Letters

Units of Weight

t was with great interest that I read the Gallery piece by David Bertram concerning the 8-bore black powder breech-loading double rifle (January 2020). What especially caught my attention was his closing sentence mentioning the legend “Charge 10 drms”. I recalled reading in by FC Selous, about black powder charges expressed in drams. I suspected, and this was confirmed when I read up about it, that the dram unit of weight is derived from the Greek drachma, which of course is also a coin denomination. As the term drachma is believed to originally mean the amount a person can hold in the hand, I laughingly compared it with the practice of olden-day pioneers who used the hand-eye method to