OAKLAND, CALIF. : For decades the slide rule was a universal emblem of the engineering profession. A slide rule sticking out of the shirt pocket, along with the inevitable black glasses and bad haircut, was the easiest way for a cartoonist or filmmaker to show that someone was an engineer. Groups of students carried oversized versions at their graduations, and a drawing of a slide rule was invariably used in newspapers to illustrate an engineering-related story. The symbol was instantly understood, the way test tubes and retorts signal chemistry or scales of justice mean the law.

You can still see such imagery occasionally, but to a generation of people who used E-mail to make their prom dates, it must look ludicrously archaic—if, indeed, it is recognized at all. Slide rules quickly disappeared from use when cheap pocket calculators became available in the early 1970s, and while other artifacts from that era, such as bell-bottoms and Richard Nixon, keep breaking out anew, no one is predicting a similar comeback for the slide rule. Beloved as they were, slide rules have gone irretrievably to the technological Valhalla populated by T-squares and double-pan balances and constant-density graph paper that you could weigh to find the area under a curve.

Scientists and engineers, like other workers, welcome anything that makes their job easier; no one longs for the time when it took several reams of paper to calculate something a modern computer spits out in seconds. Yet many who started out in the pre-electronic era have fond memories of their slide rule days. Knowing how to use a Log Log Duplex Decitrig was a badge of proficiency, a Masonic ritual that set initiates apart. And traditionalists will tell you that learning the layouts of the various scales, moving the slide by hand, and reading the results by eye gave one a visceral understanding of the meaning behind the numbers that no computer, no matter how powerful, can provide.

It’s not surprising, then, that even in these days of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, some people still cherish their old wooden Keuffel & Essers. One group of such enthusiasts is the recently formed Oughtred Society, named for William Oughtred, a seventeenth-century Englishman who by some accounts built the first slide rule. Since its founding two years ago, the society has worked to promote the exchange of information and the swapping of antique models (though, when you think about it, all slide rules are antiques) as well as books, catalogues, and related paraphernalia. Today the society has 175 members, mostly in the United States but with a scattering of enthusiasts worldwide; for some reason there is a particular concentration in the Netherlands. Most members seem to be engineers or scientific professionals who used slide rules in their work, though lately younger folks have started joining. “Sometimes people call me up and say, ‘I’ve never seen a slide rule,’” says Osborne Price, the society’s publicity director. (For information on the Oughtred Society, write Mr. Price at 8338 Colombard Court, San Jose, CA 95135.)

The membership’s broad range of interests can be seen in recent copies of the society’s journal (which “is issued at least twice a year”; if only Invention & Technology ’s publication schedule were so liberal!). There are items on Braille slide rules, triangular models, and ones in the form of pencils. Nomenclature mavens debate various names for the little windowlike thing that slides back and forth (”runner,” “indicator,” and “cursor” all have their partisans; “crosswire” is also occasionally seen) and plaintively ask, “Which is the ‘front’ face? Confusion reigns!” A fifteen-page article covers the many methods that have been tried to make the slide loose enough to move freely but tight enough to stay put when the user is making a reading. Regarding one such scheme, involving metal strips, that was patented but apparently never used, the author says, “I have sawed through several slide rules but have not yet found any one with these strips.” It just goes to show that when you’re searching for truth, you have to break a few rules.

PITTSBURGH, PA. : Cities celebrate their pasts in varying ways. In some, such as Boston and Philadelphia, you can’t throw a brick without hitting a statue of one of the Founding Fathers; in others, such as New York, history is generally ignored unless there’s money to be made from it. In Pittsburgh, where the Society for Industrial Archeology (SIA) held its annual convention in June, the city’s smoky past comes through in two widely divergent ways.

Pittsburgh’s blue-collar virtues—hard work, honesty, community spirit —are constantly trumpeted in advertisements, newspaper columns, and remarks from residents old and new. The source of it all is embraced in sobriquets like “Steeltown”; football’s Pittsburgh Steelers, perhaps the city’s most beloved institution, are another prominent example of this tendency. Yet visitors are also constantly told that Pittsburgh no longer relies on heavy industry and its skies no longer darken at noon—even if the visitors held no such misconceptions in the first place, and even though the city’s sparkling downtown is enough to instantly convince any doubter.

While many of the region’s furnaces and mills do lie silent, many others are still active. When SIA members fanned out for a variety of tours on the first day of the conference, for every site that was shut down, like U.S. Steel’s storied Homestead works (closed in 1979), there was one that is thriving, like the same company’s Edgar Thomson works in Braddock—one of the most up-to-date steel mills in the country, with a new continuous caster installed just last fall. One group visited Carnegie-Mellon University’s center for computer-aided design and robotics, then drove to a modern plant of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company; with other groups, the past tense was used almost exclusively, and phrases like “what remains of” predominated.

The spirit of the convention was perhaps best summed up on a tour of current and former breweries. Ghosts of old labels like Buccaneer (put out for a few months following the Pirates’ 1960 World Series victory), Duquesne (with its inviting slogan “Duquesne Beer Is Good”), and Fort Pitt (marketed under the somewhat snappier motto “Fort Pitt—That’s It”) hovered over the derelict buildings, and many an industrial archeologist was heard to bemoan the blandness of today’s national brands of beer.

During a midday visit to two working breweries the mood lifted considerably, perhaps because samples of the product were dispensed. First stop was the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, where an introductory video explained that Iron City, the company’s main brand, is “a Pittsburgh beer made in Pittsburgh for Pittsburgh by Pittsburghers” and included local residents saying that their grandfathers had drunk I.C. and, by God, so would their grandchildren. The retired union president, Herman Lageman, led visitors through the plant and told stories of the days when beer-consumption breaks were included in every worker’s contract, leading to reduced efficiency in the late afternoons. (Nowadays employees take home several cases a month instead.)

Next stop was the Allegheny Brewery & Pub, a faux-German beer hall, where Penn Pilsner from the on-site microbrewery accompanied “U-boat” sandwiches (German-style submarines). The owner, Tom Pastorius, established his business on the site of the old Eberhardt and Ober brewery in 1989 and since then has been working to establish a niche for his premium product. Having worked in the German beer industry for twelve years, he is evangelical about his imported brewing techniques and equipment (though the site is old, all his machinery is brandnew) and will discourse at length about the superiority of two-row barley over six-row, or the differences between top-fermenting and bottom-fermenting yeast.

While Iron City (about which Mr. Pastorius sniffed, “You didn’t learn anything about beer over there”) is ubiquitous in the Pittsburgh area, Penn Pilsner is thus far sold only in its own pub and a few dozen upscale taverns. Despite this disparity in size, both beers manage to combine the old and the new. Iron City is a modern brew sold on television and produced in huge quantities; 1940s barflies ordering “an Imp and an Iron” (an Imperial whiskey and an Iron City) would be shocked to see the company putting out a light beer or including Canadians on ice skates in their advertising. Yet it clings to its old-fashioned local character in more than just the brand name; Pittsburghers cherish it as a symbol of their city, as the video shows, and it has resisted several attempts by national brands to drive it out of the local market. As for Penn Pilsner, while it uses only pure copper kettles and shuns such modern adulterants as corn and artificial carbonation, it is mixed, monitored, and stored with the aid of the latest high-tech equipment instead of relying solely on the brewmaster’s nose and palate.

Residents like to boast that Pittsburgh combines the “livability” of a small town with the advantages of a big one. For a city whose soul lies in manufacturing, these qualities put it in good stead for the future, when customers will demand the individualized service of a local blacksmith and the efficiency of a gigantic assembly line. As Pittsburgh’s breweries show, it’s possible to combine these qualities if you are committed enough to your product and your community. So when the city clings to its brawny past, it does so not from fear of the present and future but in order to keep in mind some very important lessons.