JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 1019
Yesterday while trying to entertain our six-year-old ,
sitting in a small waiting room to an office with nothing to do, I estimated
the number of holes there were in the boring acoustic ceiling tiles. A short
distraction later I realized that if each one of those holes was a dollar bill,
that the national deficit would require those titles to be laid out over an
area roughly the size of D.C. and Alexandria
(about a hundred square miles). That
sort of brought some perspective to what trillions of dollars might mean, but not
really—it was still too weird and vast a number.
I had the same sort of feeling seeing this picture essay
(yesterday as well) on soldiers and war.
The photos appeared in the July
1 1920 issue of the Illustrated London News and spoke of the new
management of manufacturing British war medals.
The vastness of the casualties of that war are well known, but somehow
this story seemed to put the big numbers into a more understandable
perspective.
I learned that there were 300 men who worked full-time on
producing these medals, making about 67,000 a week--in 1920, two years after
the end of the war. Not only that, since
the Royal Mint and the Royal Ordnance Factory would be working jointly on the
project, the Army Council expected production to increase to 120,000 medals a
week. That’s six million medals a
year.
It seems extraordinary that even after the fighting that
production levels would need to be so high.
But there were millions who fought, and so these 300 workers would still
have to work for several more years to produce enough medals to honor those who
fought in WWI.
I read somewhere—a citation now long lost—that in America every Purple
Heart that has been given out since 1945 was struck in that same year. This mountain was made in preparation for the
hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were expected to be made casualties in
the Allied assault on the Japanese homeland in 1945/6—a figure that would come
close to half of the total number of 1.6 million Purple Hearts that have been
awarded since 1932
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