purple motes

The rapid growth of novels in the late eighteenth-century was an important communications industry development. A large number of manuscripts of novels were available to printers at low cost. Printing novels was a profit-driven business, as was book-selling and book-lending through commercial circulating libraries. Printers chose novels to print with keen regard for market demand. Hence studying what novels were printed provides insight into what readers sought.

Female authors predominated among the authors of English novels for about thirty-five years after the production of novels rose sharply. The number of new novels printed in Britain and Ireland roughly doubled from the first half of the 1780s to the second half of the 1780s, rising above 50 novels per year and remaining above that level permanently. Across the years from 1785 to 1819, the median ratio of male-authored novels to female-authored novels was 0.69, meaning that male-authored novels numbered about 31% fewer than female-authored novels.[1]

[graph with underlying data and source citations here]

Printers probably favored female authors because they judged female authors to have better prospects of successfully serving readers' demands. Female authors on average probably understood the literary demands of female readers better than male authors did. Hence the sex ratio for authors suggests that, for thirty-five years after novels became a much more popular good, female readers predominated. These were also the years when women workers, including married women, were a large share of the new cotton factory workforce. Thus, even when women were taking jobs outside the home in a new, high-profile segment of the economy, women probably were also spending more time reading fiction than were men.[2]

Given the biological facts of human sexual reproduction and the evolutionary creation of the human animal, one should expect the behavior of males and females to differ significantly. In the contemporary U.S., men are much less likely to read literary works than are women. Taking sex differences seriously is important for thinking about the development and marketing of communication services.

Notes:

[1] The ratio of male-authored to female-authored novels is not the same statistic as the ratio of male authors to female authors of novels, because some authors wrote multiple novels. Raven (2003) p. 150 declares that the latter statistic is "far more significant" than the former, but does not clearly specify why. From 1770 to 1799, the number of male authors of novels was 54% greater than the number of female authors of novels. See Raven (2000) p. 41. Since authorship of novels typically generated little profit in money or social status, the latter statistic indicates that authorship disadvantaged men more than women. Authors, however, were a much smaller share of the population than were readers.

[2] Tepper (2000) analyzes the "gender gap" in fiction reading in the U.S. This work notes that fiction reading is "passive and generally home based" and states that "girls are still socialized into passive, private and non-competitive activities, while boys are channeled into activities which tend to be aggressive, competitive, creative, and leadership-oriented" (p. 272). It cites an authority who declares that "inequalities persist for women in their opportunities for leisure" and concludes that socialization accounts for women reading more fiction than men (id.). Tepper seems not to have considered the possibility that particular patterns of socialization of males and females are part of evolved human development paths and might be extremely difficult to change without tyrannical force. Note that Tepper's concern about women's fiction reading goes against the fundamental theme of the NEA's study, Reading at Risk. Neither Tepper (2000) nor Reading at Risk shows much concern for men.

References:

Raven, James (2000), "Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age," in The English novel, 1770-1829: a bibliographical survey of prose fiction published in the British Isles, gen. eds. Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 1, pp. 15-121.

Raven, James (2003), "The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1830," in The faces of anonymity: anonymous and pseudonymous publications from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Robert J. Griffin, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Ch. 6.

Tepper, Steven J. (2000), "Fiction Reading in America: Explaining the gender gap," Poetics 27, pp. 255-75.

Tags: authors, history, novels, readers, sex

2 Comments

Photography was the first mass-market presence technology. A British observer noted in 1857:

Portraits, as is evident to any thinking mind, and as photography now proves, belong to that class of facts wanted by numbers who know and care nothing about their value as works of art.[1]

Photography provided sense of presence like that of a painted portrait, but much cheaper and with obvious product differentiation.

The work of leading amateur photographers does not provide a good indication of the business model that drove commercial photography. The Edinburgh Calotype Club, formed in the early 1840s, was the world's first photography club. In two albums of its members' works, calotypes with subjects other than portraits comprise roughly 70% of the photographs.[2] An exhibition at the U.S. National Gallery of Art, British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840 to 1860, includes many calotypes of nature and built structures. In contrast, commercial photography at this time almost surely consisted of not much more than portraits.

Photographic portraits were an astonishingly successful good. While photographs of any type were first displayed about 1840, photographic portraits were widely offered commercially in Britain by 1857:

who can number the legion of petty dabblers, who display their trays of specimens along every great thoroughfare in London, executing for our lowest servants, for one shilling, that which no money could have commanded for the Rothschild bride of twenty years ago?[3]

At the high end of the market, drawing and painting complemented photography:

There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries -- we understand not less than 1 £ a day -- in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation. ... The coloured portraits to which we have alluded are a most satisfactory coalition between the artist and the machine. Many an inferior miniature-painter who understood the mixing and applying of pleasing tints was wholly unskilled in the true drawing of the human head. With this deficiency supplied, their present productions, therefore, are far superior to anything they accomplished, single-handed, before. Photographs taken on ivory, or on substances invented in imitation of ivory, and coloured by hand from nature, such as are seen at the rooms of Messrs. Dickinson, Claudet, Mayall, Kilburn, &c., are all that can be needed to satisfy the mere portrait want, and in some instances may be called artistic productions of no common kind besides.[4]

But the main effect of photography was to greatly expand the market for non-artistic portraits. By 1857 in Britain:

[photographers] are wanted everywhere and found everywhere. The large provincial cities abound with the sun's votaries, the smallest town is not without them; and if there be a village so poor and remote as not to maintain a regular establishment, a visit from a photographic travelling van gives it the advantages which the rest of the world are enjoying. Thus, where not half a generation ago the existence of such a vocation was not dreamt of, tens of thousands (especially if we reckon the purveyors of photographic materials) are now following a new business....[5]

Even with the rapid rise of novels in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the occupation of author developed much more slowly than that of photographer. In the U.S. in 1860, the occupational Census reported 627 authors and reporters, 2994 editors, and 3154 daguerreotypists and photographers.

Those looking to create business models for new media might think about the rapid commercial success of photographers and the long history of impecunious authors.

Notes:

[1] From Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, "Photography," London Quarterly Review (April 1857), pp 442-68.

[2] A search for the keyword "portait" returns 89 calotypes out of 332 total in both Edinburgh Calotype Club albums. Among both these totals are 70 duplicate prints. The number of calotypes returned for keywords "castle" and "church" are 33 and 35, respectively.

[3]-[5] Lady Eastlake, "Photography," op. cit.

Tags: business models, history, new media, photography

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Hard-working volunteers have recently entered Thomas Jefferson's personal library into LibraryThing. The U.S. Congress purchased Jefferson's library in 1815 to replace to the library Congress lost when the British Army burned the Capitol in 1814.[1] Thus Jefferson's library on LibraryThing documents the library that formed Congress's new library in 1815.

Although Jefferson was at the forefront of intellectual and political life of his time, his library contained rather old books. In 1815, 90% of his library books were printed more than a decade earlier. Half of his library books were printed more than 35 years earlier, that is, prior to 1779. In terms of Jefferson's life (he was 72 years old in 1815), half the books in his library were printed before he reached 36 years of age. The formation of the U.S., the French Revolution, the rapid growth in book production, and Jefferson's two terms as president did not put a large share of books into his library.[2]

Jefferson's books were old in relation to movements in the book trade. In the U.S. at the beginning of the nineteenth century, book sellers kept a print edition for sale for perhaps a decade.[3] In both Britain and the U.S., book production, particularly that of fiction, grew strongly relative to macroeconomic trends from about 1780. In contrast, the number of books per publication year in Jefferson's library trends downward from the mid 1780s.

The publication dates of books in Jefferson's library indicate that as he grew older, he acquired a larger share of books addressing current affairs and applied technology. The table below gives the median publication dates of Jefferson's books by book categories. Apart from newspapers, agriculture formed the most current category. That's consistent with Jefferson's interest in fostering an agricultural nation of yeoman farmers. The most dated category consisted of ecclesiastical law and history. Human efforts to build a city of God did not interest Jefferson. His library also show relatively little interest in new developments in poetry and fine arts (Romanticism) and in fiction (novels). Jefferson, in short, was a founding policy wonk.

Categories of Books
in Thomas Jefferson's Library, 1815

Catogory of Books	# Titles	Median Pub. Year
Newspapers	47	1797
Agriculture	133	1795
Medicine	141	1791
Politics	1194	1790
Technical Arts	131	1788
Natural Philosophy	189	1786
Mathematics	123	1784
Astronomy	36	1770
Geography	335	1768
Polygraphical	44	1768
Tales and Fables	73	1766
Religion	260	1764
Ethics and Morals	211	1762
Law	654	1762
History	550	1761
Language	261	1760
Fine Arts	88	1757
Poetry	274	1756
Ecclesiastical	44	1700

Compared to when it purchased books for its library in 1800, Congress paid a higher price for older books when it purchased Jefferson's library. In 1800, Congress paid $2.97 per book for 740 books that it purchased from a London bookseller. This price includes the cost of packaging and shipping the books from London. The bookseller wrote:

we earnestly hope the books will arrive perfectly safe, great care having been taken in packing them. We judged it best to send trunks rather than boxes, which after their arrival would have been of little or no value. Several of the books sent were only to be procured second-handed, and some of them, from their extreme scarcity, at very advanced prices. We have in all cases sent the best copies we could obtain and charged the lowest prices possible.[4]

In 1815, Congress paid Jefferson $3.69 per volume for 6487 volumes, plus at least an additional $0.10 per volume for packing and shipping from Monticello, Virginia.[5] Adjusted for inflation, this price is about 20 cents higher per volume than the price per volume for the books purchased in 1800. Apparently all but several of the books purchased in 1800 were new books, which probably means that they had been printed within the previous decade. In contrast, 90% of Jefferson's books were printed more than a decade earlier.

Older, higher priced books are not necessarily worse than newer, lower-priced books. Older books might be more scarce than newer books, and hence more valuable. Book prices varied greatly depending on the size of the book, the quality of its binding, the paper used, and engravings included in the book. Average price and median age are important descriptions of a collection of books, not inverse measures of the attractiveness of purchasing a collection.

Congress's purchase of Jefferson's library was quite controversial. One Congressman opposed the bill to purchase the Jefferson's library with this argument:

the library contained irreligious and immoral books, works of the French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution, which had desolated Europe and
extended to this country. [The Congressman stated that he] was opposed to a general dissemination of that infidel philosophy, and of the principles of a man [Jefferson] who had inflicted greater injury on our country than any other, except Mr. Madison. The bill would put $23,900 into Jefferson's pocket for about 6,000 books, good, bad, and indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages which many can not read, and most ought not; which is true Jeffersonian, Madisonian philosophy, to bankrupt the Treasury, beggar the people, and disgrace the nation.[6]

Representatives also put forward less partisan reasons for not approving the bill to purchase the library:

Others, among whom were a number of the political and personal friends of Mr. Jefferson, opposed the bill on the ground of the scarcity of money, and the necessity of appropriating it to purposes more indispensable than the purchase of a library; the probable insecurity of such a library placed here; the high price to be given for this collection; its miscellaneous and almost exclusively literary (instead of legal and historical) character, etc. [7]

The bill to purchase Jefferson's library was narrowly approved: 81 votes for, 71 votes against.

The accumulation of knowledge doesn't happen automatically. Jefferson's library testifies to the personal effort and political controversy associated with accumulating knowledge in the early nineteenth-century. Many signs in the twenty-first century indicate that personal effort and political controversies remain at the center of knowledge accumulation.

Additional data notes:

I calculated the publication year statistics given above by extracting the Jefferson library from LibraryThing, cleaning it slightly, and recoding the (first) category for each book. Here's a year-by-year summary of the publication dates and book counts. For more detail, here are the individual records with the tab-delimited fields author, title, publication year, original category, and recoded category. For records that included a publication year range, the year in this dataset is the average of the given range. For years that included a "-" (such as "178-"), I've replaced the dash was the midpoint of the dashed range. The recoded categories are historically appropriate terms, but are not necessarily consistent with Jefferson's hierarchical organization of categories.

The dataset excludes 101 records that do not include a publication year. These records do not appear to have a strong publication-year bias. Given the large total number of dated records (4788), excluding a 102-record sample with even some date bias probably wouldn't effect aggregate statistics much. Note, however, that the LibraryThing Jefferson stat page gives an average publication year of 1754. I calculate an average year of 1756. If the LibraryThing average uses a zero-value for records with no publication year, that might account for the lower LibraryThing average.

The median is a more easily interpretable summary statistic for publication years. The average can depend significantly on a few outliers, e.g. a few very old books. I suggest that LibraryThing replace on its member stat page the "average" publication year line with a "50% of your books were printed before" line.

As with any data source, you should cross-check and evaluate the datasets I have shared for possible mistakes. Sharing data helps to advance knowledge, and I encourage everyone to do so.

More historical data on libraries.

Reference notes:

[1] Some evidence indicates that many books were not destroyed in the fire, but were lost after being removed from the building in 1814. See Johnston (1904) pp. 66-7. For another example of losing valuable federal government property in a nineteenth century fire, see this discussion of the Smithsonian fire of 1865.

[2] When Jefferson was President, he suggested books to be purchased for the library of Congress. See Johnston (1904) p. 37. Thus government purchases may have substituted for Jefferson's personal purchases. Note also that some of Jefferson's books may not have been included in the library he sold to Congress in 1815. Jefferson described his library as containing "between nine and ten thousand volumes." See Johnston (1904) p. 70. The library he sold to Congress consisted of 6,487 volumes.

[3] Amory (2000) p. 198.

[4] Johnston (1904) p. 24, quoting a letter apparently from Cadell & Davies, the London bookseller. See id. pp. 24-5 for the total cost. The items procured for that sum probably also included three maps.

[5] On packing and shipping costs, see id. p. 104.

[6] Id. p. 86, quoting Representative Cyrus King of Massachusetts.

[7] Id., general text. Some argued that Jefferson's library was worth $50,000; others stated that such a library "might be bought in any of the large cities for half the money."

References:

Amory, Hugh (2000) "A Note on Imports and Domestic Production," in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Johnston, William Dawson (1904), History of the Library of Congress : volume I, 1800-1864 (Washington: GPO).

Tags: books, history, libraries, Thomas Jefferson

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A friend who worked at the State Department moved out of the area to take up an academic post teaching history at a state university. He and his wife came back a week ago for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). They're a swell, smart couple.

At their party in their hotel room at the site of the AHA meeting, my friend's wife wore a black t-shirt that said on the front "arrest Bush." My friend's t-shirt said on the front "arrest Cheney first." I think I get that. But on the back of the shirt was Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution. That section doesn't say anything about arresting political leaders.

Stroking my small head trying to figure out this conundrum, I remembered Lev Razgon's story. Razgon was a Communist Party member in the Soviet Union. After graduating from a provincial teachers' training institute and a short career writing children's stories, he was imprisoned in the Gulag for 17 years. Once by chance he shared a jeep ride in the Gulag with the deputy Chief Medical Officer. The officer reminisced about having personally dined with Soviet President Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin. The officer collapsed hysterically when Razgon inadvertently revealed that Kalinin's wife was imprisoned nearby.

Razgon explained that this situation should not have been considered surprising: "If members of the Politburo were themselves liable to be arrested and shot without more ado, why should their wives enjoy special immunity?"[1] Stalin in fact arrested close relatives of many members of his inner circle.

President Kalinin's wife, Yekaterina Ivanovna, was imprisoned in the Gulag from 1937 to 1945. She spent years working at hard labor. Because of poor health, her job was then switched to working in the washhouse, picking nits out prisoners' underwear. She was released after World War II ended. Razgon explained:

Kalinin was already terminally ill when he was permitted to see his wife again. He died only a year later, in the summer of 1946. ... We reacted with very mixed feelings to the rhetoric gushing from the radio and the press about how deeply the deceased had been loved by the Party, the Soviet people and Comrade Stalin himself. Even more bizarre was to read in the papers a telegram of condolence from the Queen of England to a woman who only a year earlier had been picking nits out of underwear in a prison camp. But most terrible of all was to see the newspaper and magazine photographs of Kalinin's funeral, with Yekaterina Ivanovna following the coffin, and Stalin and his entire retinue walking beside her.[2]

The human way is a hilly, wet foot-path.

[1] Lev Razgon, "The President's Wife," in True Stories (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1997) p. 14.

[2] Id. p. 18.

Tags: AHA, arrests, history, Kalinin

1 Comment

A gardener shows what he's made and grown over the years.

Click To Play Video

Tend your garden.

Tags: garden, gardener, history

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As part of the Art on Call project, the Southwest neighborhood of Washington, DC is refurbishing about 40 police and fire call boxes still existing in the neighborhood. The Dupont Circle and Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhoods of DC have completed similar projects, while the Foxhall neighborhood is moving forward. In Southwest, the Earth Conservation Corps, an organization that has made important contributions to community life in the Southwest, recently started repainting Southwest call boxes. Refurbished call boxes could help to signal Southwest's long history and vital present.

Call boxes installed in Boston in 1852 formed part of the world's first fire-alarm telegraph system. Each call box had a crank and a bell. Turning the crank signaled a fire alarm by sending via telegraph the fire district number and the call box number (within that district) to a central operator. The central operator responded to the alarm by ringing via telegraph large fire bells located atop churches, schools, and fire engine houses. The central operator also rung via telegraph the small call-box bells.

The central operator's telegraph signals specified the number of rings that both the large fire bells and small call-box bells periodically made. The number of rings of the large fire bells indicated the fire district from which the alarm originated. The number of rings of the small call-box bells indicated the call-box location within that fire district. Thus when a fireman heard the large fire bells ring, he would count the number of rings to learn in which fire district the alarm occurred. He would run to a fire-alarm call box and count the number of rings periodically made on that smaller bell to learn the alarm location within that fire district. Fire trucks throughout the city were thus directed quickly and simultaneously to the specific location of the the fire alarm.[1]

Washington, DC, installed a fire alarm telegraph system in 1864. The system initially had twenty-five call boxes. By 1881 the system had expanded to eighty call boxes and incorporated about 200 miles of telegraph wires. In 1926, Washington, DC had 1500 call boxes. The call box system remained in operation until 1976, when DC established emergency 911 telephone service.[2]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose headquarters is located in Southwest, has played an important role in the development of public safety communications. The FCC worked with AT&T to define 911 service in 1968. In 2000, the FCC established rules and timetables for mobile telephone operators to provide emergency 911 service with location identification (enhanced 911). In 2005, the FCC required a class of Internet telephony (VoIP) providers to implement 911 service. Public safety requirements are currently a major issue in the FCC's 700 MHz band plan and license assignments.

Five historic call boxes remain within three blocks of the FCC. Three are fire alarm call boxes, and two are police call boxes. The style of the call boxes indicates that they were installed in the 1930s.[3] These call boxes remain to be refurbished under Southwest's Art on Call effort.

View Larger Map

I suggest that some call boxes be refurbished to include communication technology directing call-box users to socially identified "hot" sites. A screen in the call box might present a choice among a small number of sites. When the call box user selected a site, the call box would provide information about the site and directions to it. Like the historic call boxes, the refurbished call boxes would be connected to a network, but now the network would be the Internet. The basic idea would be to update continually the list of hot sites based on choices at the call boxes and other indications of current hot sites or events. With respect to the later, one could set up a website where visitors could vote for events to be downloaded into the call boxes. Unlike social rating features on Internet services such as YouTube, Digg, and many others, this system would publicly communicate relevant information about socially defined "hot" sites in a real-world neighborhood.

Perhaps volunteers from the FCC could work with other volunteers to implement a great new communication service in call boxes in the Southwest neighborhood around the FCC. Count me in for such a project.

For more information about the Southwest Call Box project, contact the Southwest Call Box Committee at 202 479-2750.

Update: Lida Churchville, who works on the Southwest Call Box project, told me of another police call box that I hadn't noticed. I've updated the text and the map above to include this additional call box.

Notes:

[1] William F. Channing first described a fire alarm telegraph system in 1845. Moses G. Farmer, "one of the ablest and most ingenious telegraphic engineers in the country," implemented Channing's system in Boston in 1852. See Channing, William F., The American Fire-Alarm Telegraph, A Lecture Delivered Before the Smithsonian Institution, March, 1855 (Boston, Redding & Company, 1855) p. 10. The above description of operation of the Boston system is based on id.

[2] On the establishment of the DC fire-alarm telegraph system, see District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) History, p. 2. The date given, July 1, 1884, clearly is a mistake; it was July 1, 1864. For information about the three engine companies started in that year, see DCFD Company History. The information about the system in 1881 is from the Annual Report of the Fire Commissioners, as reported in the Washington Post, Sept. 13, 1881, p. 3. Subsequent information is from the Paul K. Williams (DC Heritage Tourism Coalition), History of District of Columbia Fire and Police Call Boxes.

[3] See Williams, History of District of Columbia Fire and Police Call Boxes.

Tags: call boxes, fire, history, police, preservation, telegraph, Washington DC

3 Comments

Digital forms and ubiquitous networks are greatly increasing opportunities to circulate authored symbolic works. Digitization projects are creating huge online libraries of digitized books that persons around the world can access at zero incremental cost. Storage prices are dropping so rapidly that one small device will soon be able to store all the music that most persons listen to throughout their lives. Video sharing sites are collecting and distributing large amounts of video across the Internet. Many persons can now easily create a huge library of digital works. How persons respond to vastly expanding access to works will significantly shape the communications industry.

To understand better the circulation of works, consider U.S. public-library users’ book-borrowing behavior since the mid-nineteenth century. Measured relative to the unskilled wage, the dime novels that Irwin Beadle began selling in 1860 were almost five times more expensive than the twenty-five cent paperbacks being sold in 1950. A lower real purchase price for books increased the incentive to purchase rather than borrow. Average time spent reading, according to the best available estimates, fell 50% from 1925 to 1995. Less time spent reading implies less demand for borrowing books.

Other factors probably pushed toward more borrowing. The number of books in print, and the number of books in libraries, increased immensely from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Perhaps such a change encouraged persons to read a larger number of books less thoroughly, and hence favored borrowing books relative to purchasing books. Library users’ travel costs, in time and money, probably fell with improvements in transportation technology since the mid-nineteenth century. Lower travel costs reduce the total cost of borrowing books from a library.

Library book circulation per user has no strong, long-run trend. From 1856 to 1978, library users borrowed from U.S. public libraries about 15 books per user per year. From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline. These figures depend on estimates and disparate samples of libraries with varying circulation and user accounting methods. Nonetheless, these figures are of sufficient quality to suggest that historically established institutions significantly stabilize borrowing behavior.

Users borrowing items from public libraries has plausible connections to a variety of institutions and values. Much of the pleasure from reading comes from discussing a book with friends who have also read the book. The desire to discuss books among friends may constrain the rate at which individuals will read books. At the same time, persons may value going to the library as an activity in itself. Borrowing library items may be in part a by-product of interest in those visits. On the supply side, libraries can counterbalance changing demand for books by shifting the distribution of book collections between popular and less popular works, by changing investments in promoting book borrowing, and by shifting collections from books to audiovisuals.

Media use that is connected to wider scope of behaviors and interests is likely to change more slowly. The shifts in music from vinyl records, to CDs, and then to digital downloads were format changes that required relatively small changes in behavior. Persons who read the same newspaper every morning while using the bathroom, or who watch a half-hour television news program every evening before dinner, have their media use connected to relatively stable patterns of life. Generational changes in patterns of life, rather than changes in relative prices, quality, or features, are more important for such media use. Established institutions, meaning both routine patterns of personal activity and indefinitely chartered organizations, can give media use considerable stability despite major changes in activity incentives and technological possibilities.

Note: Post edited and updated. For sources and data, see Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856 (also on SSRN).

Tags: books, circulation, history, libraries, statistics

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A great way to study the ancient Greek trireme is to build one. Frank Welsh, a trireme enthusiast and funder, John Morrison, an ancient historian, and John Coates, a former British naval architect, established in 1982 the Trireme Trust with the following objectives:

1. To resolve a long-standing controversy about the design of this historically important type of ship
2. To discover its true performance at sea
3. To enable the realities of sea power at that time to be understood
4. To draw attention to the maritime and technical skills which were the keys to the cultural achievements and lasting influence of ancient Athens.

The Trireme Trust and Greek shipbuilders worked together to build an ancient Greek trireme. In 1987, the full-scale, fully functionally trireme Olympias was ready to be commissioned into the Greek navy and taken out for its first sea trials around the island of Poros.

I was part of the crew that rowed the Olympias in its first sea trial in the summer of 1987. The crew was collected mainly from British universities. We stayed for a couple of weeks in the Greek naval officers school on Poros. Being on the crew of an ancient Greek warship undoubtedly included great hardships and suffering. But by 1987, that job made for a very good time.

The trireme has 170 rowers arranged in three tiers: thranites (top tier), zygians (middle), and thalamians (bottom). I was a thalamian. Because the seats were fixed wooden benches, the effort of rowing was shifted towards the arms and back compared to boats with slides (rolling seats). From where I sat I couldn't see the water nor feel any breezes coming across the boat. The rowing section leaders and master would shout out instructions, and I could see and feel the rhythm of rowers both in front of me and above me.

Being down in the boat has advantages and disadvantages. It was hot. I drank a lot of water and sweated it out. Arranging fresh water supplies must have been a major challenge. Being a thalamian wouldn't be a good position for being rammed by another trireme. But it would be a great position in winter, or in battle with projectiles flying.

The boat itself is an engineering marvel. John Coates, the architect, would climb around the boat, fixing various broken parts, and talking with rowers. You can find more pictures of the boat here. That the Greeks could build hundreds of these boats 2500 years ago is amazing. That the Greeks and the Brits could together rebuild one based on scraps of archaeological and textual evidence is astonishing. I remember Mr. Coates saying that the design constraints implied much of the design.

We rowed the boat through a variety of test maneuvers. One was was to accelerate to full speed and hold that speed for a short period. Another was to reverse direction quickly and turn sharply. Given that no one had any experience, and given the difficulties of coordinating 170 rowers, the boat performed amazingly well.

A recent study has analyzed the power output of trireme crews. The study found:

rowers of ancient Athens – around 500BC – would had to have been highly elite athletes, even by modern day standards.

Says Dr Rossiter: “Ancient Athens had up to 200 triremes at any one time, and with 170 rowers in each ship, the rowers were clearly not a small elite. Yet this large group, it seems, would match up well with the best of modern athletes. Either ancient Athenians had a more efficient way of rowing the trireme or they would have to be an extremely fit group. Our data raise the interesting notion that these ancient athletes were genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than we are today.”[1]

This is an interesting finding. The historical record seems diverse enough and clear enough to rule out performance exaggeration or misreporting, an issue that always should be considered carefully. Perhaps some subtle difference in ship design made a huge difference in performance. That seems highly unlikely.

Were the ancient Greeks genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than persons around the world today? Note that "persons around the world" is the relevant comparator, because the market for athletic performance today is globalized. No negative selection for endurance seems plausible for all human beings around the globe over the past 2500 years. Genetic differences, it seems to me, isn't a plausible explanation.

Trireme crew performance is puzzling. I personally believe in the potential of modern athletes.

* * *

[1] Quote from Leeds University Press Release. These findings are also reported in Stephanie Pain, "When men were gods," New Scientist, Feb. 10, 2007, pp. 46-7. That article provides a few additional details. It notes that ancient writers consistently indicate that triremes crews could row at 13-15 kilometers per hour for 16 hours or long. Modern measurements indicate that 30% of the crew's power output is lost. But even with 100% power efficiency, the crew could not achieve ancient performance. The New Scientist article is not scholarly documentation of the study. Such documentation apparently is not yet available.

Tags: classics, endurance, genetics, history, performance, rowing, sports, trireme

12 Comments