# 100 Years Ago



## juniorjock (Feb 3, 2008)

I don't know how accuarte this stuff is, but it's worth thinking about.

THE YEAR 1909

This will boggle your mind, I know it did mine! 
The year is 1909. 
One hundred years ago. 
What a difference a century makes! 
Here are some statistics for the Year 1909 :


 **

The average life expectancy was 47 years.

Fuel for a car was sold in drug stores only

Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone..

There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!

The average wage in 1909 was 22 cents per hour.

The average 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 took place at HOME .

Ninety percent of all 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 were: 
1. Pneumonia and influenza 
2. Tuberculosis 
3. Diarrhea 
4. Heart disease 
5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars.

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

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea Hadn't been invented yet.

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

Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write and

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

Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.

There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE ! U.. S.A.!

Plus one more sad thought; 95 percent of the taxes we have now did not exist in 1909

Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years.

IT STAGGERS THE MIND

A P.S. From JJ - - - - - WHAT?


> ? No Canned BEER


?????


----------



## SnowyRiver (Nov 14, 2008)

Thats great…thanks for posting it.


----------



## Roger Clark aka Rex (Dec 30, 2008)

Did you get this information from Karson? He was a teenager back then and almost got drafted for WW1. fortunately he was not accepted as he had his trigger finger missing due to a table saw mishap.


----------



## 8iowa (Feb 7, 2008)

My grandparents were married in 1909. Grandpa wrote his prospective bride a letter (who writes letters today?) and told her that he had just gotten a job that paid $9 per week, so they could now get married.

He was the son of a Civil War veteran. There were lots of them in 1909. The GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) was a powerful organization.


----------



## a1Jim (Aug 9, 2008)

I thought he was talking to my wife Roger


----------



## davidpettinger (Aug 21, 2009)

My Grandmother, may she rest in peace, was born in 1897. She grew up on a farm in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. She was one of 23 children and 1 of 4 sets of twins. She had a 3rd grade education, and in 1912, she landed a job at the age of 15 as an assistant to the company accountant in Chicago for a laundry service. She earned $12.40 a week(60 hour work week). She got the job because she excelled at math due to her education. She thought that income tax was started in 1913 because the government saw people migrating from rural farms to the city as an easy target to make money off of. 
She called the IRS, a bunch of knotheads - robbing the working class without using a gun. She also thought that Woodrow Wilson was the biggest robber of them all.


----------



## richgreer (Dec 25, 2009)

My grandfather, whom I was very close to, was born in 1891. You are describing the world that he realized as a young adult. I know that he spent time every winter in as a lumberjack in South Dakota. It was 3-4 months of hell every winter but he made $3.50/day which was a lot of money back then. I've often thought about what it was like to cut down trees with a 2 man saw, trim the log with axes, and load them on sleds with manual labor and haul them on ice tracks with horses out of the forest. That was a lot of VERY hard work but that is how we got the lumber that built this country at that time. We have it so easy today.


----------



## juniorjock (Feb 3, 2008)

Good one Roger…...... You guys are lucky to have the knowledge about your relatives that you do.


----------



## Nomad62 (Apr 20, 2010)

I've often pondered the medical changes made in the last 100 years, funny you brought this up. Hospitals that help people rather than sanitariums that hid the sick until they died. Doctors with incredible knowledge bases (like the internet!) instead of snake oil salesmen. Medicines and vaccines that flat out removed sicknesses that once were death sentences. Our human capability of learning and teaching that is rivaled by no other animal on Earth (not even monkeys) is truly amazing. We are a lucky generation…after all, we have not only cans but bottles for beer! Woohoo!


----------



## dustinkester (Sep 16, 2009)

Cool post. This stuff certainly gets you thinking about how far we have come. Think about how far even just computers have come in the past 50 years, from not even being invented to all the awesome little gadgets we have today!


----------



## Cher (Dec 6, 2009)

*juniorjock* Thanks for posting I have enjoyed reading the comments. I hope there will be more.


----------



## lighthearted (Apr 30, 2009)

And Hand Tools were the ONLY option!

Thanks for posting


----------



## Eli (Mar 3, 2010)

Hand tools weren't the only option in 1909. Power tools were around and most industries had been industrialized.

Eggs were expensive: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi

Eli


----------



## lighthearted (Apr 30, 2009)

Eli-
I doubt your grandfather was building in his garage with power tools.


----------



## jbertelson (Sep 26, 2009)

Thanks…......my father was born in 1901. Wow, what a difference from now….......just looking at the health and life expectancy statistics is overwhelming. I tell my patients, only half of the children born on the prairies in the USA in the 1800's lived. Most died of pneumonia before age two.

Being an obstetrician-gynecologist, I am accutely aware of the changes, but these statistics bring it even closer to reality. The good-old-days were really not very good.

It wasn't so long ago that we were at the mercy, in very real terms, of disease and happenstance, at a very young age, mostly infectious bacterial disease. My father's first wife died of spinal meningitis…..probably would have lived today. I almost died of whooping cough (pertussis), nearly irradicated now by vaccination.

............count your blessings…..........

Alaska Jim


----------



## juniorjock (Feb 3, 2008)

Thanks for your thoughts Jim…... all very true.
- JJ


----------



## jbertelson (Sep 26, 2009)

.......by the way. I had an Irish Wolfhound, Brauna, many years ago, about 160 pounds, female. The males weighed more. Very gentle. Had some fox terriers too. One of them, Monty, use to bite between the toes of Brauna, just to annoy her…...they couldnt' get a grip anywhere else. One day she got perturbed, picked up the fox terrier by the head and threw him over 20 feet. Didn't hurt Monty, but he was a lot more careful after that.

He had to be. We lived in Fairbanks then, winters to 65 degrees below zero, actual, no wind chill. I had built them an insulated dog house, really well built. They entered it by climbing up an incline so that the heat was trapped. Heated by an electric light bulb, and the dogs body heat. Brauna slept in front. The Saluki (the dominant dog, adapted to the desert) slept in the warmest spot in back, and the two fox terriers slept on top of the Irish Wolfhound. Pretty interesting adaptation to the situation…........

........thought you might enjoy the dog story…...........(-:


----------



## TopamaxSurvivor (May 2, 2008)

My Dad was born in 1915, not too long after that ;-) My granddad said, when they got indoor plumbing, "S^^^ in the house?!! I'm not gonna s^^^ in the house!!" He didn't until he was about 80 when the Grade A dairy association made them fill in the out house hole )

Grandpa said they took a bath every 2 weeks. They had to carry the water several miles. There were 13 kids, I suppose the last one in probably didn't much matter.


----------



## jbertelson (Sep 26, 2009)

..........next thing you are gonna tell me, Topo, is that you can still smell that bathwater until this day….......even though you weren't in it…........

............go ahead, tell me…..........(-: (-:


----------



## TopamaxSurvivor (May 2, 2008)

Nope, and I didn't carry it either. Glad he got the h^^^ out of PA so i didn't have to carry it ;-))


----------



## TopamaxSurvivor (May 2, 2008)

But I did walk up hill to school and up hill back home when *I* was a kid !!


----------



## jbertelson (Sep 26, 2009)

I have my own cold weather stories, and my mile long walk to school when I lived in Minnesota. But the most amazing thing I have ever seen was driving through Fairbanks at minus 60 deg F, and watching grade school kids walking to school dressed in expedition parkas, throwing snow chunks at each other. Nothing stopped the Fairbanks school system. Oh well. Glad I live in Anchorage now. Much warmer.


----------



## Orion (Dec 9, 2009)

Enjoyed that list, wonder about the accuracy of some things, but enjoyable nevertheless. What strikes me are: The prices of things, proportional to the wages at the time, are actually quite high.At $0.22 per hour, a dozen eggs were a relatively big expense at $0.14. Of course, a lot less eggs were sold as a heck of a lot of people had their own chickens. Economies of scale and efficiency really help us out in ways I can't even begin to fathom.

Just yesterday I was at my sons birthday party (turned 5). I was contemplating the toys, beyond that there were way too many of them. When I was a kid an expensive toy was $20.00 and it would get you one transformer or a cabbage patch doll. Now: $20.00 doesn't mean as much, but you actually get a lot more toy for the $. $20.00 seems to be more or less how much a parent spends on a toy for a friends party-IE toys you give a neighborhood kid-and for $20 you get a whole lot of stuff. A giant squirt gun, an entire art set, etc., stuff that seemed unobtainable to me as a child due to cost.

It also strikes me that we as a nation were a lot more entrepreneurial back then, despite many more limitations. It s actually somewhat easier to start something today-the web makes any idea immediately available to the entire world. Imagine what it took to bring an idea to the world, or even your own town, back then. We have more red tape now, but otherwise it is much easier to try something new and yet we seem to create less and less. People hypothesize that government schooling inhibits us by forcing limitations and pushing children down paths too early. Others hypothesize that entertainment makes us dull. I don't know, probably a combination of everything, but it is interesting and kind of sad.


----------



## TopamaxSurvivor (May 2, 2008)

Orion, You have to remember that there was no middle class then. There are only two periods in American history with a large, well off middle class: at the time of the Revolution and post WWII. It is shrinking today. The rest of the time the people lived on substance level incomes. Very few went to high school and started working at the age of about 10. At the last turn of the century, the breaker boys in PA coal mines started as young as 8 or 9 breaking up coal chunks that were too big. By age 15 or so they were big enough to work in the mines.

Our kids had infinitely more toys ect than I ever did. Now, out grandkids get more in one Christmas than I did all time I was growing up. I kept telling my wife they are getting too much and will think money grows on trees, but the kids turned out OK. I suppose the grandkids will too ;-))


----------

