True, but did we ever mint silver dollar-dimes?
One thing I’d heard is that horses would be auctioned in guineas, the owner getting pounds and the auction house the extra shilling as its 5% fee.
But 1 out of 21 is not 5%, but only 4.76%. First auction house I hear from that does not do the math properly to its own disadvantage.
These are the people that invented ha’pennies, farthings, and crowns. Easy math is not their forte.
When I was DM I would notate gold/silver/copper with the slashes but it was ten coppers per silver, ten silvers per gold as Og intended.
But 21 is 105% of 20, so guineas are 5% more than pounds.
Sure, but 5% of 105 is 5.25. Why is the auction house leaving 0.25 on the table? You have added 5% to 100, but if you take 5% from 100, you are left with 95, not 100.
Most fees I see are a percentage added to the original total. If something is $100 with a 5% fee, the consumer pays $105 and the final recipient gets $100. Which means the fee charger only gets 4.76% of the total.
Taxes go either way. Sales tax is a percentage added to the original. Income tax is a percentage taken from the total.
You folks are missing out on a lot of history.
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The English did not invent their system. It was invented by the Romans, using the terms librae, solidi, denarii.
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“Librae” meant a pound of silver. It was not the name of a coin, but an accounting unit. A pound of silver would be divided into a large number of coins, eventually settled on 240 pieces, known as “denari”. “Solidi” was also an accounting unit.
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When Charlemagne began to reinvigorate Europe and the European economy, he revived the Roman system. It became widespread in Europe, with “livre” used as the top-level amount in France, “lira” in Italy, and “pound” in England, all words meaning “pound” (more or less).
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That’s where £ s d came from, not from some eccentric Englishman. However, the pound and shilling were accounting units, not coins. For several centuries, only the silver penny was minted. The penny was the top level coin.
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The number system used was base 12, not base 10, likely because base 12 numbers provide more divisions. 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6. 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5.
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A shilling (or sou) was 12 pence; a pound was 20 shillings, or 240 pence, numbers which had loads of divisors, unlike 10 and 100.
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At the time, there was no such thing as a positional decimal system, because the decimal hadn’t yet made it to Western Europe, so using the base 12 system was likely easier than using a base 10 system.
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The silver penny was the top level coin in England for several centuries. That’s why it was divided into halfs (ha’penny) and farthings (fourths).
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The forerunner of a shilling coin did not emerge until the Tudor period, as did the crown (quarter of a pound). Pound coins were not minted until much, much later, as a result of centuries of inflation devaluating the penny, and then the shilling.
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Just as the English subdivided their top level coin, the penny, into halfs and quarters, so too do Americans: the dollar is the top level unit, with half and quarter coins, equivalent to the ha’penny and the farthing.
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Apparently the US Mint thinks that quarters and halfs are sensible divisions for the top level unit, the dollar, just as the English minters thought they were sensible divisions for the top level English coin, the penny.
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The relevance of the ha’penny and farthing deteriorated because of inflation, not because of any fundamental illogicality. Gradually, shillings became the top level coin in England, then supplanted by crowns and eventually pound coins, as a result of inflation over a millenium.
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The fact that it took so long to abolish ha’pennies and farthings can be attributed to popular inertia, not to any fundamental illogicality.
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The continued existence of the quarter-dollar and the half-dollar in the US can similarly be attributed to popular inertia in the face of inflation, not to any fundamental illogicality. When was the last time you bought something with a single quarter? or a single half-dollar?
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It took a millennium for British small coins to go out of use; will it take a millennium for the US equivalents to the farthing (quarter) and the ha’penny (half-dollar) to go out of use?
Almost 100% of that can be applied (with suitable substitutions) to the US customary system of units. It’s all quite plausible sounding on the surface, but just isn’t very convincing. Like:
Anti-metric types love bringing this up in favor of customary units! 12 inches per foot! You can divide into 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 parts! Yay!
And the reason I find it funny is exactly the reason Alessan mentioned. Somehow we were ahead of the curve in decimalized currency but remain behind the curve in decimalized units.
Nobody uses 50c pieces, though in fairness nobody really uses any coins or cash anymore. But I’d honestly be surprised if the half dollar has ever seen much use. Sort of like the $2 bill. It exists, but isn’t really a thing.
At the rate we’re going, it’ll take a millennium for us to get rid of the one cent piece. OK, maybe not. There was a news item recently that the Treasury Dept is going to reduce production.
I believe the main use of $.50 pieces is in certain slot machines. At least it was a couple decades ago. For all I know, those may not be in use any more.
Not nobody. Still very common around here, especially at small businesses, including but not limited to farm markets and farm stands.
And I get an occasional customer who wants a single hot pepper, which might be a dime or a quarter; or a single one of something I usually sell in quarts, which depending on its size might be 50¢ or even 25¢.
The news today said they’re going to stop producing pennies; though they remain legal tender for the time being, and there are lots still in circulation (though how many of those are in a jar somewhere on somebody’s back shelf is unclear.)
Interestingly, Airbus and the European research agency has looked into “drafting” with airliners. It works.
The problem is the following craft can’t absolutely 100% count on getting the fuel savings, so has to carry the fuel needed to make the trip without a leader to draft behind. Which excess weight undercuts most of the drafting savings.
Free lunches are very hard to find in the wild.
Coin slot machines have pretty much gone the way of the dodo. Collecting and counting the coins plus clearing coin jams and refilling the hopper is labor intensive and we all know how corporations feel about labor costs.
The video below is in Las Vegas. When I was in Reno eight years ago I was strolling around the MGM Grand all the slots and poker machines had bill acceptors and spit out a receipt that you’d cash at the cage, except the Sigma horse race game. While happy I never had to maintain one I find them oddly compelling and when I heard the distinctive sound I stopped at the cage and asked for a roll of quarters.
“Playing the Sigma, eh?”
“Yep. So far as I can tell it’s the only thing left on the floor that eats coins.”
“You’re right.”
When I visited Las Vegas with my wife some years ago the digitization of the slot machines was complete; which to my mind made them strangely uncompelling. The old analog mechanical machines may have been a pain to keep serviced but imho they were funner. I mean no one is going to just walk up to the teller’s cage, say “I’m putting so much money on each of these games”, have the teller punch a few buttons on a register and say “okay, you now owe us $x.xx”. The casino industry is nothing if not aware of the psychology of compulsive gaming, so do digital machines still have the same appeal?
The SpaceX Starship uses “hot staging,” where the upper stage starts firing before the lower stage has even started separating. The rocket exhaust is redirected out vents at the top of the lower stage.
They recently announced that they’re going to change the vent configuration so that the exhaust is redirected in a specific direction, so that the booster flips in a predictable way rather than randomly. This means they don’t have to reserve as much extra propellant to handle the possibility of it flipping in an unfortunate direction that would take more time to alter.
It isn’t quite the same as drafting, but making active use of the exhaust of another rocket that’s blasting into you is somewhat novel.