I'll let you in on a secret: I'm a secret wiki-pervert. I like to secretly surf Wikipedia at night and read texts about Baroque architecture or quantum physics after pulling my (little) friend to masturbate hotly.
Well... OK, maybe I'm lying a little. Actually, it's complete nonsense - I can't even imagine how anyone could do something like that. But admit it, I got your attention, didn't I?
I will need your attention. Because I'm about to fulfill the lofty goal of teaching you, you fool, a few historical facts, and thus giving you a chance to look cool in front of your friends, or (more likely) your five-year-old grandchildren, when you're a complete old man.
But meet the Hundred. He's pretty cool
Reader, I present the Hundred. Hundred is a pretty cool dude. Hundred is a reader. The reader is not bad either, I like him. Meet him, if you haven't met him over the years. I won't talk much about you, Reader - you can do that yourself - but instead I'd rather tell you about my friend Hundred.
One hundred is a number. It was probably born in ancient Rome, made famous in France, and in Lithuania it is probably most popular on banknotes. Here we usually write it as a one with two zeros, like this - 100. But in Roman, a hundred is denoted by the letter C. From the word Centum.
Does the root of this word sound familiar? I believe it should. Centimetres, centipedes, centipedes and centurions all have the same root.
Even in the word "percentage", the centum lives on - in Latin, "per centum" means a fraction of a hundred. Or in the word "cents" - the currency units making up the litas/dollar/euro. You should be familiar with the part of a hundred in that that is often what is missing from your exam score, and cents are missing when you are studying the exam material. As you can see, it's related!
How was Comrade Hundred born?
But let's not dwell too much on exam (or colloquium) grades - I don't want to remember them. Let's move on to the beginning of the Hundred - the moment when the digits that make it were born. When its ones and zeros came out of its mother's womb and nobody cared who the father was.
Long ago, across the lagoon, beyond the highest mountains and even beyond the Ikea of Vilnius, there lived a character called Al-Khwarizmi, also known as Algoritmi, from which the words algorithm and algebra are derived. He is best remembered by our historians as the Arab mathematician who brought Arabic numerals to Europe (or rather to the merchants of Venice) in 825 AD. Although he was actually born in what is now Uzbekistan, and took the numerals from the Indians. Not very Arab and not very Arabic numerals...
Let's go back in time almost a thousand years. We are on the brink of the French Revolution in 1789. The first constitution in Europe (and the second in the world) is about to be signed in a republic of two nations, and the angry French people want equality for all. Including equality of numbers and units of measurement, which was lacking at the time - almost every country (or even some cities) calculated distances and weights differently. Well, you know, in feet, pounds and other flaking units, as only three countries in the world still do - Liberia in Africa, Burma in Asia (the same one that copied the Lithuanian flag), and the big, mighty USA. The latter probably does it because it can - what will all the nerds do to it?
In those days of metravisation (yes - I invented a new word), the Hundred was not long in becoming popular. We can thank Maurice de Talleyrand, who was one of those who came up with the idea of a common system based on the hundred. He proposed to make everything from temperature (Celsius and Kelvin) to distances (metres), weights (kilograms)...
...And the faces of clocks and the months of the year. In other words, he wanted to turn clocks and the year from twelve hours or months to ten. Unsurprisingly, the French did not like these proposals, and the new systems did not catch on and stuck to the old Babylonian legacy. Whether this is good or bad, I leave you to decide. I will not think for you for the rest of my life.
A little more about the Hundred!
Now you can meet the Hundred everywhere. One hundred litas banknotes are the most commonly used banknote in Lithuania, sneezing causes bacteria to jump out at about 100 metres per second, electrons (not electricity) flow through wires at twice the speed of 100 metres per hour, and a hundred episodes for a TV show or a hundred issues for a magazine is often seen as a great achievement (yes - cheers to Nyuspeepi!). Whether you want it or not, the Hundred is with you. Almost like Jesus, but a little more real and altogether more useful.
I will end my story here, that's enough for now. I hope I have helped you to become smarter and I hope you have success in the next battle of wits.
By the way, last time (after the text about Lithuanian flags) there were people who lacked sources of information. So, this time I give them all:
www.google.lt
🙂