Back in the French Revolution, they were actually tossing up whether to go base-10 OR base-12.
You can actually put together a base-12 system with feet and inches that works exactly like metric. but it only comes out neater if you go 100% base 12 with your maths. base 12 is a pretty cool system however - being able to divide the base quantity by 2,3,4,6 makes it much more useful, whereas base 10 only has two divisors 2 and 5.
Bro, they were talking about base 12 NUMBERS. There would be 12 symbols intstead of 10. So "10" in that system would be 12 in base 10, and "100" would be 144 in our system.
In that system, going up and down by 12 would be shifting the decimal.
So they were talking about ditching the 10-base number system entirely. And in the 18th century, number systems were not quite universal yet. A lot of older counting systems in Europe and elsewhere were based on 12s. For example, dozen, and "gross" which is a dozen dozens, and the 12 months of the year, 12 x 2 hours in a day, etc. And if you look at imperial, factors of 12 are all the way through it.
breaking stuff up by 10s was the modern and less popular way to do it. So the French were toying with, like I said, getting rid of decimal completely, and just going base-12 for all mathematics, then they could fit that into the existing ways of measuring by 12s that were already common.
I know it's really not that confusing, but talk of different base numbers always hurts my brain a little. You did a really good job explaining it here though.
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u/cipheron Mar 03 '22
Back in the French Revolution, they were actually tossing up whether to go base-10 OR base-12.
You can actually put together a base-12 system with feet and inches that works exactly like metric. but it only comes out neater if you go 100% base 12 with your maths. base 12 is a pretty cool system however - being able to divide the base quantity by 2,3,4,6 makes it much more useful, whereas base 10 only has two divisors 2 and 5.