- "My eyes are dim I cannot see, I have not got my E-6B with me, over the Valley of the Ruhr".
edit: not many pilots here I guess
The E-6B was developed in the
United States by Naval Lt. Philip Dalton in the late 1930s. The name comes from its original part number for the
U.S Army Air Corps in
World War II.
Philip Dalton (1903–1941) was a
Cornell University graduate who joined the
United States Army as an artillery officer, but soon resigned and became a
Naval Reserve pilot from 1931 until he died in a plane crash with a student practicing spins. He, with
P. V. H. Weems, invented, patented and marketed a series of flight computers.
Dalton's first popular computer was his 1933 Model B, the circular slide rule with True Airspeed (TAS) and Altitude corrections pilots know so well. In 1936 he put a double-drift diagram on its reverse to create what the US Army Air Corps (USAAC) designated as the E-1, E-1A and E-1B.
A couple of years later he invented the Mark VII, again using his Model B slide rule as a focal point. It was hugely popular with both the military and the airlines. Even
Amelia Earhart's navigator
Fred Noonan used one on their last flight. Dalton felt that it was a quickie design, and wanted to create something more accurate, easier to use, and able to handle higher flight speeds.
So he came up with his now famous wind arc slide, but printed on an endless cloth belt moved inside a square box by a knob. He applied for a patent in 1936 (granted in 1937 as 2,097,116). This was for the Model C, D and G computers widely used in World War II by the British Commonwealth, the
U.S. Navy, and even copied by the Japanese and Germans. These are commonly available on collectible auction web sites.