The abacus has had a huge impact on human civilization. For many centuries, this device served as a tool to allow people to perform fast calculations in commerce and in engineering. Abacuses were employed by Europeans long before they used the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.

c. 190 BCE

ABACUS

“Artificial intelligence started with the calendar and abacus,” writes engineer and author Jeff Krimmel. “Artificial intelligence is any technology that helps a human being perform a cognitive task. In this light, a calendar is a piece of artificial intelligence. It supplements or replaces our memory. Likewise, an abacus is a piece of artificial intelligence. . . . We have no need to perform complex arithmetic in our head.”

There is evidence of instruments used for performing calculations in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the oldest surviving counting board dates to around 300 BCE in Greece with the Salamis Tablet, a marble slab with several groups of parallel line markings. Other boards used in antiquity were usually wood, metal, or stone, and they contained lines or grooves along which beads or stones were moved.

Around 1000 CE, the Aztecs invented the nepohualtzintzin (referred to by aficionados as the “Aztec computer”), an abacus-like device that made use of corn kernels threaded through wooden frames to help operators perform computations. The modern abacus, which contains beads that move along rods, dates at least as far back as 190 CE in China, where it is called the suanpan. In Japan, the abacus is called the soroban.

In some sense, the abacus may be considered the ancestor of the computer; and like the computer, the abacus serves as a tool to allow humans to perform fast calculations in commerce and in engineering. With slight variations in design, abacuses are still used in China, Japan, parts of the former Soviet Union, and Africa. Although the abacus is generally used for fast addition and subtraction operations, experienced users are able to quickly multiply, divide, and calculate square roots. In 1946, a calculating competition was held in Tokyo between a Japanese soroban operator and a person using an electric calculator to see which method yielded faster results to several problems of arithmetic. In most cases, the soroban operator beat the electric calculator.

So important is the abacus that, in 2005, Forbes.com readers, editors, and a panel of experts ranked the abacus as the second most important tool of all time in terms of its impact on human civilization. First and third on the list were the knife and the compass, respectively.