1905 Vs 2005 Interesting

[Hunter]

1905 Interesting...

The year is 1905..One hundred years ago. What a difference a century makes! Here are some of the US statistics for 1905:

Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States. He was the youngest

President in U.S. History to that time.

The Panama Canal had not yet been completed.

The average life expectancy in the US. Was 47 years.

Only 14 percent of the homes in the US had a bathtub and most people bathed no more than once per week usually on Saturday night.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.

There were only 8,700 cars in the US, and only 212 miles of paved roads.

A first class railway ticket from New Orleans to St. Louis cost $12.50.

Sleeper accomodations cost $14.50.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated

than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the

21st most populous state in the Union.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.

The average wage in the US was 22 cents an hour. The average US worker

made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist

$2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a

mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births in the US took place at home.

There was no television, no commercial radio and only 5% of U.S. homes had

indoor plumbing, running water or electric lights.

Heavier than air flight was less than two years old.

The American Civil War had been over only 40 years.

There were still a number of officers and senior NCOs serving in the

United States Military who had seen at least some service in the American

Civil War.Over half had seen service in the Indian Wars.

Ninety percent of all US physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard.

Sugar cost four cents a pound.

Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

A fifty pound bag of flour cost $7.50

Gasoline and kerosene were .05 per gallon.

A bottle of beer cost .05 per bottle.

Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason.

The five leading causes of death in the US were:

1. Pneumonia and Influenza

2. Tuberculosis

3. Diarrhea

4. Heart disease

5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.

The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was 30.

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented.

There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Two of 10 US adults couldn't read or write.

Only 6 percent of all Ame ricans had graduated high school.

Less than 50% of all Americans were Marginally literate.

A Cold "New Army" .38 caliber revolver cost $24.50. There were no regulations. It was legal, in most places, to go armed in public.

Women did not yet have the right to vote.

Marijuana, heroin, laudinum 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 bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."

Legal whiskey cost $2.00 per gallon.

Eighteen percent of households in the US had at least one full-time servant or domestic .

There were only about 230 reported murders in the entire US...

A first class letter took three days to travel from Houston to Dallas by train, and I just forwarded this from someone else to all of you without re-typing it myself, and sent it to all of you in a matter of seconds!

Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years ... if you dare.

[tomv]

Fascinating...Kind of puts things in perspective doesn't it?. Sometimes that's whats needed as we go about our lives, complaining about things, wondering why things happen the way they do.

I know that everything is supposed to be accelerating, but surely the next 100 years couldn't transform our lives more than the previous 100...or could they? Will we sprout wings and be flying everywhere, reading minds, living to be 200, working only if we choose, living on other planets? Will there be peace in the Middle East?

[Parrothead]

Really neat Hunter! Thanks for posting!!

[Montrose1100]

Diarreah?

lmao....

[BayouCityGirl]

NOT get into Canada for ANY reason! OMG!! That is a bit harsh!!

[ssullivan]

That list is very interesting. Just for a little twist - try and think about how things were in 1995 and 1985 (some of you could go back a few more decades). It's amazing how much has changed during most of our lifetimes. How many of you in spring 1995 had an e-mail address? How many had true Internet access, and I mean not just proprietary online access from a closed network like Prodigy, AOL, or Compuserve? And none of us had DVD players - VHS was still the way we wented movies, as well as recorded TV shows at home (no DVD-R or DVRs back then!). And I bet most of us still didn't have a cell phone in 1995.

Go back 20 years and many people still didn't have a VCR, most didn't have access to a personal computer, and fax machines were really only used by the very large corporations.

I think sometimes we forget that the technological innovations we all swear we couldn't live without today weren't around when many of us were kids, teenagers, and even young adults.

[Montrose1100]

In 1995 I had a Pager

[Trophy Property]

1905 Interesting...

Only 14 percent of the homes in the US had a bathtub and most people bathed no more than once per week usually on Saturday night.

Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years ... if you dare.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My Fiance gets mad at me if I skip a day of showering. Once a week would be pretty bad. Especially living in a unair conditioned Houston Texas.

[Trophy Property]

Just Ten years ago I was just learning how to use the internet. AOL was the bomb and DVD's were still a new medium. Imagine where we will be in another 100 year. It is fun to think about. Hopefully I will be alive and kicking at 133.

[Trophy Property]

I graduated college in 1994. I never once signed onto the internet during college. I did not have PC in college, but instead used a Typewriter or a word processing maching. All my papers and reports had to be researched using card catalogues (that were by this time at least automated a tad bit). I did not know what Excel or Power Point was. I did use Word when at the computer lab.

Fast forward to 2000 when I started Graduate school. All the classrooms were wired for easy access by the professors. Microsoft Office was a neccesity and all my work was completed using a computer. I could reasearch and write an entire project withouth leaving my bedroom (thanks to the internet).

When I took computer science in High School in 1989 I learned on an Apple IIe. Our final project was a graphics program. We used VLine and HLine programming to make objects on the screen. This same HS is now completely wired via a private network and the entire curriculum is taught via this network. Each student has their own notebook computer.

It is truly amazing how fast all this technology came about.

[Trophy Property]

What highschool is this? I've seen specials on tv about schools with carts that look like cafateria food tray carts that can house 30-40 laptops with a wifi router on top of the cart. They are then issued to the class like a projector or tv/vcr setup used to be checked out from the library.

Is this something similar to what your school has now?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It is a private HS in Bellaire (Episcopal HS). What you are talking about is a little different. at EHS Each student gets a laptop for his/her own personal use. It is part of the tuition payment (which is extremely HIGH). All the cirriculum is managed through the network. I do not really know much more than that. I heard from some of the teachers that is truly remarkable.

[ssullivan]

My college went through a big technical revolution in the four years I was there. In the fall of 1992 there were two student computer labs - the IBM PC lab in the library, which used vintage early 1980s IBM PC-XT, and the Mac lab in the Moody Science Building basement, which was filled with mostly first generation Macs. If you used the ancient IBMs your only word processing choice was Wordstar, and of course you had to use DOS to navigate on the computer. By my sophomore year the PC lab had new 486s with Windows 3.1 - what a big step that was! The next year we got all brand new Pentiums that ran at about a blazing 60 MHz and had like 32 MB of RAM. Then came a nice big grant from the Perot Foundation in Dallas to build a fiber optic network. During the summer of 1995 every room on campus was wired, and one of the nation's first wireless networks anywhere was installed. By that point we also had e-mail accounts and the computers in both original labs, plus the new computer labs in the residence halls, had Internet access, although there wasn't much World Wide Web to surf in 1994-1995. In my room on my personal computer I got my first modem (24 Kbps) about 1994 and had AOL, but I never really found it that useful. During my senior year the new campus network came online, and those with newer computers with LAN cards were lucky enough to have access to the Internet in their rooms, as well as things like the library catalog systems. A few VERY fortunate students had laptops with HUGE wireless cards (with an enormous antenna) that allowed them access to the campus network from just about anywhere they went, including outdoor areas. I'll never forget my friend Miles sitting on the North Lawn with his laptop sending an e-mail to show us how it worked. My friends and I that were with him that afternoon thought it was just the most amazing thing.

As for research tools in the library, we were fortunate that the card catalog had been digitalized in about 1988. There was a network of the four local libraries (two city public libraries, and two colleges) and they all used the same catalog system, so we could use the terminals to search the catalog at all four libraries at once. We also had a bank of terminals with access to about 10 different indexes of periodicals and professional journals, although the old standby Reader's Guides were just around the corner and still necessary for research on some subjects.

[ssullivan]

Now thats "old school".

Yeah but those days are long gone, at least on that campus. On my last visit there a few years ago all indexes they subscribed to were available electronically.