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The Bead Counters
by Mike Morris
December 1, 2000
The high-tech gurus of 5,000 years ago were Arab traders. Their office was the desert, and the preferred transportation was via camel. They traded simple goods: seeds, livestock, cloth and ideas, and like all merchants they had to keep accounts. There were no calculators in those days, so they invented the abacus.
This simple and powerful tool plays a large role in the history of computing. Its story begins 5,000 years ago with pebbles in the sand. Humans carry their own personal computer in the form of 10 fingers, but mankind has always needed at least four hands to do all the work he conjures up for himself.
Somewhere in the dim past, an original mind decided that 10 of anything would do just as well as fingers, which could then be freed for scratching, eating, and the like. Sand and pebbles were plentiful in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, and grooves were made in sand and clay so that pebbles could be shifted and counted fairly easily with one hand while the other was freed for other things.
The modern abacus uses the same principle today. It’s still around, not just as a curiosity, but as a useful, inexpensive computing machine.
The march of technology
The abacus evolved, along with the science of mathematics. In 1800 BC, a Babylonian mathematician developed algorithms to resolve numerical problems. Sand became a rigid grooved pebble container, and migrating armies, escaped slaves, and sleight-of-hand experts spread the secrets of the super-computing machine.
The empires of China, Japan, and Rome began to use them. The science of computing leapt ahead when an early engineer in Egypt came up with the idea of drilling holes in the pebbles and stringing them on wire. This innovation, about 2,500 years ago, generated a huge increase in the speed of calculation.
The wire-frame abacus became more sophisticated in China, where it is called suan pan. The Chinese abacus has 13 columns, with a top tier of two beads, and a bottom tier of five beads (Heaven and Earth). The Japanese copied the Chinese abacus in the 17th century, adding their own subtleties. The Japanese abacus or soroban has four counters on earth and only one in Heaven. This eliminates dual representations of fives and 10s.
The modern abacus
In Europe, Pope Sylvester II devised an efficient abacus at the end of the first Millenium (1000 AD). As usual, though, the unsubtle Occidentals opted for a simple design, with one tier only, and an empty wire to represent zero. The modern European form of the abacus is Russian, with 10 beads in ten rows. Tthe abacus began to lose its popularity earlier in Europe when paper and pencil were introduced. Prior, when most people were unable to write script or numbers and parchment was very expensive, the ubiquitous abacus was a great bargain buy.
I came across a homegrown abacus company on the Internet. It offers three types of abaci: the Beginners, the Cranmer, and the large. The Beginners has two rods of 9 beads, and is intended to teach children between the ages of 5 and 7 the elements of set theory, addition, and subtraction.
The Cranmer abacus is a pocket-sized calculating device like the one used in Japan. It is made of black and white high-impact plastic, and is described as being both luxurious and functional. There is also a coupling device that will link two Cranmers together for the experts.
The large abacus is a large Cranmer, with beveled beads. Each rod has one tactile dot, and, starting with the second rod, there is a tactile dash for every three rods. It is designed for persons with limited manipulative or visual skills. All three abaci come with thoroughly modern video training tapes.
Not yet obsolete
The abacus is still a regular part of the school curriculum in parts of the Far East, and is still commonly used as a calculator. Despite its age, it can still compete. In 1946 a contest between a Japanese abacist, and an electronic computer, lasting two days, was won by the abacist.
From small business deals between single individuals to the economies of large and sophisticated civilizations, the humble abacus has helped pull together the economic sinews of a large element of mankind for a long period of recorded history. It has allowed us to manipulate numbers, and to become as familiar and confident in their use as we are with words. The abacus provided us with a solid stepping-stone to higher mathematics.
It is a fitting ancestor to the powerful computer network that spans the globe today.
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