her home on No Bridge Road, when Edwin Berwick, a promising young fellow who had been put in charge of training new employees, approached her. Beside her lay an egg-salad sandwich on a piece of waxed paper. She had unwrapped the sandwich and eaten a couple of bites, but then she had set it aside and ignored it. The bread had curled. The egg salad had darkened. Her coffee, barely touched, was cold.
     “Mrs. Piper?” said Berwick.
     “Oh!” said Lorna, startled from her concentration.
     “I’m sorry,” Berwick said at once. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
     “Oh, that’s all right,” said Lorna. “I was just — well — I wasn’t doing anything important.”
     “Testing the product, I see,” said Berwick.
     “Oh, not really,” said Lorna. “In fact, this is an old rule. I was just — ”
     “Yes?”
     “I was figuring the volume of my house,” admitted Lorna. She smiled and shrugged.
     “Just for the fun of it?” asked Berwick.
     “Oh, no,” she said. “Or, rather, yes — and no. Herb — my husband — wants to build a gadget to filter the air in our house — when the war is over. He has a good idea, I think: he’s going to bubble the air through barrels of water in the cellar, and all the impurities — even germs — will be left behind in the water. When the house smells stale — you know how a house gets that stale odor when it’s been closed up for a long time during the winter — all we’ll have to do is squeeze a little lemon juice into the water or toss in some pine needles to make the whole house smell fresh again.”
     Mr. Berwick wore an unchanging smile throughout Lorna’s explanation. To Lorna it looked a lot like the indulgent smile she wore so often when she was talking to Mrs. Stolz. Lorna supposed that the object of Mr. Berwick’s indulgent smile was Herb, not her, and because she thought it was directed at him she felt worse than she would have if she’d thought it was directed at her. She was embarrassed for Herb. “I see that you’re skeptical,” she said, with ice in her voice. “It may sound like a foolish idea, but Herb is very clever, and I think he can make it work.”
     “He’s an inventor?”
     “Just as a hobby. He sells Studebakers.”
     “I see.” That smile again. It was beginning to annoy Lorna, but if she had known what it really meant, it wouldn’t have. Berwick was pleased with what he was hearing from her. He’d been asked to help in recruiting for an urgent project: calculating tables of artillery trajectories for the Army. He hoped he’d be able to recommend someone. It was the first time his country had asked anything specific of him, anything that he could do better than anyone else, and the army was, of course, an important client of Hargrove Slide Rules. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Why did you say, ‘Yes and no,’ when I asked if you were making these calculations just for the fun of it?”
     “Oh,” said Lorna, “because I’m really doing it for the fun of doing it.” Now she was feeling defensive. She felt that Mr. Berwick was challenging her interests, Herb’s interests, her abilities, Herb’s abilities, even the way she and Herb worked together. The more pleased he was, the more broadly he smiled, the more condescending he appeared. Lorna wanted to make him understand her; she felt that she must make him understand her if she was going to preserve her self-respect. “You see,” she said, “Herb needs to know the volume of air in the house, of course, but he doesn’t need the precision that I’m going to give him. I could have come up with the figures he needed in a couple of hours, but instead I’m including every nook and cranny. I’m even making allowances for the air displaced by furnishings — and by Herb and me, and our daughter, Ella, and Mrs. Stolz — she lives with us — and even the air displaced by the cat. Here, let me show you. Our cat spends, on the average, fourteen hours, twenty-three minutes, and seventeen seconds in the house every day. Of course, I made the calculation last week, when the weather was good, so I’m going to have to gather data over a whole year to be really accurate. Herb made a clever little timer that attaches to the cat’s door — he made the door, too, of course. The timer switches on every time the door opens from the inside, so it clocks the time that Tom — the cat — is inside. Tom displaces — let me see — 456.19 cubic inches. But, since he’s only in the house 59.95 percent of the time, he only represents, on the average, 273.49 cubic inches — ”
     “About sixteen hundredths of a cubic foot,” said Edwin.
     “Yes,” said Lorna, just a little surprised to find that Edwin had been following her so carefully. “Then there’s the air that Herb and I displace — ”

In Topical Guide 351, Mark Dorset considers Gadgets: Electro-Mechanical and Mathematics (Applied): Calculating the Volume of an Irregular Solid (a cat)  from this episode.

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