To illustrate how big a deal it was for anyone doing complex calculations, I would refer you to this passage about the autobiography of Nevil Shute, who was most famous as a novelist (A Town like Alice, On the Beach, Requiem for a Wren, etc.). He was an Engineer, Nevil Shute Norway.
His autobiography was called [‘Slide Rule’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_Rule:_Autobiography_of_an_Engineer). He was the chief calculator for Barnes Wallis, doing the stress calculations on R100, a successful airship, scrapped after the R101 (unrelated) disaster.
“The R100 design was the project on which he mentions using a [slide rule ( a Fuller cylindrical model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuller_calculator)), only mentioned once in the book. The stress calculations for each transverse frame required computations by a pair of calculators (people) for two or three months. The simultaneous equation contained up to seven unknown quantities, took about a week to solve, and had to be repeated if the guess on which of eight radial wires were slack was wrong with a different selection of slack wires if one of the wires was not slack. After months of labour filling perhaps fifty foolscap sheets with calculations “the truth stood revealed (and) produced a satisfaction almost amounting to a religious experience”.
Shute later went on to found Airspeed Limited, an aircraft manufacturer, which was famous for the Airspeed Oxford and (after he’d left) the Horsa glider, which put most of the UK & Commonwealth Airborne Force’s heavy equipment on the ground on D-Day, Market Garden and Varsity.
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