Stick with Numbers
Hi: I’m new here and I’m just looking for information about this stick. My son and I are thinking this may be a printers aide as his Great Grandfather was in the news paper business. The stick is 24” long with 3 sets of numbers on each side.
Try again
Stick1.jpg
What is the scale of gradations? Printers in UK/US used points and picas, and a pica is ROUGHLY 6 to the inch, and 72 points to the inch; the pica line is a basic unit of measurement. But they also measured lines of type that might be 8 or 10 points, and a number of other type sizes as well (5-1/2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14 etc.)
Your best bet is to campare this to a commercial printer’s rule.
After studying the markings it looks like the first number on a line is the number of divisions per foot eg. 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20
My guess: it may be a rule to scale logs, to determine how many board feet of lumber are in them. Google “Scribner decimal C”, which is one of the systems to do this. I have done it, but probably not for 25 or 30 years.