I watched a video (Invidious) yesterday detailing the type of coins they used before 1971 in the UK and its empire, and it was actually insane.
1 Pound = 20 Shillings = 240 Pennies, with coins for 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 6 pennies, 1, 2, 2.5, 5 Shillings and banknotes for the Pounds, and each of these coins had 5 or more different names
It kinda made sense for a while. Remember we’re looking at this from a modern lense.
240 is very divisible. It’s similar to why we chose 360° for a circle, or 24 hours in a day.
It stopped making sense as more and more countries shifted to decimalisation, and machines made extremely quick+accurate division trivial and accessible.
You’re right, but also stones are mostly used as an approximate unit of bodyweight in casual conversation, so people would usually say “I’m about 10 and a half stone”.
If you’re dealing with bodyweight where accuracy matters, like in a medical sense, it’s metric anyway. Plenty of people here aren’t even sure of how many pounds make up a stone, despite regularly using the latter as a measurement.
Yeah, and fractions of that stone? Pounds.
So like 10 stone 5 pounds.
I watched a video (Invidious) yesterday detailing the type of coins they used before 1971 in the UK and its empire, and it was actually insane.
1 Pound = 20 Shillings = 240 Pennies, with coins for 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 6 pennies, 1, 2, 2.5, 5 Shillings and banknotes for the Pounds, and each of these coins had 5 or more different names
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/£sd
It kinda made sense for a while. Remember we’re looking at this from a modern lense.
240 is very divisible. It’s similar to why we chose 360° for a circle, or 24 hours in a day.
It stopped making sense as more and more countries shifted to decimalisation, and machines made extremely quick+accurate division trivial and accessible.
You’re right, but also stones are mostly used as an approximate unit of bodyweight in casual conversation, so people would usually say “I’m about 10 and a half stone”.
If you’re dealing with bodyweight where accuracy matters, like in a medical sense, it’s metric anyway. Plenty of people here aren’t even sure of how many pounds make up a stone, despite regularly using the latter as a measurement.