Metrication in the United Kingdom that reported in 1818, and again in Parliament by Sir John Wrottesley in 1824. Another Royal Commission was set up 1838 by Chancellor of the Exchequer Thomas Spring Rice and it reported in 1841 that decimal coinage was required first. A third commission in 1853 advocated decimal coinage in the form £1 : 10 florins : 100 cents: 1000 mils. The first florins (one tenth of a pound sterling) were struck in 1849 as silver coins weighing and having a diameter of . An early supporter of the "Decimal Association" was the mathematician Augustus de Morgan whose articles supporting the
Coins of the pound sterling abbreviation for the old penny, d, was derived from the Roman "denarius", and the abbreviation for the shilling, s, from the Roman "solidus". The shilling was also denoted by the slash symbol, also called a solidus for this reason, which was originally an adaptation of the long s. The symbol "£", for the pound, is derived from the first letter of the Latin word for pound, "libra". A similar pre-decimal system operated in France, also based on the Roman currency, consisting of the "livre" (L), "sol" or "sou" (s) and "denier" (d). Until 1816 another similar system was used in