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
£sd abandoned the £sd system quickly, while others retained it almost as long as the UK itself. Australia, for example, only changed to using a decimal currency on 14 February 1966. Still others, notably Ireland, decimalised only when the UK did. The UK abandoned the old penny on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971, when one pound sterling became divided into 100 new pence. This was a change from the system used in the earlier wave of decimalisations in Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa, in which the pound was replaced with a new major currency called either the "dollar" or