Nomograms

September 5, 2009 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

For some reason, I found myself looking at a rather pedestrian page about slide rules today, and it once again rekindled my interest in the closely related nomograms and nomography. I’ve mentioned them once or twice on this blog in the past, but in case you don’t know, nomograms are a computational aid from the past which were used for computation. In their most common form, they are a diagram with three separate scales, and by connecting a line between two variables, you can read off the third. They are an interesting and mostly forgotten relic from the past.

Now, I’ve particularly when interested in old technology, I imediately surf over to archive.org and see if they have any books for downoad about the subject. And, of course, they do!

Internet Archive: A first course in nomography.

You could also surf over to the PyNomo website and get their software for designing and printing nomograms.

Comments

Comment from Ron
Time 9/14/2009 at 8:33 pm

Google Books is a great resource for complete texts of books on nomography prior to 1923 for which the copyrights have expired (assuming you are accessing it in the US). Search “nomography” and choose to see full views only, and you will find classic books by Lipka, Haskell and others. Search “nomographie d’ocagne” to find d’Ocagne’s “Traite de Nomographie” in both the 1899 and 1921 editions. And if you really want to blow your mind, search for “nomographie soreau” to find his “Contribution à la théorie et aux applications de la nomographie” from 1902, full of extraordinary nomograms and their theory (and incorrectly classified by Google Books as juvenile nonfiction!)

The PyNomo software is fantastic, by the way, as seen in the examples on the site.

Ron