Old english units of money

ValeryOchkov · ‎Jan 12, 2015

I read in FORSYTE SAGA (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4397/4397-h/4397-h.htm)

"He was er—an owner of houses, my dear. His hair about your Uncle Swithin's colour; rather a square build. Tall? No—not very tall" (he had been five feet five, with a mottled face); "a fresh-coloured man."

I can calculate the growth of this man 5*ft+5*in=165 cm

But I cannot calculate this:

"Old Jolyon stepped out, and, in paying the cab fare, for the first time in his life gave the driver a sovereign in mistake for a shilling."

Can anybody send me a Mathcad-sheet with

shilling:=?

sovereign:=shilling

etc

Fred_Kohlhepp · ‎Jan 12, 2015

According to what I can find, a "sovereign" is a coin equal to an english pound; there are 20 shillings in a pound.

A guinea was a pound and a shilling

http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/moneyold.htm

RichardJ · ‎Jan 12, 2015

A guinea was a pound and a shilling

Yes and no. A guinea was originally a gold coin and it's value fluctuated with the price of gold. That was obviously not very desirable so for about 100 years it's value was fixed at 21 shillings, until Britain adopted the gold standard, at which point the coin disappeared. After that it referred to a quantity of 21 shillings, but no coin of that value existed.

There was also a florin (2 shillings) and a groat (4 pennies), but the latter has not existed for a very long time. Those were both coins, but were not units of currency.

AlanStevens · ‎Jan 12, 2015

An old English sovereign was a coin that was nominally worth one old English pound (the standard pound was a note, not a coin in times past). The shilling was worth 12 old English pennies. There were 240 old English pennies in a pound.

Luckily, these days English money has been decimalised, so there are 100 (new) pennies in a pound (which is only available in coin form these days).

I'll leave you to produce a Mathcad conversion worksheet Valery!

Alan

PS I am old enough to remember pre-decimal English currency. There were also threepenny-bit and sixpenny-bit coins, florins (two-shilling coins), crowns (five-shilling coins), half-crowns (a coin worth two shillings and sixpence) and ten-shilling notes. And at a time I can barely remember there were half-pennies and farthings (1/4 of a penny) too!

RichardJ · ‎Jan 12, 2015

Farthings predate me (although I have a few that I got in change by accident), but I remember all the others. Does the expression "as bent as a 9 bob note" still exist in the UK? If it does then there must be a lot of people that don't understand where it comes from!

AlanStevens · ‎Jan 13, 2015

I haven't heard the expression "as bent as a 9 bob note" in decades; and, if it were used now, there would be many who wouldn't understand it at all, let alone where it comes from! (Note for those who don't know: a "bob" was slang for a shilling).

Alan

RichardJ · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Sigh. Now I feel old

athurin · ‎Jan 13, 2015

I remember reading about those when I read Good Omens, from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. With the comment "For a long time, British were opposed to the metric system that they found to complicated". I moved to UK 3 years ago, and only now I understand how true this statement was...

RichardJ · ‎Jan 13, 2015

For science and engineering nobody in the UK uses anything other than metric now, but for everyday use it's true that many people still prefer imperial units. That's because although they appear complicated because of all the different multipliers involved, in many ways they are convenient. A pint is a more appropriate quantity than a liter when buying, for example, milk. A liter is too big, and a milliliter is way too small (granted, there are other metric prefixes that could be used, but they never are). A pound of meat is a quantity that someone is much more likely to buy than a kilogram. And a quarter of a pound is, conveniently, an integer number of ounces (4 of course). A foot is 12 inches because then it can be divided by 2, 3, 4 or 6 to get an interger result. The base quantities of imperial units grew out of peoples daily needs, and seemingly odd multipliers were chosen for sub-units because it made the base quantity easily divisible. I guess you could say that imperial units were designed from the bottom up, with little or no thought to an overall system, or to science and engineering. Metric units were designed from the top down, so although the overall system is very easy to understand and work with, and it's therefore great for science and engineering, the base quantities don't fit well with daily life, and a multiplier of 10 means they don't divide easily to integers. In fact, the only choices that would be worse than 10 would be prime numbers . I believe Napoleon proposed changing to a duodecimal system, which IMO was an excellent idea. It would make counting on your fingers tricky, but everything else would be easier.

athurin · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Richard Jackson wrote:
For science and engineering nobody in the UK uses anything other than metric now

I wish that was true ...

Standard units for electronics are, often, somehow imperial. Manufacturers prefer board sizes in inches. The thickness of a copper track on a board is in "ounce per square inch" (seriously, in what world is that considered a normal unit of length ???), etc. I even found one of the stupidest units ever : c-inch : the diameter of a round wire of equal surface (yes, a unit of surface that varies in square root of the surface in metric !).

Seriously ?!?

The worst bit is that a lot of the people I spoke to don't event know what imperial units are worth. I have only found a handful of british (even amongst engineers !) who know how many yards there are in mile ! And that applies to a lot of units : because conversion coefficients are so different and random, people just end up not remembering them.

An that's just regarding units that are still currently in use. If you look at some old units, you're up for quite a laugh ! (but it isn't fair, as I am sure France had stupid units too before the metric system was generalised).

In terms of "human-size" quantities, I understand the principle, but I still don't agree. I don't know where that comes from, but in France, a pound is half a kilo, not 0.45xxxx, and a pint in half a litre, not one of the 3 or 4 different (but totally random) coefficients. At some point, someone rationalised it to make the "human sized units" as close as possible to a multiple of a metric unit, and I haven't heard anyone complain about it.

I do agree with the "divide by 2,3,4,6" argument, but it also doesn't justify the choice. That's a very strong argument in favour of the duodecimal system, which I agree would be a good idea, but as long as a decimal system is used for counting, the only sensible thing to do is to have everything else follow...

Here is a fun story a friend told me (although I don't know for sure how true that is).

Most currencies in the world have the property that, when giving some change, the following algorithm is the one that end up with the smallest number of coins/notes :

Consider X the amount of change to be given
select the coin/note with value Y, highest value below X, give it
X:=X-Y
Loop back to step 2 until X==0

I was told that the old British monetary system didn't follow this property, and that in some cases, the number of notes/coins given following this algorithm wasn't optimal.

Isn't that crazy ?

RichardJ · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Interesting. I left the UK a long time ago, but everyone I communicate with now regarding science or engineering works exclusively in SI. Unless they are dealing with the US of course. If you think units are a mess in the UK, try working over here! And it's not just units. Everyone in the world uses the same system for paper sizes: A4, A3, etc. Except the US, which has it's own sizes, letter, etc. So any document I get from anywhere else in the world doesn't fit the paper properly. And where else uses US bolt sizes? Nowhere of course. Wire diameters? AWG (American Wire Gauge). The list is a very long one, and it makes interacting with the rest of the world unnecessarily painful.

I couldn't tell you how many yards are in a mile without looking it up! I would guess that's a consequence of the bottom up design system. Those that needed small measurements of length came up with inches, feet and yards. Those that needed a large unit of length came up with miles, which had nothing to do with yards, and wasn't even the same in all countries. Until 1959, when it was standardized, and it's now 1760 yards. Except in the US of course, where it's 1760.00352001 yards. And those that needed large areas came up with acres. Then someone adjusted the acre so that it's an integer number of square yards: 4840. The only problem is that 4840 does not have an integer square root

As for the old UK money system, the British can blame the French for that . It was adopted from Charlemagne's Frankish empire. 1 livre = 20 sous, 1 sous = 12 deniers.

athurin · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Richard Jackson wrote:
Interesting. I left the UK a long time ago, but everyone I communicate with now regarding science or engineering works exclusively in SI. Unless they are dealing with the US of course. If you think units are a mess in the UK, try working over here! And it's not just units. Everyone in the world uses the same system for paper sizes: A4, A3, etc. Except the US, which has it's own sizes, letter, etc. So any document I get from anywhere else in the world doesn't fit the paper properly. And where else uses US bolt sizes? Nowhere of course. Wire diameters? AWG (American Wire Gauge). The list is a very long one, and it makes interacting with the rest of the world unnecessarily painful.

Ouch ! That must be hard.

I don't understand why americans don't try to change that. Lots of industries interact with the rest of the world, why on earth wouldn't they align with everyone else ?

Richard Jackson wrote:
I couldn't tell you how many yards are in a mile without looking it up! I would guess that's a consequence of the bottom up design system. Those that needed small measurements of length came up with inches, feet and yards. Those that needed large units of length independently came up with miles. And those that needed large areas came up with acres. Then someone adjusted the acre so that it's an integer number of square yards: 4840. The only problem is that 4840 does not have an integer square root

1760 yards in a mile Strange that I know that better than most british And again, what a crazy number ! It doesn't even work in duodecimal system ! Where is the consistency ?

I think the absolute worst (British) unit I've heard of was a unit of weight : the grain. Because, as everybody knows, the weight of every single seed of barley is the same...

Considering how much I complain about the imperial system, a collegue used to try and find the weirdest units ever used in UK. And for someone raised with the metric system, that was pretty scary...

Richard Jackson wrote:
As for the old UK money system, the British can blame the French for that . It was adopted from Charlemagne's Frankish empire. 1 livre = 20 sous, 1 sous = 12 deniers.

Fair enough. But it only took you 200 years more than us to fix that mistake ...

Note that this sytem didn't include a "1 livre + 1 sous" coin. Probably for a good reason ...

RichardJ · ‎Jan 13, 2015

1760 yards in a mile Strange that I know that better than most british And again, what a crazy number ! It doesn't even work in duodecimal system ! Where is the consistency ?

There is no consistency. A mile was used by surveyors. A mile was 8 furlongs. A furlong was 10 chains. A chain was 4 rods. A rod was 25 links. There were basically two unit systems for length. They were later reconciled by making a rod 16 1/2 feet.

athurin · ‎Jan 13, 2015

And some people still think it's better than the metric system...

*sigh*

RichardJ · ‎Jan 13, 2015

I think in the UK those people are a dying breed though. Miles will stick around for a long time simply because it's not practical to replace all the road signs in one shot, but gradually everything will move to SI and metric. Sadly, there seems to be no movement whatsover for that to happen in the US

And, BTW, the US acually has two different miles. A survey mile is not equal to an international mile, and is not even an integer number of yards. I guess having just one definition of a mile wasn't complicated enough!

Just for kicks, type Smoot: in Mathcad.

athurin · ‎Jan 13, 2015

I don't know if I should laugh or cry...

Do everyone knows it's a prank, or are there some people who actually think it's a real unit and use it ?

RichardJ · ‎Jan 13, 2015

I doubt anyone uses it. It's only in there because Mathsoft was based in Cambridge, so someone knew about Smoots and added them to the Mathcad units as a joke.

ValeryOchkov · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Richard Jackson wrote:
As for the old UK money system, the British can blame the French for that . It was adopted from Charlemagne's Frankish empire. 1 livre = 20 sous, 1 sous = 12 deniers.

See please about livre, deniers, Mathcad

http://twt.mpei.ac.ru/ochkov/MathLit.pdf

ValeryOchkov · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Adrien Thurin wrote:

I was told that the old British monetary system didn't follow this property, and that in some cases, the number of notes/coins given following this algorithm wasn't optimal.

Isn't that crazy ?

Seven is a fine number for money.

1 2 5 10 20 50 100$

5 10 20 50 400 200 500 euro

1 3 5 10 25 50 100 soviet ₽

now we have 10 50 100 500 1000 5000 ₽ - six is bad number

ValeryOchkov · ‎Jan 13, 2015

Most currencies in the world have the property that, when giving some change, the following algorithm is the one that end up with the smallest number of coins/notes :
Consider X the amount of change to be given
select the coin/note with value Y, highest value below X, give it
X:=X-Y
Loop back to step 2 until X==0

Roman numbers

http://twt.mpei.ac.ru/MCS/Worksheets/Romam-Arabian-Number.xmcd

ValeryOchkov · ‎Jan 15, 2015

One part from my last book^

When introduced the metric system of measures, it pursued not only purely practical purposes (ease of conversion), but also expelled from the natural sciences mysticism and superstition: non-metric (old) system of weights and measures based on the so-called sacred numbers: 3, 7, 12, 16, 21, 40, 7000, and so on. etc .: 3 feet in a yard in russian fathoms (сажень) 7 feet, 16 inches in russian arshin, in guinea 21 shilling, in russian pood 40 pounds, in libra 7000 grains etc.

(you can use googl-translator)

Почему в СИ семь основных физических величин (масса — килограмм, длина — метр, время — секунда, сила тока — ампер, температура — кельвин, сила света — кандела и количество вещества — моль), а не шесть или восемь? Такое чувство, что создатели СИ не устояли перед магией сакральных (прекрасных) чисел: в СИ семь основных размерностей потому, что... в радуге семь цветов, в октаве семь нот, в неделе семь дней, в истории семь мудрецов и т. п.

Основные размерности СИ можно условно разделить на три группы: 1) масса, длина и время; 2) сила тока и температура и 3) сила света и количество вещества. Первая группа (масса, длина и время) является основой не только для СИ, но и для более стройной системы измерений СГС (сантиметр — грамм — секунда), которую разработал еще великий Гаусс и которую до сих пор физики (и теоретики, и экспериментаторы) ни на что не променяют. Вторая группа — это плод развития физики после Гаусса, развития, в частности, электро- и термодинамики. Третья же группа — это то, что докладывают в набор, делая его "подарочным". Почему в СИ есть сила света, но нет силы звука, например, или силы запаха? Ведь, свет — это более субъективная субстанция, чем звук. Свет — это узкая полоса широчайшего диапазона электромагнитных колебаний (частиц), видимая глазом. Но акустиков в СИ не пустили — им пришлось довольствоваться (деци)белами ("недоединицей" измерений — логарифмом отношения двух величин)! Наверное, потому в СИ присутствуют светотехники, но нет там акустиков, что через зрение мы получаем до 90% информации, остальное приходится на слух, обоняние и пр.

Моли — это не что иное, как штуки, к которым приписан множитель — число Авогадро. Обычно такой множитель кратен десяти: дека, гекто, кило, мега, гига, всеми нами любимые нано и т. д. В случае со штуками эти множители оказались, в основном, неметрическими: пара, две пары, десяток, полдюжины, дюжина, чертова дюжина и т. д. до... числа Авогадро — до моля.