> During construction of the Hudson River Tunnel in 1889, 25% of the workers died from decompression sickness.
Less interesting but of far greater value to humanity has been the innovation in heath and safety regulations.
According to this article [1] one worker died per foot of the Hudson River Tunnel.
> In 1906, attitudes toward the sandhogs changed after a series of accidents beneath the East River. Blown-out tunnels put the dangers of the profession on display in a way few New Yorkers could ignore, and the Progressive-Era press worked to publicize them. Suddenly, sandhogs were big news, and people started to complain about their high death rates.
That 25% statistic is unreferenced (or else I'd have to read all the sources to find where he got that from). It's sort of difficult to imagine it being true. Because you'd also have to factor in all the people who got decompression sickness but didn't die of it, but who couldn't work anymore—you'd think that would be even higher. I have to believe that it's to be interpreted as "of the many workers who died during this project, 25% died from decompression". Maybe I'm too skeptical, but that makes more sense to me.
My grandfather was for a short time in the railroad construction business under Japanese leadership about 50 years after the Hudson project. I have never met him, but I can imagine he would be delighted if the death rate would just be 25%.
IIRC for the Indonesian, voluntary workers the death rate was 80%. For the prisoners like my grandfather the rate was lower, simply because they started working later (and perhaps some racism from the leadership).
This was not so much health and safety regulation-related, but simple ignorance. The dangers of rapid decompression were not recognized until early 20-th century when underwater construction became more common.
That's why "decompression sickness" is called "caisson sickness" in several languages.
They did know migrant workers were dying, they thought it was a sickness caught being below ground so they kept them in dorms away from everyone else.
When you are hiring new people each day, to replace the ones who died, knowing that a quarter will lose their life, ignorance around exactly how they died is no excuse.
Today in my country at least a single workers death is not acceptable. Accidents happen but prosecution happens if everything was not done by the book.
I don’t buy it. 25% of workers is a lot of workers for a megaproject of this scale. This would either have to be a single devastating week, in which case they would learn about it really quickly and would probably still be the collective memory, or O'Rourke Engineering Construction Company willfully allowed their workers to die out of mysterious causes and opted not to investigate.
The latter is actually more likely but not really. There is no way the tunnel would have been finished if a quarter of the workforce was dying and the company just allowed it to continue happening.
Compare this to the Panama Canal which started construction under US supervision the same year as the Hudson North River tunnel. They didn’t know much about the spread of tropical deceases but they knew enough to supply their workers with mosquito nets etc. The French effort to build the canal totally failed, primarily because of the high death toll among workers. When the US took over preventing the spread of deceases was a primary concern. And this project now lives in our collective memory as one that costed so many lives.
Now there is no doubt in my mind that working condition for the Hudson North River tunnel were horrendous, and that far too many unnecessary deaths resulted from total disregard of worker safety by the construction company. That this number was 25% and that it was because they didn’t know about decompression sickness... That I don’t buy, dozens of workers dying from the construction company cutting corners, overworking their workers, setting harsh deadlines, not providing safety gears, and (yes) not treating sick workers, that is far more plausible.
I can believe it, and I can believe it is still in the collective memory of the relevant unions since it is apparently partly the reason for their existence. From NY Time Archive: [1]
> In 1890, 68 sandhogs died as they bored a gas tunnel under Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island. A Manhattan coroner estimated that at least 50 sandhogs died in the first five months of 1906 in the construction of Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. Thirteen sandhogs died building the Holland Tunnel between 1921 and 1924.
So they lost 10 per month building the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. The 25% probably refers to the underground workers, not everyone employed on the project. Either there was greater automation, or by the 1920s the numbers lost decreased substantially.
25% of underground workers is a far more reasonable number, and I can actually believe that. Don’t get me wrong, companies during the guilded age had no respect for their workers, and if they had to choose between worker’s lives or company profit, they choose profit 100% of the time.
I just think that even during this horrible time period, you still couldn’t get away with loosing 25% of your workers while still getting the job done.
It seems plausible to me and the Panama canal is a good comparison. 30,000 workers dies building the canal, which was 40% of the workforce.
It is a lot easier to replace a few dozen men digging tunnels in New York, than find 30,000 replacements in a swamp and jungle.
Life was simply cheap. If you go back 75 years further, you had pretty similar documented death rates for sailors - especially in the slave trade where a 25-50% death rate during Atlantic slave crossings was pretty common.
The shear lethality of tropical diseases to Europeans prior to the 20th century really cannot be overstated. I'd run across a statistic that the life expectancy of a British soldier stationed to Africa was on the order of six months:
In 1824 half the 600 soldiers garrisoned in the Gold Coast died within a few months, and the House of Commons was told in 1826, that of 1,567 troops sent out in the previous two years, 905 had died. Europeans died mainly from malaria and yellow fever - or from the “cures” which were nearly as dangerous as the ailments. Blood-letting was common. Leeches were standard colonial surgical equipment, being placed on the patients shaved head to “suck out” the fever. Great blisters were raised with steaming cloths or mustard packs and then broken to drain away the fever. On the same principle, salivating was induced by calomel, often at the expense of the victim’s teeth, or by quicksilver and mercury, an even more drastic “treatment” that inflamed the mouth and sometimes caused the sick man to suffocate on his own swollen tongue.
I would put that date a little closer in time actually. And I actually have a precise date. I think that labor was unfathomably cheap until July 6th 1935, when the National Labor Relation act was enacted.
Both the tunnel and the canal (under USA supervision) didn’t start construction until 1904.
But that said, by far the majority of the deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal were under French supervision, in the 1880s. This effort failed primarily because of the heavy toll on human lives. While people did die under the Americans, and while labor conditions were horrendous, it was nowhere near on the same caliber as the decades prior. Further indicating that you cannot just disregard human lives completely and still get the job done (you could only do that to an extend; until July 6th 1935 that is).
It has never been practical to simply disregard the practical financial and labor implications of human life and get the job done. If all your workers starve, they wont shovel. If there are no replacements, work stops.
I think what is interesting is the expansion from purely logistical/financial implications to include other considerations.
These other considerations including legal ones, as labor laws were passed, civil liability law developed, social sentiments changed, and welfare increased so that people didnt have to choose be 50% chance of death or starvation.
There's a key distinction that I'd like to point out.
Operational safety based risks, such as experienced in direct earthworks, blasting, transport, etc., disproportionately affect front-line workers.
Infectious disease based risks are largely indiscriminate between front-line and managerial staff. That is, unskilled labourers and administrative, clerical, officer, etc., staff all largely face a similar threat against vector-transmitted diseases. The only option for the latter is to avoid the location or posting entirely.
That may be a subtle shading, and points about the US NRL made by runarberg are well taken, but again, it seems significant.
Note that tropical diseases were an issue across the Panamanian isthmus for travelers and transport workers (sailors, teamsters, railroad) who traversed the region even before the canal was built, as an overland leg in the East-to-West-coast route which avoided both the time and perils of going 'round the Cape, encircling all of South America.
A railroad was opened across the isthmus in 1855. That effort cost 5-10k workers' lives itself.
And, somewhat supporting your viewpoint, Adam Smith describes the career duration of workers at his time (~1750--1775): "A carpenter in London, and in some other places, is not supposed to last in his utmost vigor above eight years."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 8, "Of the Wages of Labour"
Similarly, prior to the development of modern sanitation and hygiene (fresh water supplies, sewerage systems, regular bathing, handwashing), cities were net population sinks and relied on in-migration from surrounding countryside (often driven by limited employment and income potential there) in order to simply maintain population levels. Infectious disease deaths within cities could top 50 thousand per year in 19th century London and New York, out of populations of 1 million or fewer.
>cities were net population sinks and relied on in-migration from surrounding countryside.
Now that's interesting. I consider myself dark realist when it comes to history but I haven't read that. I'm guessing it must be constrained to some pretty specific circumstances and period in time.
"Infectious disease based risks are largely indiscriminate between front-line and managerial staff."
Not at all. When you are a worker in the jungle, you will get biten by way more mosquitos, than when you are sitting in a office protected by mosquito nets.
I mean, I don't think we really invented safety regulations. I am not sure if a regulation existed that could have allowed the HRT to be built safely with the technology of the time.
I think technology is inherently linked with standard of living which is inherently linked to the value of a life.
They were paid $2.50 a day. Which is around $91 in today dollars. On top of that wage theft was all too common. And that's a wage that they had to fight to unionize to get up to
For unskilled labor 6 days a week at 2.50/day = 15$/week which would have been quite tempting especially if the risks where unclear.
It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be. Take the average person’s budget today and remove their car, gadgets, AC, subscriptions, most of the pricy food options, etc. Healthcare was cheap and largely ineffective, collage was rare and minimalist by todays standards. Most of what people spend money on today simply didn’t exist so not having it was normal.
> It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be.
And also, how much of the wealth created by the employees ended up in their pockets vs. the pockets of the owners, and how the standards of living were. Basically, back then with such a job you could afford a place to live, to have kids, a wife to take care of housework and, post 1930-ish, a car. Today? Most of my generation struggles to make rent because we're being bled dry.
Lifestyle inflation, urban planning, and choices makes living a quality life more difficult than it should be.
You're able to afford a larger house and a car or two, but you're also spending more money than necessary on transportation and housing. Buying a car is expensive and so is the road built for cars. Trains are more expensive than a car, but its cost can be amortized across many riders.
Housing is a problem of both government and market dysfunction and is directly tied to our transportation woes. People are tied to the idea of real estate as an investment which means they often opposed development. Planners continued to zone only SFH, and made middle housing illegal. They also don't do mixed zoning which improve efficient utilization of land.
I supposed if income goes to workers more, they would just push the housing price higher. It can't be fixed unless we build sufficient housing.
Lifestyle inflation is why people don’t feel so much wealthier than their grandparents, but housing isn’t the economic drain it seems like because so much of its value doesn’t require resources to create. It’s mostly redistribution of income from workers to other people and as such it gets into politics.
Well that and the giant ball of suck associated with long commutes, but I am kind of hoping there’s going to be more pushback on that due to people working from home during COVID. Even those who still needed to go in had vastly less traffic.
We've got richer while food has got relatively cheaper, transport has got relatively cheaper, all the things you need to live have got relatively cheaper, so it isn't really surprising that all the extra money is going towards people's homes.
On top of that all the nice things have gotten cheaper. Listening to music is now cheap. Books, news, entertainment are cheap.
Yes you may have had a car (24 million cars in 1940 v 135million population) but then you wouldn't have had a fridge, TV.
And youre comparing someone relatively wealthy, to someone who can't afford rent.
If you were poor you probably didn't have electricity, indoor toilet, more than one heated room in the house, and probably lucky if you could afford enough food.
I'm from the UK and we went through this a bit later so it's still within living memory. My dad remembers getting an indoor toilet an plumbed in bath for the first time, that was late 50s/ early 60s.
And if we are talking late 1800's/early 1900's, Taxes were essentially non-existent, so people kept and spent more of their money. Taxes as a % of GDP was in the 5-10% range, opposed to ~40% today.
They also didn't have to worry about the same healthcare costs, as they were healthier in general, and the options were far fewer when sick.
That isn't the critical part of the sentence, which is why you didn't spend any time mentioning it.
Yes they were less obese, the issue was the more likely to be the opposite, malnutrition. I dispute they spent less time battling disease, but if they did, it's because they died quicker.
Alzheimers is a disease of the old, and cancer tends to be also.
So all you're left with is obesity and the closely correlated diabetes.
Indeed, but I am talking about the sum of all disease.
Polio is a good example of the opposite, because polio today is effectively zero. Most other types of disease trend the other way with much more significant margins.
Polio lead to some level of paralysis in somewhere between 0.5-0.2% percent of people, many of whom died and needed no further healthcare.
Today, a far larger percent of Americans have lost the ability to walk due to obesity and diabetes.
Polio is just one success story among many. Sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics don’t just cut down on Cholera but a huge range of diseases.
Tuberculosis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Cholera, Polio, Smallpox, Tetanus, Varicella(Chickenpox> shingles), etc didn’t individually leave large segments of the population with serious lifelong issues, but collectively they added up. Add in a little cut or malnutrition and even diseases we don’t normally consider serious would more frequently have huge long term health impacts.
Very few young people lose the ability to walk from obesity, that’s generally something that impacts older people who were able bodied up to that point. Infectious diseases however generally hit the young harder more than people with fully developed immune systems.
Health and fitness are different things. Elite athletes are generally doing great harm to their long term health.
Pick 10,000 random people from each time period. 2023 would probably win a tug of war. Increased heigh and obesity not being as detrimental as being under weight.
Cardio would presumably go to 1923. However what percentage of people could walk 1 mile could go either way. Someone that’s paralyzed can’t do it but someone that’s fat need to be motivated.
I think the 1923 group would out perform at the a mile walk completion, simply from age effects alone.
I agree the strongest would be 2023.
I agree that health can have complex and variable definitions. It is also very different than life expectancy.
One measure of health may be baseline fitness and ability to care for ones self. Alternatively, health could be freedom from disability, pain, and health related suffering.
Another definition of health, which I was originally getting at, is how many people rely on continuous medical services to remain alive. That is to say, how many people would drop dead if they stopped receiving medication and medical services.
This baseline, pre-intervention health is relevant if you want to compare health costs.
I agree that it is different that post-intervention health, which might be the most relevant of you want to consider something like quality of life.
It is a shame we dont have better data from the earlier 20th century.
> Today? Most of my generation struggles to make rent because we're being bled dry.
As a kid I remember visiting a friend who lived in an old workers house. I was in awe to see such a small house, and in shock to learn they actually bought two houses and connected them.
Less interesting but of far greater value to humanity has been the innovation in heath and safety regulations.
According to this article [1] one worker died per foot of the Hudson River Tunnel.
> In 1906, attitudes toward the sandhogs changed after a series of accidents beneath the East River. Blown-out tunnels put the dangers of the profession on display in a way few New Yorkers could ignore, and the Progressive-Era press worked to publicize them. Suddenly, sandhogs were big news, and people started to complain about their high death rates.
[1] https://daily.jstor.org/the-sandhogs-who-built-the-new-york-...