Yesterday the slide-rule way
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
There are any number of reasons why I knew I had to drive out to Delano to meet Dave Grout last week, after he called to chat with me following a "newscast" I did on The Current a few weeks ago.
Grout, a Saint Paul native and son of a man who parlayed two peanut-vending machines at Lake Harriet into a nationwide coin-op game business -- pinball machines and jukeboxes -- is a long-time engineering "nerd."
"I started tinkering with radios when I was 8 years old, and started at the University of Minnesota when I was 15," he said. "I got my degree two weeks before I graduated from high school (in Hopkins). I was fascinated by mathematics and I was fascinated by electronics."
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
Grout says he worked on the space program when NASA was developing the Saturn V rocket ("they needed to be able to measure the stresses on the structure and I had done some work on a much smaller basis and I figured out a way to do it and provide telemetry to the control room"), helped calculate the landing site for the first Mars lander (Viking I), designed speakers and amplifiers for musicians, designed a power steering pump tester for Cadillac, restored jukeboxes, ran a pizza joint in Osseo, and took Joan Jett to his high school class' 50th reunion.
Which ones of those are true, I cannot confirm, but I can confirm the one factoid that made me want to visit him: He doesn't own a computer.
"They bore me to tears," he said.
What he's used his entire engineering life is a slide rule, the rotary telephone of engineers. We're guessing there aren't many people left who can do this, so I wanted to see it before the species becomes extinct.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/uUzSStVnAHk
Grout says this is a talent that needs to be taught in school again. "This thing is wonderful. You don't need a battery, all you need is a little light to see it. But you have to know some mathematics. In my world, if you can't do it with a piece of paper and a pencil, you ought not to be doing it with a machine because you won't know if the machine is lying to you."
Plus Joan Jett must think they're cool.
