Last December's Discover carried an article about Science Kits aimed at the 20th century American boy...with a nod to Gilbert's (pink!) "Lab Technician Set for Girls." Cringe-worthy cultural norms aside, one paragraph in the description of the Gilbert company's bread-and-butter product, the Erector Set, caught my attention. (Caveat: Wikipedia's photos aren't at all evocative, so here are some more.) I suppose you could call the Erector Set the precursor to Legos...maybe in the same way that wolves are the ancestors of teacup chihuahuas.
"With pulleys, gears, metal strips and beams (both straight and curved, depending upon the model), screws to fit them all together, and even a DC motor in bigger sets, Erector soon became the gift that mechanically inclined boys wanted for Christmas. Many parents were happy to indulge those wishes during a time when engineers generally earned more than doctors [emphasis mine]."
[Double-take]
Whoa...waitaminnit...d'y'mean to tell me there was once a Golden Age when engineers actually had that kind of clout???
But before I started cobbling together a time machine from my stash of Legos and Buckyballs, I had a change of heart.
It wasn't just the fact that the glass ceiling for engineering of a century ago, like most everything, was bulletproof. Medicine (in which category I also include nutritional science) was still shedding its aura of quackery. And it certainly didn't standardise, much less scale to the level of an HMO. A few cases in point:
- 2014's Ebola deaths numbered under 8,500. The influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed 20 million people worldwide.
- Yeah, there was no such thing as a flu shot. The only time-tested vaccine available was for smallpox, and the production/scaling issues were still being worked out. You also took your chances with tetanus, polio, measles (regular and German), diptheria, and whooping cough. Those fighting yellow fever (malaria) put their energies into mosquito control. And you could contract tuberculosis from drinking the milk from an infected cow.
- With absolutely no support from the U.S. Supreme Court, reforming legislators* in the 1900s and 1910s were fighting an uphill battle against poisonous food additives and false therapeutic claims in "patent medicines" laced with narcotics (or worse).
- Contraception--in the form of condoms--only became legal in the U.S. in 1918 after, ahem, "rigorous field testing" in WWI. Women were left to control their own fertility via (cough!) "hygiene" (cough!) products of dubious claims. Canada's 1892 morals-guarding anti-contraception law was repeatedly challeged (and honoured more in the breach than observance) until finally decriminalised in the 1960s.
- Having shaken off the pseudo-science of astrology and magneticism for healing, modern scientific medicine brought radiation out of the lab and into the clinic**. X-rays could spare a patient the dangers of exploratory surgery...albeit while endangering them and those who administered unregulated doses for staggeringly long intervals.
- School lunches (which guaranteed a child at least one nutritious meal per school day) were experimental programs in Philadelphia and Boston***.
- And speaking of Boston, Massachusetts implemented the first water quality standards and municipal water treatment in the nation during the late 1800s, but not all states were on board until the 1970s.
Thus ended my pouting over the engineer-doctor wage differential in these latter decades. Clearly, the health industry is serving us far better than it did a century ago. I also like to think the reversal also means that quality of life has become more valuable than mere things.
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P.S.: Shout-out to Dennis, who reminded me to mention the advances in vaccines. Because taking them for granted is bad, as we're once again seeing.
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* Canada was 30+ years ahead of the United States (1874 vs. 1906) in regulating food and drug purity, at least at the federal level. This was largely the response to the outcry against the glut of adulterated booze on the market. Which should tell my Gentle Reader everything s/he needs to know about the priorities of the 19th century male. (Women, who might have had something to say about preservatives and fillers and shorted weights at the market, of course didn't have a vote.)
** X-ray applications became even more mainstream in the 1920s, using the fluoroscope to measure shoe fitness and remove unwanted body hair.
*** Pioneered by Ellen H. Swallow Richards, the first female graduate student at MIT, the first female chemist in the U.S.,champion of water quality, nutritionist, and basically a Force of Nature. (Suck it, Gilbert Lab Technician Kit for Girls!)
