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By Root 632 0

12 might be considered superior to ten is because of its divisibility. Twelve can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6, whereas ten can be divided only by 2 and 5. Advocates of base 12 argue that we are much more likely to want to divide by 3 or 4 than divide by 5 in our daily lives. Consider a shopkeeper. If you have 12 apples, then you can divide them up into two bags of 6, three bags of 4, four bags of 3, or six bags of 2. This is much more user-friendly than 10, which can only be cleanly divided into two bags of 5, or five of 2. The word ‘grocer’, in fact, is a relic of a retailer’s preference for 12 – it comes from ‘gross’, meaning a dozen dozen, or 144. The multi-divisibility of 12 also explains the utility of imperial measure: a foot, which is 12 inches, can be cleanly divided by 2, 3 and 4 – which is quite a plus for carpenters and tailors.

Divisibility is also relevant to multiplication tables. The easiest tables to learn in any base are the ones of numbers that divide that base. This is why, in base ten, the 2 and 5 times tables – which are just the even numbers and the numbers ending in 5 or 0 – are so painless to recite. Likewise, in base 12 the simplest times tables are also those of its divisors: 2, 3, 4 and 6.

If you look at the final digits of each column, you see a striking pattern. The two times table is, again, all the even numbers. The three times table is all the numbers ending in 3, 6, 9 and 0. The four times table is the numbers ending in 4, 8 and 0, and the six times table all the numbers ending 6 or 0. In other words, in base 12 we get the 2, 3, 4 and 6 times tables for free. Since many children have difficulty in learning their times tables, if we converted to base 12 we would be carrying out a great humanitarian act. Or so the argument goes.

The campaign for base 12 should not be conflated with the crusade against metric by fans of imperial measure. Those people who prefer feet and inches over metres and centimetres have no issue as to whether one foot should be 12 inches, or 10 inches, as it would be in dozenal. Historically, however, an underlying theme of the campaign for base 12 has been a jingoistic anti-Frenchness. Perhaps the finest example of such a view was a pamphlet from 1913 by engineer Rear-Admiral G. Elbrow, in which he called the French metric system ‘retrograde’. He published a list of the dates, in base 12, of the kings and queens of England. He also noticed that Britain had been invaded shortly after each decimal millennium – by the Romans in 43 CE and the Normans in 1066. ‘What if, at the beginning of the [third millennium],’ he prophesized, ‘these two [countries] may again appear in the same direction, and this time in conjunction?’ Invasion by France and Italy might be averted, he argued, simply by rewriting the year 1913 as 1135, as it would be in dozenal, thus delaying the third millennium by several centuries.

The most famous dozenalist call-to-arms, though, was an article in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1934 by the writer F. Emerson Andrews, which led to the formation of the Duodecimal Society of America, or DSA. (It later changed its name to the Dozenal Society of America since ‘duodecimal’ was deemed to be overly reminiscent of the system they were aiming to replace.) Andrews claimed that base ten had been adopted with ‘inexcusable shortsightedness’ and wondered whether it ‘would be so tremendous a sacrifice’ to abandon it. The DSA initially insisted prospective members pass four tests in dozenal arithmetic, although this requirement was quickly dropped. The Duodecimal Bulletin, which continues to this day, is an excellent publication and the only place outside medical literature with articles on hexadactyly, the condition of being born with six fingers. (Which is more common than you might think. About one in every 500 people is born with at least an extra finger or toe.) In 1959 a sister organization, the Dozenal Society of Great Britain, was founded, and a year later the First International Duodecimal Conference was held in France. It was also the last. Still, both