Uses for the 1960 catalog of graph sheets

[beschizza]

Originally published at: Uses for the 1960 catalog of graph sheets | Boing Boing

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[jameswest]

This video is a lovely way to spend fourteen minutes.

[allenk]

No Smith charts. I am disappoint.

[IronEdithKidd]

I have a 3-ring binder with at least 5 varieties of K & E graph sheets from various university classes. I still use their 10:1" sheets for drawing up knitting charts.

[Lot_49]

I love his respect for old drafting instruments which I, an old drafter, once used.

[euansmith]

You draft old bugger.

[Mister44]

I one time had an item come in that was a 3-D isometric graph paper and saved the file in case it would come in handy!

[douglas_stuart]

My Dad is did drafting before he went into engineering. It was a delight to find all the graph paper in the attic as a child.

These old graph sheets are GREAT for what they do. I’d love to get my hands on some to make my students do some actual graphing.

Just playing with those, and trying to figure out how/why they would be used got me thinking about math in new ways that eventually proved quite useful later in life.

@allenk

Smith charts

Lots of those! He did acoustical engineering.

[jerwin]

Chris Staeker, the author of the video, has pdf files of some of K&E’s offerings – generated from LaTeX so you can avoid his slightly misaligned scanner, and print digital perfection on your slightly misaligned printers.

http://cstaecker.fairfield.edu/~cstaecker/machines/graphsheets.html

[HaroldHill]

Let alone a double impedance/admittance Smith chart.

[nixiebunny]

Whenever I do science, I use Science Paper.

[nixiebunny]

@allenk

No Smith charts. I am disappoint.

Smith charts were printed by the Smith Co., not K&E. They have a stern warning not to reproduce them, printed on every sheet.

Addendum:
I got the Science Paper from a retired coworker’s office, after I cleaned it out in order to have a nice big office to move my officemate into. I also ran across a pad of Smith charts, but didn’t keep it as a souvenir. I gave it to another engineer who is fluent in Smith graphing.

[Mister44]

Ok, I’ll bite, what are these used for?

[Simon_Clift]

“Blue squares” eh… that’s “squared paper”… not graph paper…

…and (as my Dad used to tell me) if it’s drawn with an HB pencil, it’s not a line…

[nixiebunny]

Smith charts were used by RF engineers to calculate the complex impedance of radio frequency matching circuits, before the computer horsepower existed to automate the process. The Wikipedia entry has a good description of the procedures. Basically, the chart has really weird axes that allow the non-linear math to be represented with lines and circles.

[jerwin]

lines are infinite. What you have there is a line segment

[Simon_Clift]

lines are infinite. What you have there is a line segment

/me rolls paper into a tube … applies cylindrical co-ordinates…

there… as I was saying… line…