Posted on 05/27/2003 8:38:25 PM PDT by steplock
One Short Century Ago....Year of our Lord 1902
What a difference a century makes! We have to remind ourselves occasionally where we have come from and always imagine where we will go.
Here are some of the US statistics for 1902:
-=-=-=-=-
The average life expectancy in the US was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the US had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11.00
There were only 8,000 cars in the US 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 residents, 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 US was 22 cents an hour.
The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the US took place at home.
Ninety percent of all US physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee cost 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 prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason.
The five leading causes of death in the US were: 1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 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 30.
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea had not been invented.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
One in ten US adults couldn't read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
18 percent of households in the US had at least on full-time servant or domestic.
Just think what it will be like in another l00 years......................
Bet 95% of conceptions did too.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee
were each more heavily populated than California.
At one time, Mississippi, thanks to cotton, was
one of the richest states in the Union. Now it's
probably the poorest.
Most women only washed their hair once a
month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Masturbation was such an unthinkable act, there
were doctors women paid to massage their
'nerves' away for them.
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and
iced tea had not been invented.
Crossword puzzles became a national craze
in the twenties, along with mah-jong, flagpole
sitting, and the self-improvement mantra of
"every day in every way, I'm getting better
and better."
In 2003, cigarettes, twinkies, big macs, toxics, bad air, chopping down forrests, polluted water, illegal drugs, alcohol, racism, homophobism... have killed more people than are living, but the average life expectancy has grown to nearly 80 years!
From a book called "When My Grandmother Was a Child" by Leigh W. Rutledge, E.P. Dutton, 1996, which begins, "In the summer of 1900, when my grandmother was a child..."
These items were dropped along the way...Some you can guess why. :)
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community
was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.
Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet.
Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented
Only men could vote. [ Inaccurate. Four states allowed women to vote.]
Drive-by shootings--in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages, or anything else that caught their fancy--were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West.
Some medical authorities warned that professional seamstresses were apt to become sexually aroused by the steady rhythm, hour after hour, of the sewing machine's foot pedals. They recommended slipping bromide--which was thought to diminish sexual desire--into the women's drinking water.
Punch-card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of
the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile
the 1900 census.
There were about 230 reported murders in the US annually.
And now for some rebuttal.
This is one of those "historical" background stories that float around the Internet and genealogy lists from time to time without anyone fact checking them.
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47-years.
Actually, 49.2 years at the beginning of the century. High incidence of infant mortality affected that. If you lived to adulthood, you would live on average more than a decade longer than 49.2 years.
Only 8% of U.S. homes had a telephone. (A 3-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11.00!)
A telephone call over that distance was not possible in 1902. Before the invention of the vacuum tube amplifier in 1906, the maximum long distance call was about 1,500 miles. AT&T's long distance network did not reach Denver until 1911.
Sources:
http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory2/History2.html
http://www.att.com/technology/features/history010126.html
There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S. and only 144 miles of paved roads.
An absurdly low number of miles, even in 1902. One square mile of a downtown urban area alone would contain, on average, a grid of 24 miles of paved roads (do the math: there would be 12 miles of north-south streets, and 12 miles of east-west streets, if each street were separated by one block, and there were 12 blocks in a mile).
Cities of 30,000+ population in 1902 contained, on average, 113.3 miles of paved road.
Source: Troesken & Beeson (2001), p. 25, Table 3.
http://www.nber.org/books/healthandlabor/troesken7-16-01.pdf
There were about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.
The homicide rate in the U.S. in 1902 was 1.2 homicides per 100,000 population, or about 953 homicides in the U.S. -- more than four times 230.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Statistics
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/hmrt.htm
If you care to waste a few hours (or days) finding trivia to astound, amaze and annoy your friends, check out this page of links:
GDP from 1 million BC to present, California Gold Rush prices, inflation caculators, prices of common items in various countries in various centuries and so on.
Did you know that "in Diocletian's day a pound of ginger cost 5,000 days wages (18.5 years, with 270 workdays per year); but in 1875, only 1.4 days' pay?"
Its true. You can look it up :-)
I did not post my full rebuttal to this article because he hard drive on which it was stored crashed yesterday morning. I have, however, now pulled that document out of my backups (yeah!!), in response to your little tirade.
This article was originally published by Leigh W. Rutledge, in his 1996 book, "When My Grandmother Was a Child."
Never heard of Leigh Rutledge, steplock? He is also the author of The Gay Book of Lists; The New Gay Book of Lists; Unnatural Quotations; The Gay Fireside Companion; The Gay Decades; The Lefthanders Guide to Life; Excuses, Excuses; A Cat's Little Instruction Book; Cat Love Letters; If People Were Cats; The Diary of a Cat; Cat Love Letters; and Dear Tabby. (And if you concluded from the preceding that the author makes his home in Key West, FL, you'd be correct!)
The book "When My Grandmother Was a Child" begins, "In the summer of 1900, when my grandmother was a child..."
The average life expectancy in the United States was 47.
TRUE, but misleading.... This average (actually 47.3) was based only upon returns from those places that required death registration – and in 1900, only 10 states and the District of Columbia required death registration. [Source] This number is also skewed because of the high incidence of infant mortality. If you survived childhood, you would expect to live more than a decade longer.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
Probably unverifiable.... Federal census takers in 1900 did not inquire whether or not there was a bathtub in the household. (They weren't as invasive as today!)
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone...
MAYBE.... In 1900 the Bell System had either 801,000 or 855,900 telephones in service (depending on your source, and perhaps when in the year these were counted!), but independent telephone companies were growing by leaps and bounds. The total number of telephones in 1900 has been estimated at 1.3 million, but it could have been as high as 1.6 million. The 1900 census summary gives the total number of “dwellings” as 14,146,246. However, the number of telephones being used in commercial businesses in 1900 remains unclear.
... A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
FALSE.... You couldn’t make a telephone call from Denver to New York City in 1900 for any price! A telephone call over that distance was not possible in 1900. Before the invention of the vacuum tube amplifier in 1906, the maximum long distance call was about 1,500 miles. AT&T's long distance network did not reach Denver until 1911. [Source] [Source]
There were only 8,000 cars in the US...
TRUE....
... and only 144 miles of paved roads.
FALSE.... The city of Philadelphia by itself had paved over 300 miles of road by the year 1870. [Source]
The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
POORLY WORDED.... Responses from those in the work force 16 years and older for the 1900 Census show that a female worker brought home, on average, $272 per year, and that a male worker earned, on average, $495. [Source]
Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen. Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound.
MAYBE....As it is today, commodity prices depend on where you are living!
Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants.
FALSE.... Canada did have continual conflict with Chinese immigrants during that time period, and in 1900 increased a head tax on Chinese immigrants from $50 to $100, but there is no evidence of a "law" as stated. [Source]
Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine....
FALSE.... Coca-Cola contained BOTH, although conscious efforts were being made around that time to minimize the amount of cocaine in the formulation. Caffeine occurs naturally in the Kola nut. [Source]
Punch-card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile the 1900 census.
FALSE.... The Hollerith Tabulating Machine, designed by Herman Hollerith, was first used by the federal government in the 1890 census! [Source]
There were about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.....
FALSE....The homicide rate in the U.S. in 1902 was 1.2 homicides per 100,000 population, which would put the number of homicides in the U.S. between 900 and 1000 -- more than four times 230. [Source]
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