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What a Difference 100 Years Make!

post #1 of 26
Thread Starter 
I came across this in another forum and thought it interesting enough to share. I am glad I live in this day and age!

The year is 1907.
One hundred years ago.
What a difference a century makes!
Here are some of the U.S. Statistics for the Year 1907:
************************************

The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years old.

Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

A three-minute call from Denver to New York City
cost eleven dollars..

There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S.., and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more
heavily populated than California.

With a mere 1.4 million people, California was only the 21st
most populous state in the Union.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower !

The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents per hour.

The average U.S. Worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
A dentist made $2,500 per year,
A veterinarian $1,500 per year,
And a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births in the U.S. took place at HOME.

Ninety percent of all U.S. doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which
were condemned in the press AND the government as "substandard."

Sugar cost four cents a pound.

Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used
Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from
entering into their country for any reason.

Five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea UH ??
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars.
Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and
Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.

The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30!!!!

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea
hadn't been invented yet.

There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.

Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school..

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over
the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists
Said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind,
regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian
of health."

There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A. !
post #2 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years old.


Quote:

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over
the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists
Said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind,
regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian
of health."


A lot of people must have been following their pharmacist's advice.
post #3 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
post #4 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

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Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.
Today, about 20% of the US population (same goes for the UK population, BTW) is functionally illiterate. There are various definitions of this, but in essence, being functionally illiterate means having a reading ability at or below that of an average eight-year old. If you do a readibility measure of many of the more popular newspapers, you'll find they are aimed at someone with a reading age of about eight years (albeit with a few words that you hope most eight year-olds don't possess). This is not coincidence.

Quote:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years old.
This is roughly accurate (it depends to some extent on which part of the USA you're considering), but it's worth adding that life expectancy is one of the most misunderstood of statistics. The figure refers to the age at which half of a birth cohort (i.e. people born in the same block of time) have died. A low life expectancy implies to many people that people didn't grow old in times past. This isn't quite true. A very large proportion of the people who died before 47 died during birth, infancy, or early childhood. If you survived childhood and adolescence, your life expectancy in the 1900s was 'only' about seven years less than today. In fact, the older the person you consider the less the difference between the remaining life expectancy of someone in 1900 and someone today. And if you want a pause for thought - even today, outside the developed world most people die before their fifth birthday.

Quote:
Ninety percent of all U.S. doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
It probably made little difference. Many historians reckon that until the 20th century, medical doctors (even the qualified ones) overall did more harm than leaving the patient untreated or reliant on folk remedies.
post #5 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

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The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower !
Not sure why this deserved an exclamation point? The Eiffel Tower remains a structure of respectable size.

Quote:
The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents per hour.

The average U.S. Worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
A dentist made $2,500 per year,
A veterinarian $1,500 per year,
And a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine: People citing utterly meaningless non-inflation adjusted numbers like they are supposed to mean something

--
H
post #6 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

He didn't say it meant something, obviously inflation is a huge factor, but just the though of making .22 an hour is pretty amazing, no matter how little things cost, considering that is close to what a North Korean makes now. Its just fun numbers to look at. You know, interesting and fun.
post #7 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

I wonder what things will be like 100 years from now. Will a guy like me be earning a working class wage of $4000 an hour while thinking about how he could have bought a whole months worth of groceries back in the day for less than a candy bar currently costs, or will the world's financial system be completely overhauled?
post #8 of 26
Thread Starter 

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
Its just fun numbers to look at. You know, interesting and fun.
Thats the way I was looking at it. Looking back at how it was and wondering how it will be in the next 100 years.
post #9 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Sometimes "experts" have trouble even predicting what will happen in the next 10 years. I remember back in 1990 reading an issue of Time magazine which was devoted to the comming Millenium. A lot of the issue dealt with what things would be like in the year 2000. Funny thing was, they completely missed the one thing that has come to dominate our lives-- the Internet. Not once in their predictions of technology did they even come close to envisioning the Internet. It's kind of fun to look back on those predictions and see how wrong they generally were.
post #10 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

I'm still waiting on flying cars and all we get is soaring gas prices!
post #11 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
The average U.S. Worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
A dentist made $2,500 per year,
A veterinarian $1,500 per year,
And a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine: People citing utterly meaningless non-inflation adjusted numbers like they are supposed to mean something
Well, the rather large difference between what the average worker made back then and a mechanical engineer has meaning to me (being the latter). That would translate into several hundred thousand per year in today's dollars.
post #12 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Where did you get your real wage number of "several hundred thousand", Robert? I checked out the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website which has a calculator for comparing real dollars. It only goes back to 1913, but should be somewhat close to 1907. $5,000 in 1913 is the equivalent of just under $105,000 in 2007 dollars.

For $5,000 in 1907 to be worth even just $200,000 in 2007, that $5,000 in 1907 would have had to "grown" to $9,550 by 1913. I'd guess prices didn't nearly double between 1907 and 1913.

CPI Inflation Calculator
post #13 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

I based it on what would happen if the same ratio was still in effect.

From this:

BBER-UNM: All States Average Wage and Salary per Job

The 2006 average annual wage was $41,991. Dave says the average annual wage was between $200 and $400. The average mechanical engineer made $5000 per year. Divide $5000 by $400 and you get 12.5. Multiply $41,991 by 12.5 and you get $524,887.50. I wouldn't mind that.
post #14 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

The BLS and other price deflators have some serious problems.

Anyway, it's not true that inflation occurs gradually. It's typically a stepwise function. For example, the Gold Reserve Act of 1933 changed the basis of the dollar from 23.22 ($20.67/oz) to 13.7 grains of gold ($35/oz) on a single day. It's possible to argue that that did not amount to a depreciation of the currency by 60% in a single event, but it's close. Similarly, the decade of the 1970s saw depreciation at least by a factor of two (which, if continued every decade for 100 years, would lead to a devaluation factor of a thousand, rather than the real figure of 20 to 50). At today's gold price — which, admittedly, is inflated over that of two or three years ago, to a level beyond that of most other prices — $5000 in 1908 = $220 000.

Quote:
Five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea UH ??
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke

Maybe you do not realize how serious diarrhea really is. If not stopped, it can cause severe dehydration, & in the days before intravenous saline drips this was often fatal. Even today people, small babies particularly, die of it despite medical attention. Without indoor plumbing, modern water purification techniques, & the like, there were far more cases of cholera & other enteric illnesses than there are today.
post #15 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Not to mention that diarrhea may have been a symptom to some as-of-then undiagnosed or unrecognized disease. Since they didn't know what they were dealing with, and saw diarrhea as the only symptom, they may have assumed it was the underlying sickness as well.
post #16 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
The 2006 average annual wage was $41,991. Dave says the average annual wage was between $200 and $400. The average mechanical engineer made $5000 per year. Divide $5000 by $400 and you get 12.5. Multiply $41,991 by 12.5 and you get $524,887.50. I wouldn't mind that.

I see. You weren't really trying to figure out what the $5,000 engineer's salary equals in today's dollars. Just what a mechanical engineer's wage would be if the relationship between the average person's salary and a mechanical engineer's annual salary was the same today as it was in 1907 ( which apparently isn't the case given your reaction )
post #17 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

> the rather large difference between what the average worker made back then and a mechanical engineer

My guess is there weren't many places to get trained for engineering back then, or people couldn't afford the training, compared to now.

Or maybe there were fewer jobs that paid well back then, so the engineers were some of the few who made way more than average workers.

I'll bet nuclear engineers really made big bucks back then.
post #18 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
Just what a mechanical engineer's wage would be if the relationship between the average person's salary and a mechanical engineer's annual salary was the same today as it was in 1907 ( which apparently isn't the case given your reaction )
If only it were! (imagining the home theater I'd have!)
post #19 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
If only it were! (imagining the home theater I'd have!)

post #20 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
Five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea UH ??
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
I thought that pneumonia was a symptom rather than a disease? Ditto diarrhoea (which Carlo has already mentioned). Still, I guess it's a slightly better picture than a few years previously, when the second commonest cause of death in women (the first was childbirth) was burning - with so many stoves and fires with open flames and large dresses ... Not a pretty thought.

With regard to the relative buying power of wages, no method is satisfactory. In addition to the ways mentioned above, another common method is to peg the wage to its purchasing power of a staple product, such as a loaf of bread. The trouble is that the relative cost of a staple product relative to other household items changes over time, and this muddies the waters (e.g. a loaf of bread was once an essential and key part of many people's diets; now it's something that most of us could quite easily do without). And composite measures such as the cost of a collection of essential goods also varies, in part because over time what's included in the set of 'essential' goods varies. Nor can you compare a salary with a typical working person's wage, because at different points in history this has varied considerably in relative terms. Really the only way in which you can judge the worth of a wage is to consider the lifestyle it would buy at that point in time. Very prosaic, and not terribly useful as an easy to use guide.
post #21 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
I thought that pneumonia was a symptom rather than a disease? Ditto diarrhoea (which Carlo has already mentioned).
Pneumonia is generally a result of disease, rather than a disease in itself (except for pneumococcus), but that doesn't keep people from dying of it. In fact, a sizable fraction of deaths in hospital today, especially among the elderly, are attributed to pneumonia. It is still a common entry on death certificates. And my father almost died of diarrhea before the doctors figured out what was wrong with him.

The biggest problem with comparing money values across time may be the problem of what you can buy. I have seen it asserted that private individuals of moderate means are, in some ways, more wealthy than entire governments in past centuries ; an example (which has several serious problems) given was that "Queen Isabella of Spain had to hock the crown jewels to pay for a crossing of the Atlantic, which anyone can buy for a few hundred dollars now".
post #22 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

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I have seen it asserted that private individuals of moderate means are, in some ways, more wealthy than entire governments in past centuries
I agree that this is a rather bizarre way of looking at things. But saying that an average person today has greater creature comforts than the richest of people in the past is sort of accurate.
post #23 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
But saying that an average person today has greater creature comforts than the richest of people in the past is sort of accurate.
That's true. Industrialization and mechanization give the average person access to creature comforts that couldn't be bought at any price in the past. On the other hand, some individuals in the past were incredibly wealthy relative not only to other individuals, but even governments. The likes of J. P. Morgan and John Rockefeller had a net worth comparable to the entire federal budget at the time. That would translate into a net worth of several trillion dollars today, making Bill Gates' wealth seem paltry by comparison.
post #24 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

Quote:
On the other hand, some individuals in the past were incredibly wealthy relative not only to other individuals, but even governments.
One measure I've come to prefer is comparing the cost of something (or the wages earned by someone in a year) to the GDP at the time. This completely eliminates the cumulative inflation/recession calculations (with the requisite cumulative error) and gets right down to the buying power of a dollar between the two years being compared. So if a loaf of bread was 1.2*10^-7 GDP in 1907, and it's 8.7*10^-8 GDP today, then bread is 27.5% cheaper today than it was a hundred years ago. (That's just an example with made-up numbers, BTW.)
post #25 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

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One measure I've come to prefer is comparing the cost of something (or the wages earned by someone in a year) to the GDP at the time.
In the Wiki article I read about John D. Rockefeller, he is considered the richest American in history, based on the criterion you mentioned (net worth as a percentage of GDP). Using the more conventional measure, he would be worth well over $300 billion in today's dollars (most of which he gave away to various charities and foundations).
post #26 of 26

Re: What a Difference 100 Years Make!

He didn't give away everything he stole as a large part in the crooked Federal Reserve Bank.
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