The Cellular World of Twelve

The foot has twelve inches just as the British shilling had twelve pence. A good case can be made for twelve as a base like 10, since there are 12 months within the year and many ancient monuments can be seen to have employed duodecimal alongside decimal number, to good effect.

Until 1971 the currency in the United Kingdom of Britain was duodecimal, called pounds, shillings and pence.

This old system of currency, known as pounds, shillings and pence or lsd, dated back to Roman times when a pound of silver was divided into 240 pence, or denarius, which is where the ‘d’ in ‘lsd’ comes from. (lsd: librum, solidus, denarius). see historic-uk.com

There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound, that is 240 pennies. The change to a decimal (100) pence in a pound caused a lot of inflation during the changeover due to price opportunism, then part lasting recession. In British heads the skill of giving and taking change in a duodecimal arithmetic was soon lost. In the late 70’s my mother, when visiting the US, was amusingly referencing “old money”, alongside the exchange rate between a decimal pound and the decimal dollar, just as Greeks had problems with the Euro.

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