Anglo-Saxon pound × 32 = 7680 wheat grain. The Tower wheat grain was defined as exactly of a troy grain. Expressed in modern English troy grains, the Tower pound was 7680 × = 5400 modern troy grains (350 g). The Tower pound was divided into 12 ounces, each ounce into 20 pennyweights, and each pennyweight into 24 barleycorns. There were thus 480 barleycorns to a Tower ounce, 5760 barleycorns to a Tower pound of 350 g. The Anglo-Saxon pound (Saxon pound, moneyers' pound or Tower pound) remained in use for silver and gold coinage in England after the adoption of the medieval
Silver center cent of the new nation's coinage should be approximately equal to its face value. Some merchants would refuse to accept coins that did not meet this standard. For most denominations, bullion parity was achieved by producing the coins in a gold or silver alloy. However, the Coinage Act of 1792 specified that the cent was to consist of 11 pennyweight (264 grains or 17.1 g) of pure copper. Such a weight, needed to maintain intrinsic value, would have been too heavy for practical everyday use. U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson suggested an alternative: a coin made of an alloy that