Hi all,

Anyone watching the TV show "Manhattan"?  It's a drama based on the Manhattan project - takes place at Los Alamos.  The series premier was Sunday, July 27 on WGNHD.  I spotted at least three or four scenes with slide rules, two of them good enough to make at least a tentative ID (I think both of these were in the last half of the show).  The first shows a man using a slide rule - the side visible onscreen had a cracked cursor window.  From the shape of the cursor frame and the black cursor end bar I think it was probably a Dietzgen - couldn't tell which model.  The second showed one of the ratiest looking slide rules I've ever seen with most of the paint flaked off near the  slide - from the flaking I'd say it might have been an old magnesium Pickett - also the cursor looked like it had solid metal end bars with the old four-screw Pickett cursor, but I just couldn't get a good enough look to be sure - again, I couldn't determine the model.  If it was a Pickett, of course it was an anachronism - I believe Pickett and Eckel wasn't even formed until after the war (and this scene in the movie takes place in 1943).
Oh, yeah, they had a room full of girls they referred to as "computers".  :-)

Steve Treadwell