The Damn Dots at Last

The idea was first formally introduced in a book in 1608. Ninety years later, having mulled it over, Sir Christopher Wren guessed he was for it. In 1854, Gladstone said: "I cannot doubt it would be of immense advantage," but he decided not to make undue haste. In following decades came a select parliamentary committee, a royal commission, a Paris conference, three colonial conferences, and most recently a special committee of inquiry, all primarily devoted to the subject. Last week, after 358 years of careful thought, the British government formally announced its intention to decimalize the pound. Instead of consisting of 240 pennies (each worth 1.18 U.S. cents), as it does now, the pound will be divided into 100 new pennies (worth 2.8 cents).

Unchanged -L-. For years British schoolchildren have chanted, "Twelve pence make a shilling; 20 shillings make a pound," and the system they were straining to learn is as dismal as the chant. The mere job of figuring a 10% discount on a 3-L- 3s 3d roast beef could take a man to the edge of starvation. The system had at least one advantage: it had practically always been that way. The pound and penny first appeared about the time of King Offa in the 8th century. They were originally named for the Roman libra and denarius (hence the still used signs of -L- and d), but the libra eventually evolved into the pound, because it was worth that weight in silver. Similarly, it took 240 pennies to make a pound because that was the number of pennies that weighed a pound.* Shillings joined Offa's awful system in the 16th century, and that basically formed the current currency setup--though such denominations as the florin (2 shillings), half crown (2 1/2 shillings), guinea (21 shillings) and sovereign (approximately 3 guineas) came along at various times.

To the relief of accountants, schoolchildren, tourists and moneymen, all such variations will officially disappear with decimalization. They will be replaced by six coins: a halfpenny (worth 1.2 present pennies), a penny, a twopence piece, a 5-pence piece, a 10-pence piece and a 50-pence piece (worth, like the current 10-shilling note, half a pound). The pound will remain but the decimal system means that a price will be written as -L-3.33. The sum can then be converted to dollars, simply by multiplying by 2.8, and the simplification may cut bookkeeping time by an estimated 30% .

The new system will cost something too. Manufacturers of such items as cash registers, adding machines and any coin-operated machines will not be subsidized, may well incur $224 million in conversion costs. The government itself expects to spend $134 million minting 9 billion new coins. It will also mount a $3,000,000 public-education program to help decimal haters like Winston Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who claimed, "I never could make out what those damn dots meant." There will be plenty of time to learn, however: the changeover will not be for another four leisurely years--in February 1971.

* Eventually, of course, the pound as a British weight measure was replaced by the stone (14 Ibs.), but that is another story (TIME, June 4, 1965).

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