How to count with ancient counting chips

Before the abacus, the counting chip was the main calculation tool in ancient China, usually made of wooden sticks, bamboo strips or animal bones. By arranging and placing the chips, one could perform operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and squaring, and could also be used to solve equations. Most of the major achievements of traditional Chinese mathematics were made by using chips as computational tools and calculations.

The Han book - legal calendar records: its algorithms with bamboo, diameter of a minute, six inches long. 20 century archaeological excavations have found a number of warring states, Qin Han chips, some of the chips on the red lacquer, may be used for negative calculations. In addition, people can also use the counting chips to keep track of fractions and decimals. The counting chips evolved into the bead counting in the Southern Song Dynasty at the latest, and were completely replaced by the bead counting in the mid-Ming Dynasty after being used in conjunction with the bead counting for two to three hundred years.

Did the ancients ride in taxis? The odometer was an ancient tool for measuring the length of long-distance journeys, usually in the form of a wheelbarrow or two-wheeled cart, which had to be drawn by human or animal power. Inside the odometer, vertical and horizontal gears were meshed to record the number of revolutions of the wheels and the distance traveled by the vehicle. This gearing structure was mostly used in later mechanical calculators. Therefore, the odometer is also regarded as the earliest mechanical counting device.

Ancient Western odometers can be traced back to the ancient Greek period. The earliest document recording the structure and use of the odometer was the Ten Books of Architecture by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. Ancient Chinese odometers were known as ji li drum cars, which also reported mileage automatically, similar to the counters in modern vehicles. Inside the car, a three-stage gear reduction mechanism was set up to transmit the rotation of the wheels through the meshing of the gears to the wooden figures on the car, thus realizing the beating of drums and bangles at regular intervals.