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įor mechanical devices, the symbol appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter (c. The symbol appears to have been used primarily in handwritten material in the printing business, the numero symbol (№) and barred-lb (℔) are used for "number" and "pounds" respectively. The term hash sign is found in South African writings from the late 1960s and from other non-North-American sources in the 1970s. The use of the phrase "pound sign" to refer to this symbol is found from 1932 in U.S.
#Number pro vs number press manual
A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign: "number (written before a figure)" and "pounds (written after a figure)". sources refer to it as the "number sign", although this could also refer to the numero sign. 1896) appears to refer to the symbol as the "number mark". The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter ( c. The symbol is described as the "number" character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping, and its double meaning is described in a bookkeeping text from 1880. Examples of it being used to indicate pounds exist at least as far back as 1850. Ultimately, the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes "=" across two slash-like strokes "//". This abbreviation was printed with a dedicated ligature type element, with a horizontal line across, so that the lowercase letter l would not be mistaken for the numeral 1. It is believed that the symbol traces its origins to the symbol ℔, an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo, which translates as "pound weight". The abbreviation written by Isaac Newton, showing the evolution from "℔" toward "#"
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