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Gunter’s Rule was invented by Edmund Gunter in 1620 to operationalize the work John Napier did with Logarithms. Napier published a table of logarithms in 1614 with which one can replace complex multiplication and division with simpler addition and subtraction of the equivalent logarithms.  This is an improvement if you must calculate by hand but still leaves a laborious and error prone task.  Gunter placed these logarithms in a line, so that instead of looking up the logarithms in a table, adding them and looking up the result of the multiplication, all you had to do was use a pair of dividers to add the lengths representing the two multiplicands.  The result could be read right off the same scale.

The Gunters Rule was the de facto standard computing tool for surveyors and mariners throughout the 18^th and 19^th Century.  In about 1632 William Oughtred, an Anglican minister, places two such scales side by side and slides them to read the distance relationships, thus multiplying and dividing directly without the use of calipers.  This tool, slide rule, was used to perform design calculations for virtually all the major structures built during the 19^th and 20^th Centuries and was instrumental in sending the Apollo Astronauts to the Moon.

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