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One hundred
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Published: April 22, 2009
Long before mankind trod the earth on five-toed feet, and perhaps before the first warm-blooded, fur-bearing fore bearers scurried unnoticed between the legs of the dinosaurs they would outlive, the number five was a matter of life and death.
Or a matter of "lives" and death might lend more appropriate emphasis, since hundreds of species in that dark dawn may have experimented with different numbers of toes, fading from the gene pool in the process. Five, apparently, was a lucky number for those beings in whose progress hand-eye (or paw-eye) coordination was to play a decisive role.
By the dawn of human numeracy, our set of fingers had become an organic abacus on which we taught early ourselves and succeeding generations how count; the standard issue set of ten fingers became the basis of our numbering system.
Ours, but not everyone's: The Babylonians picked twelve, perhaps because counting moon phase cycles for planting and harvesting was critical in early agrarian cultures and there were roughly twelve lunar cycles in the farming year.
Our Western tradition was built on Greek thought, including the notion that "man is the measure of all things." Our finger sets (10) and sets of finger sets (100, 1,000, etc.) made man the measure of mathematics as well.
By the time Rome learned to count, the number five had reasserted itself so that four was written as "IV," or five minus one; nine, "IX," became ten minus one. Being dyslexic in ancient Rome must have been purgatory on chariot wheels. Imagine learning long division in a system that required subtraction just to count.
Picture a committee of centurians coming up with their numeral system, debating on whether to write "39" as "IXXXX," "XXXIX," or "IXL." India's Indus culture had invented the zero centuries before but Rome never got the word. If they had, their military engineering prowess was such that we might all be speaking Latin and Einstein might have been named "Unumpetrus."
The Romans achieved enginering fame in spite of their unwieldy numerals. Perhaps they outsourced computation to the Greeks and Arabs.
At any rate, the fullness of time translated the ancient survival advantage of five fingers on each of two front limbs into a fascination with the number one hundred. Our dollar is valued as one hundred cents. We group the years of Western history into centuries and ascribe characteristics to them as if beliefs and behaviors expired in years ending in '99 and their replacements commenced in years ending in '00.
Stuffy perfectionists marred the turn of the millennium celebration by pointing out that the 20th century didn't really end until the stroke of midnight in the year 2000. For the century to have died with 1999, our pre-Roman ancestors would have to have named our left-hand pinky-finger "zero," but they were not that wise.
"Digital" technology works with ones and zeros, even though we have ten digits: go figure. Perhaps the fathers of binary were all thumbs.
We are all fascinated with amassing zeros. Who can resist glancing down repeatedly to catch the speedometer turning over 100,000 miles?
Back before Touch Tone, when the communications network was a miracle of electromechanical switching, the circular control that generated switching pulses on the telephone was called the "dial" -- a reference to the sun dial, another round plate with numbers. Ironically, we use a square matrix of square buttons to "dial" telephone numbers.
New businesses used to request phone numbers ending in two or three zeros, even though it meant customers would take much longer to dial them. Marketing-savvy businesses asked for numbers ending in 1111 but the conventional wisdom said more zeros meant more gravitas.
What put me in mind of round numbers this week is the fact that this is my 100th Mooresville Tribune column. Way back in February of 2004, I had just read a book by Dr. Samuel Cotton called "Silent Terror" about his struggle to make American civil rights leaders aware of modern black African slavery in Mauritania and Sudan.
Dr. Cotton, an African American Columbia professor, went underground in those countries to witness slavery first hand and report the contemporary horrors of a system that died -- most of us think -- with the Civil War. But slavery flourishes today, unremarked, in Africa.
By chance, I finished Dr. Cotton's book during Black History Month in 2004 and felt it was altogether fitting and proper to honor his bravery and commitment (and to lament his ultimate frustration) in a letter to the Tribune.
Dr. Cotton died young from a brain tumor before he could marshal the needed support to enlist very many Americans in his abolition efforts. But the letter honoring him led to Tribune Editor Dale Gowing inviting me to write these columns.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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