Since Galileo used his pulse to measure the time period of a swinging chandelier in the 17th century, pendulums have fascinated scientists. It was not until Stokes' (1851 Camb. Phil. Soc. 9 8-106). (whose interest was spurred by the pendulur time pieces of the mid 19th century) treatise on viscous flow that a theoretical framework for the drag on a sphere at low Reynolds number was laid down. Stokes' famous drag law has been used to determine two fundamental physical constants-the charge on an electron and Avogadro's constant-and has been used in theories which have won three Nobel prizes. Considering its illustrious history it is then not surprising that the flow past a sphere and its two-dimensional analog, the flow past a cylinder, form the starting point of teaching flow past a rigid body in undergraduate level fluid mechanics courses. Usually starting with the two-dimensional potential flow past a cylinder, students progress to the three-dimensional potential flow past a sphere. However, when the viscous flow past rigid bodies is taught, the three-dimensional example of a sphere is first introduced, and followed by (but not often), the two-dimensional viscous flow past a cylinder. The reason why viscous flow past a cylinder is generally not taught is because it is usually explained from an asymptotic analysis perspective. In fact, this added mathematical complexity is why the drag on a cylinder was only solved in 1911, 60 years after the drag on a sphere. In this note, we show that the viscous flow past a cylinder can be explained without the need to introduce any asymptotic analysis while still capturing all the physical insight of this classic fluid mechanics problem.