British Currency in the 1960s
As a child growing up in England in the 1960s you learned very quickly to be agile with numbers. This was due to the currency. British currency in the 1960s knew nothing of base 10. There were not 10 of anything in anything, or even 100 of anything in anything.
Not only did it use a different base but it used two of them simultaneously. So even a simple act like buying an item and then calculating your change required lightning fast mental calculation in two bases.
The bases were 12 and 20, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's look at British currency in its heyday of twin bases.
First came a half penny (in slang "hapney bit").
Next of course was the penny.
Next was a 3 penny piece (in slang "therepney bit").
Then came the sixpence which was of course 6 pennies.
Next was the shilling, a centerpiece of the currency (in slang "bob"). Was this 10 pennies? No, this was 12 pennies.
After the shilling came a 2 shilling piece.
Then came the half crown, which was 2 shilling and sixpence.
I suppose at some point there must have been a crown, but I never saw one.
That was the end of the metal money. So next came the paper currency.
The first introduced the next centerpiece, the pound note.
So there were 10 shillings in a pound, right? Wrong. A pound was 20 shillings.
After that there was a 5 pound note and a 10 pound note.
History has not been kind to base 20, but base 12 lives on even in countries whose currency is totally decimal (base 10). There are still 12 inches in a foot, 12 hours in a day, 12 months in a year and 12 of anything in a dozen. You cannot keep a good base down!
The Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians were the first civilizations to widely implement base 12, dating back to at least 3000 BCE. While we typically use base 10 today because we have ten fingers, these ancient cultures looked to the segments of their fingers instead.
If you use your thumb as a pointer, you can count the 12 phalanges (finger bones) on your four fingers. This allowed people to count to 12 on one hand and use the other hand to track multiples, reaching 60 (which is why the Sumerians also pioneered base 60).
12 is also a "highly composite number." It can be evenly divided into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths (2, 3, 4, 6). In contrast, 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5. This made 12 much more practical for early trade, construction, and dividing food.
Tech Notes:
Content written and posted by Ken Abbott abbottsystems@gmail.com
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