Category: Information, Quantitative Display of

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: 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2646

Displayed below is one of the many dozens of graphs/charts/maps created with the data collected for the 1890 and tabulated by William Hollerith’s glorious machines. It was the first use of the machines for the U.S. census and they offered a far-reaching and increased ability to tabulate and organize the data.  The 1880 census had cost about $6 million and took 9 years to tabulate; the 1890 census using the Hollerith machines cost $10 million and took seven years.  The main focus of many in government was the cost differential—not the incredible amounts of new controllable information.  The rent of the Hollerith machines was only $750,000 for the conduct of the entire census, so the differential must’ve been in the extra utility costs (for electricity, for example, which was used for the first time to run the tabulators) and for the small army of statisticians and data entry people.  Be that as it may, the government was not amused, particularly when Hollerith figured that he had actually saved the government $5 million.    The two parties left each other grumbling, though the roar of the trickle down from the Hollerith success drowned it out.  The tabulating system was quickly exported, and large private concerns in the U.S. saw a savior in the system that would soon rescue them from the sea of paper in which they were beginning to drown.   The Hollerith company did very, very well for itself, and soon merged with three other companies (in 1911) to ease the burden of success.  The resulting company was called the Computing-Tabulating-Research Company (CTR), which after a short while became the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM).  

The beautiful circle appears on page one and occupies the full 20-inch tall sheet.  This could have been more complex, but as it stands it is a very fine piece of the artfully-enhanced representation of data.  (As a pie chart the image isn’t very old, though the genre is a little uncommon in the 19th century.  Pie charts appear at least as early as  William Playfair’s Statistical Breviary in 1801 and then probably more famously in the work of Charles Minard and Florence Nightengale in the 1850’s–this work to me seems cleaner and brighter, and definitely “modern”.)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here’s another found bit whilst looking for an article in the 1920 Scientific American by Robert Goddard–no Goddard though I did find this fine “geologic clock” in the January 10 issue for that year.  As you can see if you look a little closely, the Quaternary is about the last 10 minutes of the 24-hour clock of existence on Earth, with the last 6000 years occupying the last 12 seconds.  In any event,it is an artistic and informative representation of data, created nearly 100 years ago.  (It would be interesting to know when the first graphical representation of geologic time as a clock face appeared–offhand, I do not have that answer.)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Quantitative Display of Information series

Continuing a read of the January-June 1927 volume of Popular Mechanics I found this lovely little data visualization–it has a certain irresistible quality to it, perhaps owing to its symmetry. In any event, I just wanted to post it here, before I closed the book and lost the image to memory:

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I’ve always liked these timelines as they graphically display the lifespans of scientists/mathematicians/etc against one another, making it a little easier to see a selected period and who was active within it.  

The work is by Thomas Young (1773-1829), a polymath remembered mostly for his work in optics and his very early translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is found in his classic book A course of lectures on natural philosophy and the mechanical arts, published 1807.

Full text: https://archive.org/details/lecturescourseof02younrich