JF Ptak Science Books Post 2733
The first thing that a reader in the U.S. will probably notice in this graphic is that there is no "United States" entry--that is because the U.S. had only entered the war seven weeks before this image was made after having been steadfastly neutral for the war's first 2.5 years. That said the daily cost of war was made accessible and understandable to the readership of the Scientific American by putting costs in terms of the construction of the then-tallest building in the world, the Woolworth Building (the world record holder for height from 1911-1930).
Overall, for the eight major combatants, the total daily cost of the war was the equivalent of the cost for building eight Woolworth Buildings, every day. At the end of the war that would have been a stack of Woolworth Buildings that was 30 x 30 Woolworths square and 100 Woolworths tall.
And just for perspective, the daily cost for Great Britain was 25 million pounds in 1917, which using the B of E calculator for inflation, would be about 1.2 billion pounds today (per day). This is roughly in league wit the cost of U.S. involvement in the 2003 Iraq war at about 700 million dollars a day (since 2003).
It is difficult to "translate" what $61 billion in 1917 is related to in 2017 dollars. The Bureau of Labor statistics says it is something on the order of $1.3 trillion, so it must be in there, within or so of an order of magnitude. And now it looks like the "total" cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will probably be $10 trillion when all is said and done. That would be equal to the cost of about 2,000 2 World Trade Centers. Given that the costs for WWI still had another year and a half to go, they may have accumulated costs doubling up on the 900+ Woolworth Buildings to 1,800 or 2,000--anyway something pretty similar to 2 World Trade Center measurements, which is pretty odd.
There are many ways of looking at this data, though the Scientific American wanted to approach the expenditure in terms of gigantic piles of waste, given that people are pouring money from wheel barrows into a hole.
- See also an earlier post here on data visualization and the measuring of things with the Woolworth Building: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/06/data-vizualization-automobiles.html
[Source: Scientific American, May 26, 1917.]