- A Hundred Years Ago -
(From a book called "When My Grandmother Was a Child" by Leigh W.
Rutledge, which begins, "In the summer of 1900, when my grandmother was a
child...")
- The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
- Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States 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 US and only 144 miles of paved roads. The
maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.
- Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated
than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California
was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.
- The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
- The average wage in the US was twenty-two 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 $2500
per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical
engineer about $5000 per year.
- More than 95 percent of all births in the United States 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, either as travelers or immigrants.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 from high school.
- 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.
- 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."
- Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine.
- 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.
- Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time
servant or domestic.
- There were about 230 reported murders in the US annually.
Footnote:
Your
Web site has a page titled "A Hundred Years Ago", reprinted from a book alled
"When My Grandmother Was a Child" by Leigh W. Rutledge.
http://www.namvets.com/Reading/a_hundred_years_ago.htm
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
Steve Dhuey
walloon@mailbag.com
