Writing Figures The Correct Way Cuts Down Costly Errors

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 85, 13 January 1950, Page 7

Writing Figures The Correct Way Cuts Down Costly Errors

Every business day there are thousands of. mistakes and losses because of badly made figures. A vast number of people either make their figures carelessly, or don’t know how to make them correctly.

A 1 is made like a 7 and a 7 is made like a 1. A 6 is made like a nought and a nought is made like a 6. And sometimes a figure may be either a 3 or an 8.

A worried delivery man looks at the address on a parcel, and he can’t tell whether it is to go to 70 King Street or 16 King Street. The fact is that our figures were specially designed so that no two figures would look alike. If any figure is made so that it looks like any other figure, then it has been made incorrectly. As to the creative thinker who first designed our figures, we don’t know his name. As we call them “Arabic”, they were probably designed by one of the Arabs, Jews or Spaniards who had Colleges of Science in Spain a thousand years ago. The ancient Romans had no figures at all. They used letters instead. They had a crude, clumsy way of expressing numbers. V was 5, X was 10, L was 50, C was 100, and so on. One wonders how many of us can write 1949 in Roman numerals.

Today we have a perfect system of numerals, and we ought to make a right use of it, by making our figures correctly. —Efficiency Magazine.