The traditional Chinese fondness for the abacus seems to have surfaced once in Texas other than in small businesses. For totaling a restaurant check or a grocery bill, an abacus is as good as a hand-held electronic calculator. Until mid-century no Chinese business was without one.

In 1928 Shell Oil Company built the "Million Barrel" storage vat for crude oil near Marathon in Ward County, Texas. The holding tank—a huge, outdoor, partial-earth construction—was intended to offset an overproduction of oil.

Dana Young, called "an engineer of Chinese extraction," did the mathematical calculations for the project…using an abacus.

One might think the engineer would have used a slide rule, the most common hand-held nonelectronic mathematical calculator until the 1960s. One can multiply and divide large numbers—to an approximation—faster on a slide rule than using an abacus. But the abacus has a certain elegance. Most abaci resemble a set of movable beads mounted in a wooden and metal framework of fine construction. The Chinese name for the device is hsuan-pan, or "computing tray."

The abacus can be thought of as a type of digital calculator in that it works with exact numbers, while a slide rule, being an analog device, cannot calculate with exact numbers but with "rounded" ones. In this regard, a slide rule and a clock with hands are rather the same: They are both sufficiently accurate for most work—but precisely correct time (say 12:42:13.67 p.m.) cannot be read from an indicator such as a moving hand, and the number 1,642,736 can only be estimated on a slide rule. In skilled hands an abacus is a swift, reliable, and precise arithmetic calculator.

Even though the construction of Shell Oil’s "Million Barrel" reservoir certainly did not require extremely precise numbers, Young apparently preferred the abacus. After all, in 1928 abaci had been in use for 3,778 years. Precisely.

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