Britannica 1911: old English standards

Encyclopaedia Britannica published 1911 315 characters hard

Besides these ancient standards of England (1495, 1588, 1601) there are at the council chambers of Edinburgh and Linlithgow some of the interesting standards of Scotland, as the Stirling jug or Scots pint, 1618; the choppin or half-pint, 1555 (fig. 7); the Lanark troy and tron weights of the same periods (fig. 8).

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About this text

The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared between 1910 and 1911 in twenty-nine volumes, and its copyright has long expired. This passage lists old English and Scottish standards by year, from 1495 to 1618, including the Stirling jug used for the Scots pint. Dates in parentheses and semicolons between them make it a precise exercise for the number keys. Wikisource has transcribed the whole edition article by article.

Where this text comes fromA standard here is not a definition but an object: a physical weight or measuring vessel, made of metal, kept in a town hall or a council chamber as the thing everything else was compared against. The entry linked below is a survey of which of those objects had survived by 1911 and where they were, not a history of measurement, which is why it reads as a catalog of places and dates with almost no explanation attached. The Stirling jug it names was the reference vessel for the Scots pint.

What you might not noticeThe standards listed here span from 1495 to 1618, and the ones at Edinburgh and Linlithgow are Scottish rather than English, which is why the entry keeps the two sets apart instead of merging them into one list. Source

What it trainsTwenty-two digits inside 315 characters is the densest concentration of numbers on this shelf, and unlike the Jefferson passages they arrive in parentheses: three opening and three closing, each one requiring Shift on a key most typists reach for by feel. That combination, digit row then Shift then digit row again, is the specific thing this passage drills. Two semicolons separate the groups of dates. Seven of the eight capital letters are place names sitting inside sentences.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource