Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

by Tim Harford

Those tally sticks, by the way, met an unfortunate end. The tally stick system was finally abolished and replaced by paper ledgers in 1834 after decades of attempts to modernize. To celebrate, it was decided to burn the sticks—six centuries of irreplaceable monetary records—in a coal-fired stove in the House of Lords, rather than let parliamentary staff take them home for firewood. Burning a cartload or two of tally sticks in a coal-fired stove, it turns out, is a wonderful way to start a raging chimney fire. So it was that the House of Lords, then the House of Commons, and almost the entire Palace of Westminster—a building as old as the tally stick system itself—was burned to the ground. Perhaps the patron saints of monetary history were having their revenge.