Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - July 31, 2026

Pounds and pottles

In the late 1950s after the Soviet Union placed Sputnik into orbit, U.S. officials were concerned we were falling behind our Cold-War adversary. This prompted an all-out push to catch up, and hopefully surpass them. Part of that effort involved officials wagging their fingers at common folk, admonishing them to leave behind the English system of weights and measures and switch to the more uniform metric system.

Many complained it was too hard, despite the fact that they quickly adapted to buying soft drinks in two-liter bottles and had been purchasing wine in metric-sized containers for a long time. So while even the Brits waved good-bye to their old Fahrenheit temperature scale and adopted the metric system's Celsius version, we soldiered on.

But we humans are actually quite adept at managing systems that are, well, very unsystematic. Most of us manage just fine with lengths where 12 inches make up a foot, three feet combine to create a yard, and 1,760 yards generate a mile. Some measurements, such as time, are semi-orderly: 10 years make a decade, 10 decades make a century, 10 centuries make a millennium. Then things go somewhat haywire with the year divided into 365 days or 12 months. Those months have varying numbers of days, each day has 24 hours of 60 minutes each, and each minute has 60 seconds.

Another aspect of the "space race" was the push to make computers commonplace. Those who embraced this were told they needed to learn the binary system, as if it were something new. In reality, most had been using it for years, but just weren't aware of it. Our common volumes are based on the binary system. Two tablespoons are a jack, two jacks are a gill, two gills are a cup, two cups are a pint, two pints are a quart, two quarts are a pottle, and two pottles are a gallon. Somewhere along the way, we quit referring to jacks and pottles. But while gills are rare, the rest we use frequently.

For that matter, a liter and a quart are almost equal in size. That means the common two-liter soft drink container is about one pottle! So we can salute our skill in navigating this system and the one that makes computers purr by adding to our coffee a touch of milk poured from a gallon, quart or pint container or taking a swig from a pottle of pop!

I started down this trail when I asked myself where the word dozen came from and why we count some things by 12s. According to Merriam-Webster, dozen "entered the English language in the 14th century via the Old French word douzaine (a group of twelve) ... from the Latin duodecim, ... a combination of duo (two) and decem (ten)."

OK, that explains where the word came from, but why don't we just buy eggs and donuts in 10s rather than dozens? It's such an odd unit.

Or is it only because we don't use the base-12 counting system. But Babylonians did. They used their fingers for counting as we do, but in a different and more efficient way. Rather than two hands of four fingers plus the thumbs producing 10, they counted the joints of the fingers - three on each. When all four fingers are included, the result is 12. The other hand was not used in the same way. Its fingers and thumb were used to track the number of 12s. While we can only count to 10 with two hands, they could tabulate up to five 12s or 60! So while we are inclined to divide something into 10 parts, they would cut it into 12 portions.

One of the things they counted this way was time. The period when the sun was out was divided into 12 equal portions and the night was similarly parsed, making 24 portions in total. Since the length of day and night varies with the seasons and latitude, the amount of time in a nighttime "hour" and a daytime "hour" will generally be different and also will change day-to-day. It would have been reasonable to divide day-plus-night into 12 equal parts, but people were resistant to change then as now. So they kept the total divisions at 24, but made them all equal. So we can thank the Babylonians for the 60s, 24s and 12s in our modern time-keeping.

Those accustomed to the base-12 system used it for money as well. It was present in the Roman system, was transferred to the old French system, and the English then copied the French. That ₤ symbol the Brits use is from the Roman money system's libra, which was called the Roman pound and referred to its actual weight.

In that old British system, there were 12 pence to a shilling. King Henry III set the price of an egg at 1 pence. Buying by the dozen required a single shilling - one coin. Similar prices were set for bread weights, and penalties were severe for short-changing a buyer. So bakers routinely threw in an extra roll to make certain not to run afoul of the law, and the "baker’s dozen" was born.

We aren't quite done yet! The word degree comes from the French word degré, meaning "step." Inaccurate measurements led the Babylonians to conclude the earth took 360 days to return to the same point in the heavens. So the 360 days or steps it took the sun to circle the earth led to them dividing the circle into 360 degrees.

I doubt any of this will have any impact on my life, yet it somehow makes me feel good understanding how these things came to be, while also recognizing that our routinely navigating them makes us pretty flexible critters.

Perhaps we should now celebrate that adaptability with a pint ... or a liter ... or maybe even a pottle ... of some refreshing liquid!