JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
In case you’ve wondered how much four barrels of gin cost in the U.S. in 1836 I have provided the following list of What Stuff Cost, found tucked away in a book-keeping section of a very well used pocket-sized copy of Roswell C. Smith’s Practical and Mental Arithmetic on a New Plan..., which was published in Hartford in 1836. The answer to the gin question is $75, and if a barrel meant 42 gallons back then as it does now then the gin would cost about 60 cents a gallon. That of course sounds like a tiny price, but compared to what? That 60 cents would be about two-thirds of a day’s wages for the average non-farm white male worker (actually between 50 cents and $1.00), while girl/women textile workers in Lowell Mass worked for about $3-4 per six day week. So if you considered working for most of the day in exchange for a bottle of (average, nothing special) gin, then it would seem a little on the expensive side. Or consider the prices of stuff as expensive or not based on a yearly salary of $300 or so and getting by on about a dollar a day. Naturally many standard cost of living bits are not present in 1836, but still there’s not a lot of wiggle room on a salary like that.
What is also a very attractive insight was that these items were considered to be at least more-or-less obvious object to have in a store or in trade, which might say a lot about what sorts of things were available for purchase in general at that time.
In any event, the list (which is tiny in real life, about 3.5×3″ total) which for some reason did not make use of the decimal point:
