This is a question about historical notation practices.
A colleague recently sent me a scan of a portion of a 1935 paper:
P. R. Bassett. "Passenger Comfort in Air Transportation", Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences (Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences), Vol. 2, No. 2 (1935), pp. 48–50.
He asked me to guess what was meant here, particularly by the "1-10" notation:
After considering carefully, I guessed that the “1-10g” actually meant $\frac1{10}g$, where $g$ is the acceleration due to the Earth's gravity, a fairly common unit of acceleration in this kind of context, and that the following “1-10” similarly meant $\frac1{10}$.
This would mean that the hyphen was being used to separate the numerator and denominator of the fraction $\frac1{10}$. I vaguely remember having seen this before, but can't think of any examples.
My question is about the rarity and usage patterns of this notation. Is it a one-off oddity, or was it ever usual? If it was a usual notation, how common was it, during what period was it most widely used, and by whom? Was it more common in certain sorts of literature, or at certain times?
I looked briefly in Cajori 1928, especially §272–275, which discuss the introduction of the “$1/10$” notation, but I was not able to find anything relevant.
My understanding of the use of dash is that it is used to separate two connected numbers, such as hours-minutes or stones-pounds. One would write a weight as 8-7, meaning eight-stones, seven pounds. There was a show called the 6-5 show (ie 5 minutes after 6pm).
I have seen things like 5-8 (five-eight), meaning five-eights, but i can't recall where.
Some of the more ancient texts i have from C19, certianly know of the solidus for division, money amounts tend to be spaced (a solidus is a shilling), or evident by context.
Like the long hundred, it tends to fly below the radar of the learned.