On Tuesday, September 26, 2017 at 7:16:44 PM UTC-4, Dave Platt wrote:

Actually, consider the additional i in Aluminium, and all those Us such as colour, behaviour an more, going on since the days of Shakespeare and before.

If you allow a cost of GBP 0.01/100 such extra letters, and for round figures consider that the average number of printed & written such letters is around two billion per year, that comes to GBP 200,000 per year. Since about 1590. Consider the miracle of compound interest - and what that would be worth today, not including all the additional years. What a waste!

That initial 200,000 would be worth GBP 807,434,220 +/- today. Boggles the mind.

http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA