William Oughtred published his design for a slide rule in 1632.  A series of designs followed.  In 1727 Jacob Leupold published the "Theatrum Arithmetico-Geometricum"[^A scanned version of this book may be downloaded from [[http://ia600304.us.archive.org/33/items/theatrumarithmet00leup/theatrumarithmet00leup.pdf]] (viewed 3 Jan 2012)^] of which Table XII (page 241) is held in this collection (see below).[^This page was held in a German family and placed on auction on ebay in January 2012, after the seller's grandfather, an art collector, who had held it and had it restored, passed away.^]

This page shows three existing designs for logarithmic proportional rules. The top most (titled Mechanische Rechen Kunst and bearing also the initials MLBMC of its maker) is effectively a Gunter scale and dividers would be used to perform multiplications or divisions using the scale.[^a diagram of this %center% http://meta-studies.net/pmwiki/uploads/staebe1.JPG is shown at "Rechenschieber mit logarithmischen Skalen" [[http://www.rechenwerkzeug.de/staebe.htm]] (viewed 2 Jan 2012)^]  The lower two are slide rules.