Category: Change in the past

Dangers in crossing the Atlantic Ocean during the 1700s.

The Wagram (1810) – a first-rate 118-gun ship of the line of the French Navy, of the Ocean type. Illustration of the 19th century. Image couresy of Adobe Stock.

In addition to the agonizingly long time it took to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the time of sail, the journey carried risk of sickness, especially from scurvy caused by the lack of fresh vegetables.

Edward Lengel provides an illustration in his book, The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution.

On May 2, 1780, the first wave of French troops left France, arriving in Newport Harbor on July 11, 1780. The trip took 70 days.

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Prices of slaves on the eastern shore of Maryland before the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman Memorial Statue in Harlem, New York. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Watched the uplifting and depressing movie Harriet last night. Second time I’ve seen it. Fabulous tale about the efforts of Harriet Tubman in liberating herself from slavery, then liberating most of her family, eventually freeing about 70 people from slavery.

(Cross post from Ancient Finances.)

After watching the movie again, wanted to pull together a recap of the posts discussing slavery on my other blog. Most of this discussion is based on Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero, by Kate Clifford Larson, which is the first adult biography of Harriet Tubman published since 1943.

A thin sliver of highlights from the book, primarily about the pricing of slaves:

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Film clips of Apollo 11 mission to the moon. 50th anniversary is today.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin by Neil Armstrong, Sea of Tranquility, Moon, 1969 by trialsanderrors is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Behind the Black has a series of posts linking to video of the astounding first trip to the moon. Today, July 20, 1969, marks 50 years since humans set foot on the  moon. What an incredible accomplishment.

Some fun links to fun video:

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Cost and time to cross the Atlantic has dropped by more than 90% in the last 500 years.

Columbus’ Ships. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Transatlantic travel time has dropped radically in the last 500 years.  Time to transit the Atlantic has dropped about 99% and cost has dropped about 95% by my calculations.

Let’s look at several data points for cost and time, then calculate one indicator of improved quality of life.

Human Progress provides fun data points on August 2, 2018 in their post, A Reminder of How Far Transatlantic Travel Has Come.

Update: An earlier post on November 27, 2015 discussed Time to cross the Atlantic – 500 year history.

Update: Added in travel time of Concorde at end of the post.

Columbus’ first trip

The 1492 trip by Christopher Columbus took two years of lobbying before the king and queen of Spain approved 2 million Spanish maravedis to fund the trip. A professor has calculated that would be comparable to about US$1,000,000 today.

The cost seems low to me. I’ll look at that more later.

Crew size was 87 according to this article. The accountant in me is driven to calculate the cost per crewman.  That would give an average cost of $11,494. I’ll round that to $11,500 and ignore any adjustment for several crew members who died on the trip.

His trip took two months, nine days, which I calculate at 70 days (30+31+9).

Mayflower

Mayflower. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

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Abundance of food today compared with routine scarcity of food earlier than 150 years ago.

Abundance of refrigerated fresh meet at your conveniently available grocery store. Not an option for anyone on the planet 200 years ago, to say nothing of the 10,000 years prior. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Johan Norberg describes the tremendous progress in the last several hundred years in so many areas, such as life expectancy, health, sanitation, liberty, education, and equality in his book Progress: 10 Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Here are a few more tidbits I found fascinating.

Consider the scarcity of food in the past and the drop in cost to feed a family in the last 150 years.

Food

Look at just a few of the statistics on availability of food:

Continue reading “Abundance of food today compared with routine scarcity of food earlier than 150 years ago.”

Most of the improvement in life expectancy in the last 10,000 years has taken place in the last 100 years.

Johan Norberg describes the tremendous progress in the last several hundred years in so many areas: life expectancy, health, sanitation, liberty, education, and equality. He discusses these wonderfully delightful trends in his book Progress: 10 Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. I will highlight merely a few of the many things I found fascinating in the book.

Life expectancy

Book provides the following estimates of life expectancy, which I graph above:

Continue reading “Most of the improvement in life expectancy in the last 10,000 years has taken place in the last 100 years.”

Gross World Product over last 27,000 years

Gross World Product, according to Wikipedia is

the combined gross national product of all the countries in the world. Because imports and exports balance exactly when considering the whole world, this also equals the total global gross domestic product (GDP).

I got curious about the world-wide GDP after thinking about two previous posts:

What would happen if you multiplied the drastic increase in  population with the radical increase in per capita income? I made a feeble effort to multiple the two data sets and quickly realized that wouldn’t work. Poked around a bit on the ol’ internet thingie and found the answer at Wikipedia – gross world product is what I was looking for.

27,000 year time horizon – Check out the graph at top of this post for the estimated gross world product on a very long time horizon, specifically from estimates back in 25,000 B.C. through 2014 A.D.

Copyright notice:  Graphs in this post are based on data in an article titled “Gross world product” by Wikipedia, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.  As a result the following tables which are derived from this information are licensed for use by anyone under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Any use of these graphs must in turn be distributed under the same license.

I will show the raw data at the end of this post.

With that 27,000 year time horizon, there is a radical turn in the 1900s, at which point the graph appears to goes from horizontal to straight up vertical.

That is too long of a time horizon to understand, so I broke it out into smaller blocks.

Last 2,000 years – To remove the many earlier millenniums of slow growth, time horizon was revised to 1 AD through now. Notice there is still a radical change in the 1900s. With the dramatic changes in the last 200 years, the line from earlier looks like it is flat, but it isn’t.

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Growth in world population

Our World in Data, the web site of Max Roser, visualizes data in amazing ways. Check out this graph of world population:

“World Population over the last 12,000 years and UN projection until 2100” by Our World in Data is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.  The graphs which follow are derived from this information and are licensed for use by others under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Very cool. The dramatic expansion in the number of people is amazing.

The graph includes projections through 2100. I pulled out the projections and developed the following graph:

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Increase of income per person over last 200 years

Here is an approximation of annual per capita GDP from 1 AD through 1913:

I’ve long been amazed at the radical growth in per capita wealth over the last 200 years. That means since the Industrial Revolution.

Living in dirt-eating poverty as the normal way of life for essentially every person on the planet changed about 200 years ago, give or take.

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Radical drop in cost of lighting as indicator of how much better our lives are today

From really expensive candles to cheap electricity for brighter light bulbs. What luxury we now have!  “Trip the Lights Fantastic” by Anne Worner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

One measure of how radically life has improved over the centuries is how much nighttime illumination can be purchased from a certain amount of labor.

For example, George Washington calculated that it cost him £5 a year to provide himself five hours of reading light every evening. That is the equivalent of about $1,000 today.

Imagine spending $83 a month to light only one lamp in your entire house.

We are amazingly rich today.

This insight provided by Human Progress on 2/15/17:  How the cost of light has fallen by a factor of 500,000.

Here are some reference points provided by the article:

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Rapid economic growth of the American colonies before the revolution.

“3D Growth Projections” by ccPixs.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0:  www.ccPixs.com

Take a look at how rapidly the colonies developed over the many years in advance of the successful American revolution. Comments are from An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steel Gordon.

One part that is astounding to me is certain geographies were very conducive to a certain type of crop. That is why tobacco, or corn, or cotton, or fishing for cod thrived in certain areas.

Consider: export of tobacco from Virginia to England:

  • 1618 – 20,000#
  • 1622 – 60,000#
  • 1627 – 500,000 #
  • 1629 – 1,500,000#
  • 1638 – 3,000,000#

let’s look at the annual increase and compound rate of growth:

Continue reading “Rapid economic growth of the American colonies before the revolution.”

Why has there been such astounding economic success in the United States?

How to illustrate the super-abundance produced in the U.S.? Perhaps this view of a corn field, knowing there are huge fields of corn for a hundred miles in every direction. “An Iowa Summer Carpet” by cwwycoff1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Why these is so much economic output in the U.S. is a valuable question because once you can explain why the U.S. has seen such powerful growth for such a long time, there is a possibility, remote though it may be, for others to have the same prosperity.

Each of us has to search for the answer by yourself. I suggest you seriously consider the first chapter of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steel Gordon if you want to get your arms around the answer.

It is not just that the US is a large country that goes from coast to coast.

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Technology changes overtake the iconic Boeing 747

“Boeing 747” by allenthepostman is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

United will make a big deal of its final flight of a 747 on November 7 with retro uniforms for flight attendants, a stylized ‘70s menu, and entertainment fitting the era.  Forbes reports on  9/19/17:  The Boeing 747 Came In With a Bang And Now It Will Go Out With One.

Delta’s final international flight of a 747 was on September 7. Their final two domestic flights of the 747 were for evacuation of people in advance of Hurricane Irma.

Article describes the launch of the 747:

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Drop in cross-country travel time using a DC-3

Another post has a comment on how much the DC-3 shrank travel time to cross the country. Here is a description of how much that beautiful bird cut the time:

7/24- Popular Mechanics – Why the First True Spaceliner Will Change Everything – The beautiful DC-3 reduced the time for coast-to-coast travel.

Before the DC-3, it took 25 hours and 15 stops for fuel and repairs to cross the country. With the DC-3, there were only 3 stops for fuel.

(A video of DC-3s in a 2013 flyby follows, if you are interested.)

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