Those of you in the U.S. have to remember that we’re changing to daylight savings time this weekend. I don’t know why, but it takes me about a week to adjust completely each time we make this change, but especially in the spring when I’m already tired and then have to lose a precious hour of sleep!
When I got to thinking about “changing times” I thought of something I sent to the ivman group back in 2000 and have received every year since then, purporting that it was for whatever year that was 100 years earlier, most recently several times in 2007 for the year 1907. You’ll see from the info about the original source that it was indeed written about life in the year 1900.
It is quite interesting to see how people lived at that time. They would be totally shocked at what our lives are like now and would probably understand little of what we take for granted!
100 Years Ago … It May Be Hard to Believe (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….”
1. The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
2. Only 4 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
3. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
4. A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
5. There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads.
6. The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
7. 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.
8. The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower, which at that time was only 11 years old.
9. The average wage in the U.S. was twenty-two cents an hour. The average U.S. 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.
10. More than 95 percent of all births in the United States took place at home.
11. Ninety percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as “substandard.”
12. Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen. Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound.
13. Most women washed their hair only once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
14. Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants.
15. The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were
- Pneumonia and influenza
- Tuberculosis
- Diarrhea
- Heart disease
- Stroke.
16. The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn’t been admitted to the Union yet.
17. 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.
18. The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.
19. Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn’t been discovered yet. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned drinks, and iced tea hadn’t been invented.
20. There was no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.
21. One in ten U.S. adults couldn’t read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
22. 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 (hence the name).
23. 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.
24. Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic.
25. There were about 230 reported murders in the U.S. annually.
***
This is Rob again… I wonder how quaint people will think we were when they read about our lives in a hundred years?
quotation…
“Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” — Richard Bach
=^..^= =^..^=
Rob Loach in Greenville SC
The bathtub was invented in 1850. The telephone was invented in 1875. This might not seem like much, but if you had lived back then, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without being bothered by the phone!
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