Living in the past: Forget the ‘War on Coal.’ What about the ‘War on Slide Rules’?

Just as the swallows returning to Capistrano herald a new spring, Andy Barr and Mitch McConnell launch a new election cycle by announcing a new initiative to “Win the War on Coal.”

The desperate miners in Eastern Kentucky fall for it all over and slavishly vote for these two snake oil salesmen for yet another term. As I have said before, the war on coal was lost a long time ago. According to the industry’s own figures, coal mining accounts for only 0.4 percent of all jobs in Kentucky. Coal mining contributes about 1 percent of the state’s total economy.

Let’s compare that to the automotive industry using 2014 data. In 2014, there were about 500 plants associated with the automotive industry. The automotive industry exports $5.5 billion in car sales Clearly, the only people who would miss coal would be the miners who are held in thrall to the coal companies.

However, I have different axes to grind. The coal proponents argue, (correctly, I might add) that coal helped to build this nation. So did horses, so why don’t the Republicans worry about the war on horses whose numbers fell from 20 million in 1915 to just 9 million today? Can you imagine what our state would be if every automobile were replaced with horses?

The state would be covered in what these lawmakers are peddling to the low information voters. Why has no one pledged to stop the war on slide rules? When I was in high advanced mathematics and science classes, every student was trained to use slide rules and schools provided them to students. Perhaps I need remind you that the people who put the men on the moon did so using slide rules to calculate predictive scientific data. The last company that made slide rules went out of business in 1980. Conspiracy?

And while we are on the topic of math, what about the war on logarithms? When I was in school every advanced math and science book had pages of logarithms and antilogarithms. Teachers spent a lot of time teaching students how to use them. There are many complicated math problems that cannot be solved without using logarithms. Are we seeing a pattern here?

What about the war on typewriters? Just one generation ago, every prosperous company had offices filled with IBM Selectric typewriters and many students had a Smith Corona with a cartridge ribbon. I daresay that many young people today have never actually seen, let alone used, a typewriter.

What about the war on Studebakers and REO Speedwagons? At one time those cars were the cat’s pajamas, but they have not been produced for decades. Clearly there was a conspiracy to put them out of business. And let’s not forget those wonderful foot x-ray machines that allowed shoe salesmen to x ray your feet to get the best fitting shoe, never mind that you may have gotten cancer or had children with birth defects due to exposure to radiation. I can go on and on.

The same thing that killed off all of these once popular items is the same thing that is killing the coal industry today, namely, advances in technology that are safer and more efficient than burning fossil fuels. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly nostalgic or sadistic, I play around with my old slide rule and remember my salad days in trigonometry and physics.

But time marches on along a one way street and no matter who much we wish we could go back to the so-called good old days of coal production there is no going back. Kentucky can either adapt to the new technologies and survive in the twenty-first century or try to live in the past and be buried there.

Roger Guffey of Lexington is a math professor. Reach him at rlguffey1@insightbb.com.

This story was originally published March 29, 2019 at 12:11 AM.