Calculator salesmen reportedly fled Russia after watching skilled abacus operators at work
According to the writer Yakov Perelman, some businessmen who tried to sell mechanical calculators in the Russian Empire gave up in despair once they saw how fast a practised abacus user could work. The humble bead frame stayed in Soviet shops and markets for another century, fading only once cheap homegrown pocket calculators arrived in 1974.
An abacus is a hand-worked calculating device built from rows of sliding beads, each rod usually standing for one digit of a number. The earliest versions used loose pebbles on a flat surface or counters in grooves; putting beads on rods inside a frame made them much quicker to handle. Skilled users can add, subtract, multiply, divide and even extract square and cube roots.
Its roots run deep. A Sumerian form appeared between 2700 and 2300 BC, arranged around their base 60 counting system. Herodotus noted that Egyptians moved their pebbles from right to left, the reverse of Greek practice, and the orator Demosthenes grumbled that calculating with pebbles was too hard. The Salamis Tablet, a white marble counting board found on a Greek island in 1846 and dated to 300 BC, is the oldest yet discovered. Romans called their pebbles calculi, and Pope Sylvester II revived a faster beads-on-wires design in Europe during the 11th century.
Designs varied by region. The Chinese suanpan, first written about in the 2nd century BC, typically has two beads above a central beam and five below, and a quick sideways flick resets it. The Russian schoty has ten beads per wire, with the middle two coloured differently for easy reading, plus a short wire once used for quarter-kopek fractions. The mathematician Jean-Victor Poncelet, a former prisoner of war in Russia, brought one to France around 1820 and used it purely as a teaching aid.
The word itself reached English by 1387 through Latin, from a Greek term perhaps borrowed from a Semitic word for dust, possibly sand used as a writing surface. Electronic calculators largely replaced abacuses in the 1980s, yet they still help merchants in parts of Eastern Europe, China and Africa, assist people whose eyesight rules out calculators, and teach children arithmetic in Japan and China.
Source: Abacus
