Early cuneiform inscriptions, made about 2200 B. C, show that the Babylonians had developed a fairly extensive system of figuring. This was in the days of the patriarch Abraham. When men's minds were overtaxed with the strain of counting into the hundreds and thousands, the Babylonians invented the first adding machine, a "pebble board," a ruled surface on which pebbles were shifted about to represent different values.

The next adding and calculating machine was an evolution from the digits of the human hand and is known as the abacus in China, and the soroban in Japan.

The abacus may be defined as an arrangement of movable beads which slip along fixed rods, indicating by their arrangement some definite numerical quantity. Its most familiar form is in a boxlike arrangement, divided longitudinally by a narrow ridge of two compartments, one of which is roughly some three times larger than the other. Cylindrical rods placed at equal intervals apart pass through the framework and are fixed firmly into the sides. On these rods the counters are beaded. Each counter slides along the rod easily and on each rod there are six tamas or beads. Five of these slide on the longest segment of the rod and the remaining one on the shorter. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and even square and cube root can be performed on the abacus, and in the hands of a skilled operator considerable speed can be obtained.

The Oriental tradesman does not deign to perplex himself by z, process of mental arithmetic; he seizes his abacus, prepares it by a tilt, makes a few rapid, clicking movements and his calculations are completed. We always, look with some slight contempt upon this method of calculation, but a little experience and investigation would tend to transform this contempt into admiration, for it may be safely asserted that even the simplest of all arithmetical operations, the abacus, possesses distinctive advantages over the mental or figuring process. In competition in simple addition between a "lightning calculator" and an ordinary Japanese small tradesman, the Japanese would easily win the contest.

Finger Counting was Common Among Earlier Peoples, and was Brought to a.

Fair Degree of Efficiency by South Africans

Courtesy of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.

The "Abacus" was One of the Earliest Aids to Calculation.

It is still used extensively in China, and occasionally will be found in Chinese laundries in the United States.

Courtesy of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.

Blaise Pascal, the wonderful Frenchman, who discovered the theorem in conic sections, or Pascal's hexogram, was not only one of the foremost mathematicians of his day but also excelled in mechanics; when he was nineteen years old he produced the first machine for the carrying of tens and the first arithmetical machine, as we know it, was invented by him about 1641. This was the first calculating machine made with dials. The same principle, that of using discs with figures on their peripheries, is employed in present-day calculating machines. Among these are numbering machines of all kinds, speedometers, cyclometers and counters used on printing presses.