Monday, July 15, 2019
Plan ahea
Following on previous item.
KSHS has a second set of records from the Missoury Fur Company, led by Clark in 1812. This set is in English, and mainly deals with the finances and bylaws of the corporation itself. The first set was in semi-French, and recorded the transactions of the store that sold supplies to the explorers.
The clerk who kept these records had a habit of doodling, and didn't have a sense of proper graphic layout. Here's the title page:
Like the old PLAN AHEA poster.
His ledger and his math doodles show how the columnar approach was still strong even in a strictly decimal system.
Part of the ledger:
Note the lack of leading zero on the cents column, and the blanks instead of zeros on amounts without cents.
And his doodles:
Again, even in a familiar layout of a subtraction problem, and even with actual decimal points indicated, the cents and dollars are felt to be distinct columns.
Question: Was the leading zero introduced by adding machines and cash registers?
Easy answer: No. Here's a sample ledger from an 1844 bookkeeping text:
No cents indicated by 00, two and a half cents indicated by 02½.
Leading zero was available and taught before machines, but probably enhanced by dealing with machines.
Like the old PLAN AHEA poster.
His ledger and his math doodles show how the columnar approach was still strong even in a strictly decimal system.
Part of the ledger:
Note the lack of leading zero on the cents column, and the blanks instead of zeros on amounts without cents.
And his doodles:
Again, even in a familiar layout of a subtraction problem, and even with actual decimal points indicated, the cents and dollars are felt to be distinct columns.
Question: Was the leading zero introduced by adding machines and cash registers?
Easy answer: No. Here's a sample ledger from an 1844 bookkeeping text:
No cents indicated by 00, two and a half cents indicated by 02½.
Leading zero was available and taught before machines, but probably enhanced by dealing with machines.Labels: Asked and answered, Real World Math
¶ 12:04 AM
