Ptak Science Books

Prison Labor and the Price of Kegs of Lard, 1875-1885

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

 

The title of this quick post seems both irresistibly attractive and horribly repelling in an oh-g_d-is-this-what-we're-down-to dissertation for a moderately-good university.  But really all this post is is a title--I stumbled upon this table looking for emigration figures to illustrate a dot-matrix map from the United States Industrial Commission (printed in 1900), volume 3, which concentrated on the statics and sociology of prison labor.  So what this table shows is the effect of prisoners' labor on the price of pork and pork fat in the Chicago market for a ten year period at the end of the 19th century, and what we see is that the "free" labor in prison in this area produced cheaper prices in the fat market.  There you have it. [Source: Internet Archive, here.]

How Much it Cost to Clothe the Working Poor of London, 1854

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1761

The "working poor" of England may have been half of that--working, that is, and hard at work, though not being paid even enough to be considered poor. Their story has been told in many ways, of course, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution succeeding on their bones, observed and recorded and shared by Charles Dickens and others, and on and on, told elsewhere in brevity and quick detail better than I can do so here.

I did want to make a quick comment about a very small detail in the state of those poor people, found in Charles Kingsley's  Cheap Clothes and Nasty, printed in 1850.  It is quite a documentarian's tour of the plight of the poor, written by a very able observer.  (Kingsley is a very interesting person--an historian, priest in the Church of England, social commentator, and novelist.  As a matter of fact he was exceptionally prolific, producing during his lifetime (1819-1875) a fine long list of accomplishment, three of which have survived to this day as sorts of minor classics.  But what he did with great regularity was publish books--34 of them in 25 years between 1850 and 1875, including 15 during the decade of the 1850's, 11 in the 1860's, and 8 in the 1870's to his death in 1875.  Perhaps as important as all of that was the role he played in the arrival of C. Darwin's On the Origin of  Species..., as Kingsley wrote one of the earliest reviews of the book and defended it strongly.)

But getting back to the poor,  Kingsley made a very strong case for the poor being less so than that, as we see here:

"Folks are getting somewhat tired of the old rodomontade that a slave is free the moment he sets foot on British soil! Stuff! - are these tailors free? Put any conceivable sense you will on the word, and then say - are they free? We have, thank God, emancipated the black slaves;  it would seem a not inconsistent sequel to that act to set about emancipating these white ones.Oh! we forgot; there is an infinite difference between the two cases - the black slaves worked for our colonies; the white slaves work for us. But, indeed, if, as some preach, self interest is the mainspring of all human action, it is difficult to see who will step forward to emancipate the said white slaves; for all classes seem to consider it equally their interest to keep them as they are; all classes, though by their own confession they are ashamed, are yet not afraid to profit by the system which keeps them down..."--Charles Kingsley, Clothes, Cheap and Nasty, 1850

Kingsley continues on with the stuff of research, uncommonly sharing the lot of what a vast section of English society experienced daily though mostly in silence.

Another excruciating and interesting report was made by George Godwin in his London Shadows, a glance at the "homes" of the thousands of 1854 (the whole work found on the wonderful Victorian London blog, here and about which I posted about here).

Godwin--an influential architect and editor of the very influential The Builder  as well as a social reformer, who lived from 1813-1888) wrote an expose of how so many Londoners lived at the middle of the century. It is also illustrated with woodcuts of the places in which people lives--artwork in wood and ink that have a very definite quality of the unforgiving cameras of Life magazine a century later.  The images are awakening and abrupt--all the bitter observation of George Orwell, only told much more quickly, like a person trying to describe a raging house fire before the thing burned itself out.  Its a powerful work, and I can't help but think that those reading it in 1854 must have been appalled not only by the deep visualization of the state of the working poor, but also by its scope, and the possible revelation of England's basic bedrock.

Here is an example of Godwin's work, which includes observations on not only housing the poor, but clothing them as well, and published in the editorial pages of journal The Builder. He presents one aspect of their lot by discussing their clothing and its purchasing, bought for what the polite reading circles who would find The Builder  to be almost for no money at all, though the few pennies spent on a pair of shoes or shirt were a major factor in the weekly ration of the working poor., particularly if they were making 5 or 10 pounds per year.   It was an interesting way for Godwin to present to the non-poor what the other-half really had to live like, and perhaps by reaching out to the population that did the building-of-London he probably hoped to affect some sort of reform in the way in which the poor had to live and work.  An example of the Godwin work:

"One of the London missionaries (a body whose valuable services can only be properly appreciated by those who understand the nature and extent of the evil to which we are directing attention) says:-
    "Persons who are accustomed to run up heavy bills at fashionable tailors' and milliners', will scarcely believe the sums for which the classes we are describing are able to purchase the same articles for their own rank in life."
    A missionary who recently explored Rag-fair, reported that a man and his wife might be clothed from head to foot for from 10s. to 15s. Another missionary stated that 8s. would buy every article of clothing required by either a man or a woman, singly. In Pennant's time it was less. He says (speaking of the other Rag-fair), that the dealer pointed out a man to him, and said: "Look at him. I have clothed him for fourteen-pence. A third missionary reported : "There is as great a variety of articles in pattern, and shape, and size, as I think could be found in any draper's shop in London." The mother may go to "Rag-fair" with the whole of her family, both boys and girls,- yes, and her husband, too, and for a very few shillings deck them out from top to toe. I have no doubt that for a man and his wife, and five or six children, £1 at their disposal, judiciously laid out, would purchase them all an entire change. This may appear to some an exaggeration: but I actually overheard a conversation in which two women were trying to bargain for a child's frock; the sum asked for it was 1½d. and the sum offered was a penny, and they parted on the difference..."

One Inch=$370 Million: Unusual Displays of Quantitative Data and the Height of American Public Debt

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1721

[Click image to enlarge]

 It isn't often that you see money represented by dry measure, but that's what happened here in these two examples from the fantastic Walker Statistical Atlas ( Statistical Atlas of the United States based on the results of the tenth census 1880 with contributions from many eminent men of science and several departments of the government Comp. under the authority of Congress by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintendent of the tenth census ... and published in 1884).  What we see here is a history of American federal indebtedness from 1791 (when the public debt stood at 75.1 million dollars) to 1881 (about 2 billion).  Using the CPI (consumer price index) as a factor to translate that number in 2008 dollars (or so), the 2 bil grows to about $40 billion (a nickel then is about a dollar now). The interesting part of the legend--and what drew me to this graphic even before its somewhat unique shape--state "1"--370 millions", that is one inch of pink horizontal bar stands for about $370,000,000, and the last bar on this graph is about 6 inches long, which, adjusted for inflation, would now be about 10 feet long. .That said, the really interesting part comes next--if we use this measure to graph a horizontal bar for the American debt as it stands in 2008, it would pink a pink bar that was about a HALF MILE long to express our 10(+) trillion dollars of debt.  OR, somehow, the old debt of 1881 would be about 1 story of a house, while the 2008 version would be up one side of the Empire State Building and down the other (and yes that includes the aerials).  I don't know how to put this comparison in context, the differences are so staggering. 

After having popped a neuron or two trying to get my head around that one, we'll further confuse the situation with the second chart, which shows the total net indebtedness of the U.S. in 1881 in terms of square inches; or, at the bottom of it all, a 7x7 inch square represented the entirety of the $3 billion owed out.  49 square inches. Working backwards this time, our $10 trillion (or $10,000,000,000,000.00 writ large) adjusted back to a CPI value in 1881 would have covered about 88 PAGES of the atlas or 9,000 square inches.  Again, the numbers are just almost too big to mean anything. 

We, as a country, owe one hell of a lot of money.

And yes there are many different ways of trying to figure out what one 1881 dollar "means" in terms of 2008 dollars, but the CPI is the most simple to use and least argumentative and at least gives a pretty good idea of scale.  It would be more useful to try and establish the degree of difficulty  of turning the corner on the debt in 1881 compared to doing that today, but this is just a late-night post at the end of the week, and I don't have a good clue about how to try and measure that bit simply.

The Hidden Death Hammer: Display of Quantitative Data for the Battle of Jutland, 1915.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 986

A year and two weeks after the end of WWI, the Illustrated London News  published this compelling graphical display comparing the British naval losses at Jutland to three other great sea battles (Camperdown, the Nile and  Trafalgar).  The battle near Jutland (Denmark) was the largest naval engagement of WWI, involving the German Navy’s High Seas Fleet and the Royal Navy Grand Fleet, and took place May 31-June 1, 1915 (“The Day”).  It was an absolutely enormous engagement, with 250 vessels involved (151 for the Royal Navy, 99 for the German).¹

The end result of the battle was mixed and still debated today; neither side could convincingly claim a conclusive victory from the affair.

The Royal Navy losses at Jutland were staggering: 6,094 killed and 570 wounded, with German losses at 2,551 killed and 507 wounded. 

And while this graphical display places Jutland in a weak context with these other battles, and as pleasing as the thing is visually, the larger mark, the great lurking statistical and human beast lurking there in the mix of silhouettes and data, occurs about halfway down the far right column.

Here we see the losses for five ships: the Queen Mary, the Invincible, the Indefatigable, the Defence, and the Black Prince.  Together, some 5066 men served aboard these vessels; at the end June 1, 1915, 5,059 of them would be dead.  Everyone aboard the Indefatigable, Defence and Black Prince would be killed; 1 would survive on the Invincible, and 6 would survive the killing of the Queen Mary. Astonishing, really.  And there are no other numbers like this on this chart.

As certain and as clear as this representation seems, and as straightforward and seemingly elementary as it looks, I was shocked to see the numbers for those five Royal Navy ships, a “hidden” history within a broad comparative analysis. 

Notes:

1. England: 28 battleships, 9 battlecruisers, 8 armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers, 78 destroyers, 1 minelayer,1 seaplane carrier. Germany: 16 battleships, 5 battlecruisers, 6 pre-dreadnoughts, 11 light cruisers, 61 torpedo boats.

[The Queen Mary going down.]

A Mile-High Pile of Wood--Graphical Display of Quantitative Data.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 913

Continuing a long, developing thread on the graphical display of quantitative data--and especially that which uses man-made objects for comparison—is this interesting bit from a Romanian mining publication from 1933.

The huge mound next to the Eiffel Tower shows the consumption of wood in Romania over a ten year period, a stack of wood 700  metres long and 1500 metres high.  Evidently this wall has only the most rudimentary depth of a metre, as the legend reads that the volume of the woodpile is 1,050,000 metres cubed, which is the same as its square area.  So somebody missed something, here, though the artist did supply some nice shadowing.

Just above it appeared this comparison for the amount of oil consumed over the same ten year period

I’m not sure why this comparison was being made.  This does come in the interwar period which saw a great expansion in Romanian territory and a vast modernization effort following the country’s devastating experience in WWI. Maybe it was illustrating modernization from wood-burning power/heating sources to oil-based. I really don't know--I just liked the Eiffel Tower being dwarfed by a massively tall and impossibly skinny woodpile.

History of Dots (Circle Subcategory): Circles in Graphical Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 889

I like bumping circles as modes of graphically conveying quantitative data—it is more unusual than most ways of portraying statistics and belongs mostly in the 19^th century. 

The first example is relatively early, in the first class of this sort of information display, published in Thomas Bradford’s (1802-1887) superior Comprehensive Atlas Geographical, Historical and Commercial in Boston in 1835. Circles are the entire métier of this chart, showing the sizes of the continents and oceans, concentric circles nested inside each other, then branching out into three columns of progressively smaller circles showing the comparative sizes of islands, seas and lakes, all (interestingly) presented on the same scale.  It is a virtual one-stop, single-image display showing the graphical sizes of 59 geographical entities in relation to one another, making the understanding of their comparative sizes a simple, understandable, matter. 

Prettier but (initially) more difficult to use are the next two charts, the first showing the areas and populations of countries compared to that of the United States (in 1890), and the second showing the public debts of those same countries.  At first the display looks a little confusing. But once you settle in and get your eyes accustomed to the manner of presentation, the charts are actually very easy to use and very useful. 

Moving over from circles to dots is this population map by Frère de Montizon Armand Joseph, Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France, published in 1830 (as the first of its kind).

The ubiquitous pie-chart only made its first appearance in 1801, the work of he gifted and possibly polymathic William Playfair.  He was an engineer (serving as apprentice to the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle,  and personal assistant to James Watt) and economist, and occasional mathematician, who also invented  the line graph (1786),  bar chart (1801)and circlegraph(1801).  But for this and all of his other work, he died in poverty and not comfortable¹.  

 

NOTES

1.Works by William Playfair include:

• 1786. The Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure and Debts of England during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century.
• 1801. Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe. London: Wallis.
• 1805. A Statistical Account of the United States of America by D. F. Donnant. London: J. Whiting. William Playfair, Trans.
• 1807. An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations: Designed To Shew How The Prosperity Of The British Empire May Be Prolonged.

2. In general, the website by  Michael Friendly "Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization" is invaluable (and also located here).

 

 

Window Shopping with Berenice Abbott, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 883  Blog Bookstore

I enjoy antiquarian window shopping, browsing photos or engravings that depict goods for sale-- especially if the prices are posted. I came back to this deep-in-the-Depression-fantastic photo made in 1935 by Berenice Abbott (Springfield, Ohio, 1898-1991). Blossom Restaurant, NYC was part of Abbott’s effort funded by the WPA, this time as a part of her Changing New York Project, and captures the restaurant and neighboring barber shop at 103 Bowery.  The two businesses actually occupied the first floors and basement (respectively) of the Boston Hotel, a standard flop house in a tough and distressed part of the city that rented beds by the day, with 249 small door-less cubicles offering a decent place to spend the night for 30 cents¹. 

30 cents seems to be the going rate for a bunch of things going on in this  picture—30 cents for a night in the hotel, 30 cents for the better offers of Morris Gordon’s restaurant. 30 cents for a haircut and shave, 30 cents for a “women’s hair bob”² and so on.  Which seems about right—a fancy haircut and a decent better-than-average dinner for two will probably cost about the same, today. 

If you were really on a tight budget, 30 cents would buy you three vegetarian dinners, or 6 offerings of bread and soup, or three visits to the table of meatballs and bans, or pigs feet and kraut. 

The price of a stick-to-your-ribs meal of sirloin and potatoes and a pot of coffee also cost about the same as a gallon and a half of gasoline (which cost about 20 cents).  The same amount of gas today would get you a serving at McDonalds, or something on that order, and perhaps even a happy take-away for the kids. Perhaps the two even out. 

30 cents might get you a loaf of bread, and wouldn’t quite get you a dozen eggs.  Now this is remarkable, because if you adjust all of this according to modest CPI measures, the average cost of a dozen eggs in 1935 was 37 cents, or (according to the US Census website generating 1935 to 2009 prices adjusting to CPI) $5.84.  The bread would cost $4.74 in 2009 dollars, which means that the staples today—milk, bread, butter, eggs, were more expensive in 1935 than today.  Ditto gasoline, which cost 19 cents a gallon, or $3 today—actually this would be much more expensive in 1935 as the mileage the cars were getting then (and the octane) was much lower, so the cost of running an automobile was considerably higher.   The cost of the car itself, though, still favors the ‘thirties for modest transportation, which came in at about 600 dollars, or just over $9000 in 2009 dollars³. 

The 3-cent first class postage stamp of 1935 was more expensive than first class postage in 2009:  47 cents versus 44.  When you look at the increases and bitty spikes of the cost of a first class stamp over time the whole thing looks pretty flat. 

The average salary for a family of four in 1935 was about 1500/year, which oddly enough is about the same for the poverty guideline level for 2009 established by the Department of Health and Human Services (about $23,000).  Minimum wage legislation didn’t begin until 1938, but if you take a look at one of my earlier posts here on the history of this idea  you’ll see that the recent history of legislating  a meaningful level of acceptance for a base living wage is mainly disgraceful, with relatively little accomplished (in adjusted economic terms) for half a century.  (The new minimum wage brings us to about a mid-way point as the highest minimum wages paid in the 71-year history of the program.)

And so I thank Ms Abbott again for her beautiful social commentary, and a happy 75^th birthday to this photograph. 

Notes

1.A fantastic website and resource for changing aspects of NYC can be found here, at Frank Levere’s Changing New York site. http://www.newyorkchanging.com/

2. I wrote a little bit about the appearance of women-only hair salons in my post “The Staggering Beauty of Barber Shops” http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/02/the-staggering-beauty-of-barber-shops-naive-surreal-department-22.html

 

3. Other bits of what stuff cost in 1935:

Flour (5 lbs)     25.3 cents

Bread (lb)         8.3

Round steak (lb)  36.0

Bacon (lb)        41.3

Butter (lb)       36.0

Eggs (doz.) 37.6

Milk (1/2 gal.)   23.4

Oranges (doz.)    22.0

Potatoes (10 lbs) 19.1

Coffee (lb)       25.7

Sugar (5 lbs)     28.2

Car: $580

Gasoline: 19 cents/gal

House: $6,300

Bread: 8 cents/loaf

Milk: 47 cents/gal

Postage Stamp: 3 cents

Anthropomorphic Display of Quantitative Data: Flight Safety, 1912

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 815

Even though masses of people had been used in panoramic photography for some years (thousands of people, usually soldiers, gathered to form a living liberty bell, or portrait of George Washington, or some such thing) , I cannot recall the use of humans as a direct statistical aid as in this bio-bar graph, found in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 1912 (page 357). 

The article asks the question of whether air travel (and flight in general) was "safe", and responded by graphing its "yes" response with this image. The larger groups in the top half of the image represent the number of flyers flying for that particular country; the small groups below show the number of aviators killed.  (There is no date of reference in particular but it seems to me that these are total deaths since flying began in Europe in earnest in 1905.) The photomontage below shows a selection of some of the most famous dead aviators. The number of deaths as a percentage of those flying seemed quite acceptable in the year of publication (1912) ; however if these figures were iterated forward to 2009 the death rate would be staggering, sending many thousands of aviators (and crew and passengers) to their deaths each year.  In the United States we save that safety failure for deaths in automobile accidents, which still kill about the same number of Americans each year as were U.S. soldiers lost for the entire war in Vietnam.  In spite of this the odds for survival looked pretty good in 1912. 

The Value of Money and Almost-Useful Information

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 814   Blog Bookstore

I initially chose this pamphlet to be part of a larger series on terrific/unusual/bizarre cover designs--unfortunately its contents got in the way, a little.  The cover still borders safely on the unique, and so does most of its contents, except for the graphical analysis of the depreciation of worldwide currencies that appears on its back cover.  Here the information is actually pretty useful and unusual. It would've been more useful had the author included an end date for his comparisons--all we know is that he is looking at 1929 and the beginning of the Depression as a jump-off point, and we can assume that the end date is before the date of publication of the pamphlet (which actually isn't stated).  Still, the graph is almost very useful.  It is for this reason that Money and its Uses Winds Up in the "Blank and Empty Department" for its diligent but ultimately useless graphical display of data.

The Overworked Working Poor of 1914: Women and Children and What They Didn't Get Paid

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 760   Blog Bookstore

An income of $10,000 dollars a year, in the Depression year of 1936, was a huge, fabulous fortune, controlling a major buying power for food and cars and housing.  (A fine brick home for the solid middle class family of five would’ve cost well less than the 10K per year—which means that this 1936 income would correlate somewhat to a 300,000/year income in 2009 dollars so far as buying power goes.) Unfortunately the author of this pamphlet directed it at doctors who could supplement or insure their income by selling their patients the pamphlet’s products:  “Anabolic Food Products”, a quacky vitamin supplement that evidently had really little use except to expand the income. 

This reminded me of another pamphlet from a slightly earlier period on the over-worked working poor.  Report to the Louisiana State Commission to Study the Conditions of Working Women and Children… (published in 1914), chronicled the averages incomes more so than the conditions of their work—and the statistical package was simply not a pretty story.  Reading through the numbers hammered home how far away and mountainous $10,000 a year meant. 

That big bump in the bar graph for factory wages shows that the most frequent average weekly wage for women and children was about  $3.75, with about a quarter of all of those polled workers making less than that, and about half making 5.00 a week or so. Multiply those figures by 52 and they don’t come out to much—specifically, they don’t really approach the average income for a worker in the U.S. in 1914, which was about $650 a year.  It looks like only 10% or so of all of these workers met this standard of $12.50 per week.  And this was for factory workers—things get worse for most all other types of jobs—except for workers at a telephone exchange (and that wouldn’t last for very long).   

The conclusions the pamphlet reached are inescapable:  “we can arrive at but one conclusion, namely: that no matter what are the causes determining wages, the earnings of women in industry are exceedingly low in a great many cases, and scarcely enough for subsistence……the striking facts is that nearly three-fourths of all women in industry are between 18 to 35 years of age, meaning that they are spending the best years of their lives …at the lowest rate of wages…”

In 2009 women are still paid less than men--about 77-cents on the dollar less.  Generally speaking the U.S. now imports most of its child labor produced goods--out of sight, out of mind.

Triumphantly Unusual Images of the Eiffel Tower

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 732  Blog Bookstore

This image of the building of the foundation of the Eiffel Tower, which appeared in the Scientific American in 1888, appears both orderly and chaotic, a dizzy miasma of activity and a confusion of right angles.  (My six-year-old Tess says that it looks “worky”.)  Part of the issue is the fine quality of the jumble, with 90-degree angles everywhere, which confuses the eye.  Another part is the perspective, which is odd in places, and which takes the whole of it and makes the print into a near Escher-like experience of impossibility.  IT is this spatial confusion which makes this print so uncomfortable to me. For instance it seems that the observer’s point of view may be in several different positions, depending

on where you resolve to fix our eye: if you choose the worker’s shed in the upper left corner as a reference point, the height of you viewpoint will be different than if you used, say the first pointing man in the foreground as reference.  Also that pointing man sands next to a little rail track that seems to hoist itself into the air before disappearing.  There’s much else, but these examples will do for present.

These other images are the first nail & Eiffel Tower images I've ever seen.  The explanation is simple enough, though I think I'd much rather not know. 

This image and data is from the generally useful data and interesting if not useless info Scientific American Reference Book. A Manual for the Office, Household and Shop, by Albert A. Hopkins, and published in 1903. It gloriously depicts the annual American finish nail production in terms of Eiffel Towers:  there were evidently 10-million 100-pound kegs of these nails made in 1902; if they were made into one big nail, it would be this one--52' in diameter and 1000 feet tall.  I guess another useful visual bit would be the representation of the number of new houses built/kegs of nails, which would make this image a little more meaningful; though, perhaps, we may not be going for meaning, here, necessarily.

 

 

Fossils of Almost No Value? Statistics, Prisons, and Meaninglessness

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 622   Blog Bookstore

The fossil record is generally one of the richest and most compelling histories of the development of life on earth, a far-reaching, cumulative record of extraordinary importance.  There are the other, occasional, fossils that stand only by themselves, and seem to have almost no use in the current time, living almost entirely within themselves. The following statics seem to fall into that category—they seem to be only a tombstone for an era, providing nothing except to tell the story of what happened, existing only for that purpose, with no compelling utilization for anything outside understand a small piece of life for the year the stats were gathered. 

The cause for this sentiment was found in a government publication called Expense of Convicts of the United States  (Letter from the Comptroller of the Treasury…), 1 February 1859).  The following comes in the first paragraph:

“I….report that 50 cents per months is allowed for rent of prison for each prisoner in all the States and Territories uniformly.”

What this means is that the U.S. Treasury would pay 50 cents to the state for keeping a federal prisoner.  That is 50 cents per month, or about 1.7 cents per day. And that was also for rent of the cell, exclusive of all else, each state furnishing the government with the added cost, separately.

Evidently the only state in the country that prescribed an exact amount for keeping a federal prisoner in a state institution was Maryland, “which received 30 cents per day for all expenses, rent, board, medical attendance, clothing, bedding, fuel, and etc” (italics in the original).  The rest of the states and territories had diverging and different expenses, from the southern district of New York at 25 cents a day for board, and ranging up to about 50 cents per day in  Michigan. Vermont charged an extra 60 dollars a year, in addition to the 6 bucks that they would get for the rent of a Vermont cell, to keep a prisoner—all expenses included—for one year, or about 18 cents per day, total. 

Unfortunately I don’t have the stats of how many federal prisoner there were in 1859, so I don’t know how much of a percentage of the budget was occupied by prison expenses.  But what I do know is that even with tossing around the CPI with multiplier effects and so on the figures translate in no way to keeping a person in prison today.   The cost of housing someone in prison per year is around $35,000 a year, or $100 or so a day.  Adjusting the 1860 dollar via CPI for 2009 makes that dollar worth about 25 dollars today, which would be a doubling and a doubling again of keeping someone in prison. 

I’m not so sure that those figures tell us much about what we pay, today. 

Next, I was having a breeze through The Prison System of the United States by S.J. Barrows (Commissioner of Prisons for the U.S.) which was published in Washington  in 1900.  One particularly interesting section was the publication’s solitary statistical table, “Appendix A”, which detailed the crimes of the 625 men incarcerated in the state of Michigan  in 1900.  Well over half of all those in prison were there for larceny and burglary, while about 12% were in the big house for violent crimes.  (Evidently 95% of this number were literate and 70% could “cipher” (that is, produce basic arithmetical skills)).  The total crime list (such as it was) includes the following:

Capital crimes (murder in the first and second degree) and manslaughter, along with murderous assault comprised about 1% of the total prison population.  Other violent crimes included assault with intent to do great bodily harm, rape, attempted rape, rape and assault composed another 3%. Further assaults were classified under (a) with intent to do great harm;  and then as assault on a female under 14 years; and on a female under 16 years  There were also the sexual assaults:  taking indecent liberties with female; with male child;  unlawful and carnal knowledge of a young child;   inducing female to enter house of ill fame.  These last two categories included about 5% of the prisoners.  Set aside form these were the crimes of adultery, abduction, incest and sodomy, which included another 3%.  So it seems that the violent offenders in prison in  Michigan  in 1900 totaled out at 12% or so. 

Burglary and larceny were the  largest categories, being subdivided into (a) burglary accompanied by actual assault; (b) larceny; (c) larceny from a dwelling;  (d) larceny from a shop in daytime; (e) attempting larceny from the person; (f) entering a church in daytime to steal; (g) breaking and entering a store in daytime;   (h) breaking and entering a store in nighttime;(I)  breaking and entering a dwelling in daytime; (j)  breaking and entering a dwelling;  (k) breaking and entering a railroad car.

Then there were a few largely vacant offenses:  Resisting an officer; Uttering and publishing a forged note, breaking out of prison, perjury, arson, false pretense, and malicious destruction of personal property, all combing for less than 2% of the jailed population.

The vast majority of prisoners in Michigan were imprisoned for non-violent crimes.  The federal fathers, in the meantime, recognized that people in prison shouldn’t be idle while paying their debts to society, and should fill their time with work that would occupy the prisoner and bring some income into the prison system:

“The moment we apply to the convict a different system of economics because he is in prison we go astray. When we subject to analysis the plans proposed for abolishing the competition of convict labor we find them based on false principles or expecting results not to be realized. The wiser way for the peace of society and the interest of the State is to place prison industries on the same ground as free industries, and defend that. It is also said in opposition to the contract system that contractors do not pay as much for the labor of convicts as free laborers command.”

In 2005 the federal offenses for which people are incarcerated include: Drug Offenses 59.6%; Robbery 9.8%;  Property Offenses 5.5%;  Extortion, Fraud, Bribery 6.8% ; Violent Offenses 2.7% ; Firearms, Explosives, Arson 8.6% ; White Collar 1.0%; Immigration 2.8%;  Courts or Corrections 0.8%;  National Security 0.1%;  Continuing Criminal Enterprise 0.8%;  Miscellaneous 1.5% .  54% of prisoner in state custody for the same time were incarcerated for violent crimes, with drug offenses coming in at 20% and property crimes at 19%.  The racial breakdown of prisoners in the U.S. is another tragedy: of the prison population in toto of 2.3 million in 2008 there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local jails, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males—that means that the black incarceration rate was double and then double and then half-doubled again that of whites.  What this also means is that there were more blacks in jail cells than in college dorm rooms in 2008.

I'm not sure that any amount of creative statistical mathemartistry could bring these figures to life for some sort of practical application in 2009, the present situation in the prisons being so immense and pervasive.  Numbers and assorted data from the past usually have the capacity to help us see where we are today; as I said earlier, I think that these fossils are simply that:  dead.

 

The Anatomy of Comparison Department: HMS Ships Firing On London, 1909

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 596    Blog Bookstore

HMS Ships Firing On  London, 1909, Old vs. New  Comparing Shipboard Firepower:  a Compelling Comparative Graphic Display from the Illustrated London News for 24 July 1909

Without looking at the sub-title and explanation of this of this print (“Firing from Thames Mouth to the Edge of Greater London”) its purpose might be a fair mystery, given the ships and the targets and all. The two large ships at bottom are a Dreadnaught Class battleship and a (smaller) King Edward Class ship, and, yes, they are firing towards London—but they are doing so to illustrate a point on modern weaponry and the vast, new superiorities of British advances in the death/protection arts.

In June 1667 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War the British were set upon by an running attack by the Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, who had advanced as far up and into the coast as the mouth of the Thames.  The Dutch advance up the Thames was repulsed, though their secondary targets (so to speak) at Gravesend
and the River Medway proved a scorching defeat for the British, and propelled the rocky war to a quick peace favorable to the Dutch. 

This image shows what could’ve been the results of that engagement at Gravesend had the Dutch fleet been outfitted with the HMS’ new 12-inch guns—de Ruyter would’ve been able to reach the outskirts of London from that position, and could’ve b=done so from a distance of 25 miles or so. Of course the artist and editor aren’t really suggesting a “what if” scenario to the course of events of the Second Dutch War—they were merely creating a very compelling, highly illustrative comparison from old to new firepower, and to perhaps quite some fears about the strength of the Navy as the unstable and rickety international system limped its way into WWI, just five years in the future. 

An Outline Map of a Great Complexity: the ENIAC, 1948

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 575

"The ENIAC exists independent of its history"--Brainerd and Sharpless

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, b. 1943-45) was, basically, the world’s first operational, high-speed digital computer, and the father of the computer industry.  What we see to the left  is the floor plan for the computer-with-no-monitor—I know to most people working today with a computer that the idea of a “floor plan” for anything that is not in a dark place at NSA is not easily conceivable.  The 30-ton, 18,000 tube, 125 KHz ENIAC’s space was about 1800 square feet, where it was able to add about 5000 numbers/second, which was vastly faster than anything else in existence. It operated with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 5 million hand-soldered joints and 6,000 manual switches. It was a magnificent achievement.

There are many sites dedicated to the history of the ENIAC—all I want to do here is surface this detailed floor plan of the computer, which seems not to be online.  The diagram comes from an article by J.K. Brainerd and T.K. Sharpless (Sharp brain!), “The ENIAC”, from the February 1948 issue of Electrical Engineering, which defines the machine and its components in full.  The abstract states: “The ENIAC is the only electronic large-scale general-purpose digital computing device now in operation.  Its speed of operation compares favorably with other electric and mechanical computers.  Developed under wartime pressures, it has been of value not only in producing results but in pointing the way toward improvements for future designs.”  Indeed.  The authors, both of whom worked on the construction of the machine from 1943 onwards, describe it in the following ten points:

“1. Large-scale 2.General purpose 3. Digital 4. Electronic  5.  Uses 10-digit numbers   6. Uses decimal system   7. High speed   8. Synchronous operation    9. Some parallel operations possible 10. Complete flexibility within limits of programming capacity” (page 170).

The authors make the following (qualified) understatement: “electrical engineers in the United States
have had a major interest in development of large-scale computing devices” mentioning the major players as MIT, Moore School (U PA), GE, Bell Telephone, Harvard and the spelled-out “International Business Machine corporation”.  Within ten years of the end of WWII the second generation of computer was nearly functional, and (as can be seen in the wonderful computer tree below) there were dozens of new machines in operation. By 1960, the explosion was getting ready  with the advent of microminiaturization. 

The computers in operation from 1938 to 1948 include the following alphabetical hodgepodge: Z1 Z2 Z3 Z4, ABC, Bell Model II, S1, Mark I, Mark II, Elliot 152, ARC, Mark II, SSEM, and the more poetic Colossus and Demon. (Zuse Z1 1938;  Atanasoff ABC 1939;  Zuse Z2 1939;  Bell Labs Complex Calculator aka Model I1940;  Zuse Z3 1941;  Zuse S1 1942; Bell Labs Model II; 1943 Bletchley Colossus Mark I 1943; Zuse S2 1943; Bletchley Colossus Mark II 1944; Harvard Mark I 1944; Zuse Z4 1944; Bell Labs Model IV  1945;  Bell Labs Computer Model V  1947;  Elliott 152 1947; Elliott 153 1947;  Moore School ENIAC 1947;  Birkbeck ARC 1948; Harvard Mark II 1948; Manchester University SSEM 1948;  NSA DEMON 1948.)

Lethal Teeth & Causes of Death in London; Milk Leg, Breakbone Fever and Eel Thing. The Death List for 1665

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 464

 Coming on the heels of the only post that I’ve made on teeth is this happy element, a brief mention of lethal teeth in London in 1665. The listing of the death and its introduction (if not the actual dead themselves) comes in the form of a publication called The London Bills of Mortality, which was begun (so it seems) in 1538.  As an instrument of society the Bills were more for legal ramifications than for compiling medical information.  The Bill was a necessary element for legal burial and the transfer of an estate, composed to make sure (or for extent possible at this time) that death had indeed occurred and that the legal course could be enacted to disassemble the accumulated physical life of the decedent.  The weekly reporting and compilations must’ve been wearying, and I imagine that this was not the most auspicious or desirable job to have, wringing in the newly dead.  Death’s accounting procedure grew more systematized as time wore on, getting a more formal approach as early as 1603.  And it was not in every English parish that the cause of death was recorded, and the recorders were hardly a army of medical experts—causes of death were sometimes accurate, sometimes not, sometimes whimsical and sometimes all or none of the above.

The list below attests to a somewhat poetical bent in the naming of lethal afflictions; of course most meant something immediate and understandle to the reader in 1665, though today many of the names seem quire airy and adventurous, hardly things to actual die of.  The list comes from the groundbreaking work of London haberdasher and man of semi-science, John Graunt, who in 1662 published Natural and Political Observations … on the Bills of Mortality (1662):  it was a tremendously important work and a foundation stone in statistical applications in health and epidemiology, as Graunt tried to organize and interpret the collected data. 

Again, my attraction to this all stems from yesterday’s post on the question of the existence of teeth in the Renaissance—“teeth” is listed as a cause of death in 39 of these cases, the 6^th leading cause of death among the 39 causes listed.  I guess death might’ve been caused by a systemic infection caused by a rotten tooth ; or  perhaps the tabulator observed a dead body, saw a mouthful of bad teeth and nothing else obviously wrong with the body, and thus dubbed the cause of death as the most heinous looking thing that could be found.

 

Abortive Aged Ague Apoplexy Asthma Bloody Flux Cancer Childbed Chrisoms [1] Colick Consumption Convulsion Dropsie Evil Fever French-Pox Gangrene Gout Griping in the Guts Headmouldshot [2]

3 52 12 1 2 1 4 4 2 2 78 112 26 1 76 2 1 1 14 2

Jaundies Imposthume [3] Mortification Plurisie Rash Rheumatism Rickets Rising of the Lights [4] Rupture Small-Pox Stilborn Stone Stoppage in the Stomach Suddenly Teeth Thrush Tissick [5] Twisting of the Guts Ulcers

1 2 7 2 1 1 1 1 1 54 9 2 2 1 39 1 5 6 1

A few of the obscure terms explained:

Ague:  deep fever
Body Flux: sepsis? 
Childbed:  a baby or mother who dies during childbirth
Crisoms:  refers to a white baptisimal robe worn by an infant, meaning that this was a very young baby born    before baptism occurred.
Dropsie:  lethal inflammation or edema
French-pox:  syphilis (called “French” because of a decimating outbreak of teh disease in the French army.  That, or the prescribed treatment, which was the ingestion of mercury. 
Headmouldshot: edema of the brain
Imposthume: Abcesses or cysts
Rising of the Lights:  inflammation of the lungs or general lung problesms
Thrush—an infection of the mouth (especially in babies).
Tissixk:  tuberculosis

According to the website Magic-Nation "other causes of death included affrighted, bladder in the throat, breakbone fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer's itch, hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker's disease, St. Anthony's fire, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck". Most of these I have little  insight on, and even though they caused someone’s death, they still have a lilting, lyrical quality about them.  I particularly like and am curious about “eel thing”, “milk leg”, and “Stuffing”