It can also make a justifiable claim to many other inventions including: Iron casting Examinations Spaghetti Fans Porcelain Blast furnaces the Abacus Ship rudders Silk Planetaria Printed books Pasta Kites Paper money Ice cream Wheelbarrows Acupuncture and many more. It seems that direct contacts between ‘Europe’ and ‘China’ were few and it was the Central Asian intermediaries who traded in the strange new inventions from the mysterious East.Ĭhina traditionally lays claim to four great inventions: paper printing gunpowder and the compass. Along the desert Silk Roads between the two great civilizations of the time there must have been the transmission of objects of the greatest value: ideas and inventions. In the case of China, the trade between Rome and China in the Han dynasty is well known and documented. An invention in one place can lead to it being found after a hundred years over a very widespread area. So tracing the first appearance of something is a case of careful detective work. Even so it is quite possible for the same idea to be independently discovered in several places at more or less the same time, greatly complicating any search for the origin. It is only when an invention becomes widely adopted that there is a realistic chance that someone will have written down an accurate account. The first invention of something is by its nature an isolated event and it is unlikely that the initial discovery is faithfully recorded. Working out who invented precisely what and when is a daunting task as contemporaneous records are fragmentary. Needham at Cambridge have discovered that many of the great achievements in science and technology actually originated from China. Up until the 1960s World Civilization was considered to have started in the Middle East and Mediterranean with not much of any consequence elsewhere. Even today, those well-versed with the Chinese abacus can easily calculate at the speed of the modern calculator.Ming dynasty (1368-1644) waterwheel at Lanzhou, Gansu / Photo by Giddens Memorial East Asian Museum, Wikimedia Commons The abacus system in ancient China was an extremely advanced form of calculation. The original position of the suanpan was when all the beads are away from the beam. The extreme right vertical rod signified the ones place subsequently followed by tens, hundreds and thousand places while moving from right to left. When the beads were moved towards the beam, it meant counting them in and moving them away meant not counting their value. The basic calculation involved moving the beads up and down the rods towards and away from the horizontal beam. The suanpan was efficient for all simple and advanced calculations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root and cube root. The bottom beads were mainly used for counting decimal and hexadecimal numbers. The beads were usually designed in the shape of a rhombus. There were more than seven rods in the tray and each rod consisted of two beads in the heaven part and five beads in the earth section. The tray was divided into two main sections by a horizontal beam with the top section referred as the heaven while the bottom part is referred as the earth. The basic structure of the ancient Chinese abacus comprised of a tray, which has a height of about 20cms and varying widths. Basic Structure of ancient Chinese abacus Ancient Chinese abacus structure It was during the Ming dynasty that the Chinese abacus spread beyond the Chinese territory and reached Japan. This scroll was painted during the Song dynasty that ruled China from 960-1297 AD. The greatest proof of the use of abacus in ancient China can be derived in the long scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival painted by Zhang Zeduan, where the suanpan is painted with an account book. Many of the ancient and powerful dynasties in China used the abacus. The abacus in ancient China was also known as the suanpan, its literal meaning being the counting tray.
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