I was looking through an old copy of Encyclopedia Britannica (early 1900s) and noticed that in the abbreviation for pounds, the l always had a horizontal stroke through it. It looked like a cross, except that the stroke was much lighter than the letter. Other times the lowercase letter l was used, it did not have this stroke.
I was wondering if anyone knows in around what year this practice was stopped.

I have looked at copies of old documents in some of my genealogy books. A few interesting entries are:

1791 - Churchwardens accounts (handwritten), "£" symbol used.

1837 - Report of the appointment (printed) - pounds denoted by "l"

1857 - List a payments made by Warminster Poor Union(printed) - "£" symbol used.

1885 - Report from the Office for Statistics - "£" used.


THis suggests to me that there was a gradual change from using "l" to using "£" to represent pounds sterling. (The "l" was of course derived from the Latin "libra"). The habit of putting a line through the pound sign appears to have co-incided with the American habit of putting a vertical line through an "8" to denote the Spanish "Piece of EIght" or eight reals - a large silver coin which was in widespread use in the Carribean and the English colonies on the American Atlantic seaboard. WEhen those colonies achieved independence, the eight with a line through it became the "$" symbol. The dollar coin itself was about the same size as the piece of eight.

Any American readers should note that UK computer keyboards are different to US keyboards - pressing "Shift-3" gives a "£", not a "#".

Martin: "The habit of putting a line through the pound sign appears to have co-incided with the American habit of putting a vertical line through an "8" to denote the Spanish "Piece of EIght"

That's not quite true, Martin. In Roman times it was already customary to abbreviate words by
1. putting a line through the first letter of the word that had to be abbreviated OR
2. putting a dot behind the first one or two letters of the word that had to be abbreviated.

In other words, the Romans either wrote "5 lb." (not lbs) or "5 £", both meaning 5 pounds (=weight).

<<
Any American readers should note that UK computer keyboards are different to US keyboards - pressing "Shift-3" gives a "£", not a "#".
>>

So then the # is shift-4 ?
Interesting. It would have made much more sense to have the currency symbol, whatever it may be, and the # sign at the same place.

Not that it really matters.

Bud,

You can view a few different keyboards at http://www.oldstuff.myagora.net/powerload/codepage.htm

There are some curious design aspects of the UK version PC keyboard.

I would have much preferred the # symbol to have been left on Shift-3 where it belongs, and the £ Sterling sign to be placed elsewhere.

Another thing I've never been able to figure out is why the @ and " symbols are swapped over on the UK layout. The single and double quote positions on the US keyboard are derived from the IBM Selectric layout. British versions of the Selectric typewriter kept them in this position, so why were they changed for the PC?

The only reason I can think of is that on many plain ASCII terminals the " symbol was on Shift-2, but that doesn't explain why IBM chose to put in there only on UK keyboards. Neither would it explain why they kept most of the other Shifted Selectric assignments on the top row.

One particularly annoying thing (to me anyway) about the UK keyboard is the placement of the \ key. If you look at the original IBM PC keyboard, \ is located between Shift and Z on the US version as well. When the extended kleyboards were launched, it was moved over to the right on US versions but has remained next to Z on UK versions ever since.

I use an American keyboard on my PC, and if I have to use a UK version when working elsewhere I'm always hitting \ when aiming for Shift.

Other keyboards in the past were often modified in different ways for the British market. I've seen old ASR33 teletypes where the $ sign was simply replaced with £. Other terminals sometimes replaced the # with £. As both # and $ signs are used extensively in many programming languages, both could look rather odd.

By the way, does anybody know how # came to be used to represent pounds (weight) ?

PaulEOS wrote

<<
Other keyboards in the past were often modified in different ways for the British market. I've seen old ASR33 teletypes where the $ sign was simply replaced with £. Other terminals sometimes replaced the # with £. As both # and $ signs are used extensively in many programming languages, both could look rather odd.
>>

We need to look back at ISO646 which defined a 7-bit character set (the eight bit was a parity bit). THat standard allocated 116 characters and left 12 for "National useage". The UK and teh US variants were idetnical apart from character 0x23 which was allocated to "#" in the US and to "£" in the UK. The variants used in other countries can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_646. Thus computer systems that have been improperly adapted for use in the UK will print a "#" when the designer of teh software wanted a "£".

ISO646 is now an obsolete standard. It has been replaced by ISO 8859. This standard defines a an 8-bit character set. Characters 0x00 to 0x7F are identical to the US version of ISO646 (also known as ASCII) while there are 15 variants for characters 0x80 to 0xFF - each variant mapping onto a different region of the globe. ISO8859-1 is the Western European version (without the Euro) and ISO8859-15 is a Western European version with the Euro symbol (and a few other minor variants compared to ISO8859-1).

ISO8859 is not in the process of being superceded by UNICODE. (See the excellent paper by Markus Kuhn, a Cambridge University Computer Science lecturer. This paper is at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Probably a good idea to look at an old typewriter.

And I haven't got one.

When I do work in the U.S. it is probably as equally annoying as your experiences, Paul