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Abacus 1200s AD |
The human hand is certainly our oldest counting tool. But hands are limited calculators, since they only have ten fingers. In order to quickly count to 10, ancient number-lovers came up with a counting board with grooves in it, where pebbles were placed. Just sliding the pebbles along the grooves from one side of the board to the other made counting much easier, and freed one hand to do other work. The Salamis tablet is the oldest known counting board. It was used by the Babylonians over 2,000 years ago, around 300 B.C. It was discovered in 1899 on the island of Salamis. But people wanted to increase the ease and speed of counting, so the first real abacus evolved in 1200A.D. in China. It was called suan-pan. It was made of wood and had a frame of rods with beads strung on them. Around 1600 A.D. the abacus was brought to Japan by way of Korea. Early Christians later brought the abacus through Russia to Europe. In a different part of the world, Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), an abacus made from kernels of maize threaded through strings and mounted on a wooden frame was used around 900-1000 A.D. Different cultures have interesting variations of the abacus. The Chinese abacus was designed with 13 columns with 2 beads on top (representing heaven) and 5 beads below (representing earth). The Japanese abacus had 21 columns, with 1 bead on top and 4 beads below. The Russian Abacus has 10 columns with 10 beads on each.
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The ingenious abacus is still used to teach math. A two-day
computing contest was held in 1946 between Kiyoshu Matzukai,
using an abacus, and an electric calculator - and the abacus
won!