How Many Monkeys Can It Hold?

“Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.”  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain.

This was how Twain introduced Huck Finn to the world, in chapter six of Tom Sawyer.  Even with such a prodigious head start, Huck still beat out Tom as the most memorable of Twain’s characters.  I can still remember the first time I read that paragraph—I was immediately filled with a sense of wonder.  Specifically, I wondered just what the hell was a hogshead.  I probably wasn’t the only one to wonder, because eight years later, when Twain gave Huck his own book, whenever he mentioned Huck’s temporary housing, he called it a ‘sugar hogshead’, furnishing a small clue.

Consulting the family’s venerable 1957 set of World Book Encyclopedias—an early analog version of Google—I learned that a hogshead was a barrel, a big barrel.  No, it had nothing to do with hogs, pigs, or even transporting bacon.  The term comes from the 15th century English term 'hogges hede', a large 63-gallon wooden cask, two and a half feet wide and four feet tall, more than big enough for a boy to sleep in, and perfect is incorrect:  they are casks.  A barrel is a specific size of a cask.  (All barrels are casks, but not all casks are barrels.)

Centuries ago, barrel makers (more properly called coopers) discovered that the best barrels were made from white oak obtained from 75-year-old trees, whose sawn timber was left to age for a minimum of six months.  After a master cooper quarter sawed the staves and bound them together with iron rings, the barrels had to age for several more months while the fibers making up the white oak staves slowly dried, and the tannins in the wood leached out.  Master coopers created watertight casks, while ‘slack coopers’ crafted the less demanding casks to transport dry goods.

Among the many reasons the Spanish Armada failed to defeat the English in 1587 was the raid by Sir Francis Drake on the seaport town of Cadiz the year before.  Besides looting and sacking the town, Drake set fire to some 1700 tons of barrel staves that were drying in preparation to make barrels to store food and water for the invasion fleet.  When the Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel to attack England in 1588, the fleet’s food and water were improperly stored in green barrels which quickly contaminated their contents, poisoning the crew.  The crew of one ship, attempting to make landfall, found themselves too sick to maneuver their ship properly and simply ran it aground, ripping the bottom out.

Assuming that no pyromaniac pirates have been around, our seasoned barrel is ready for most uses, but bourbon distilleries learned that if the insides of the barrel was scorched with fire, it gave the aged whiskey a distinctive color and taste.  Across the Atlantic, the distillers of the best scotch learned that if the empty second-hand bourbon barrels were re-scorched, it produced superior scotch.  (Only one of the reasons that Laphroaig—my favorite scotch—tastes so good.)

Since barrels were so widely used for so many different commodities, it is not surprising that there was a wide and confusing variety of sizes of barrels and a guild was organized to regulate the training and pay of the coopers.  What is surprising is that the guild is still operating.  Among the many other guild halls in London, you can find the Worshipful Company of Coopers, which received its royal charter in 1501.  

Just an abbreviated list of the various sizes of wooden casks is confusing, but there is at least a little order to them:  There are 8 pints in a gallon, 4.5 gallons in a pin, 2 pins in a firkin, 2 firkins in a kilderkin, 2 kilderkins in a barrel, 1.5 barrels in a hogshead, 2 hogsheads in a butt, and finally 2 butts in a tun.  If someone says they drank a butt load, they consumed 108 gallons.  If they drank a tun, they imbibed 252 gallons.  The tun is a measurement of volume, not weight, though by a strange coincidence, a tun of water weighs a ton.

What prompted me to think about all of this was a discussion in an economics class about the global oil market.  When someone asked how many gallons of crude were in a barrel, the prompt—and incorrect—answer was 55 gallons.  I volunteered that 55 gallons was the capacity of a modern drum, and that oil barrels were 42 gallons.  No one believed me, even after I explained that when I grew up in West Texas, we learned arithmetic in elementary schools by calculating oil depletions allowances.  I didn’t tell them that as true native-born Texans; The Doc and I actually own a whopping 1/214th of an aging oil well.  The well currently pays an annual royalty not quite sufficiently large enough to buy a single breakfast burrito.  

So how did the international standard for a barrel of oil come to be the somewhat arbitrary measurement of 42 gallons?

It started in America with Edwin L. Drake’s 1859 oil discovery at Titusville, Pennsylvania.  This was the first commercial oil well, setting off a drilling frenzy that today we would refer to as an ‘oil boom’.  For years, the oil was shipped in anything available, a confusing variety of hogshead, barrels, tierces, kilderkins, empty whiskey barrels and just about anything else you could fill and then hammer a plug into the bung hole.  Eventually, people noticed that the 42-gallon tierce, previously commonly used to transport fish, when full of crude oil weighed almost exactly 300 pounds—about as big a container as could be handled by one experienced worker.  Just as important, 20 of the wooden tierces would completely fill a standard railroad flat car.  

Within a few years, the tierce had become the standard container for oil transport.  So many oak barrels were needed that Standard Oil maintained its own oak forests to insure a steady supply of barrels, manufacturing so many that they were able to drop the production cost of a new barrel down to only $1.50.  The wooden barrels could be tipped over by a single man, then using the extended middle of barrel, could be rolled into place, before being righted.  For years after the steel barrels replaced the wooden variety in 1902, the steel barrel retained the traditional shape.  Though oil is no longer shipped in these containers, it is still sold in 42 gallon lots.

Personally, I find it a little difficult to visualize how much a barrel or a hogshead of something is, but I know a trick to help.  A standard American bathtub holds exactly 42 gallons, or one barrel.  It turns out that “a barrel of bathtub gin” is redundant…sort of.

Thanks for the Tamales

There are moments in history when leaders suddenly find themselves in a position to say something important, uttering words that will be remembered through all eternity.  Long after people have forgotten the circumstances, or even who made the statement, exactly what they said seems destined to be recorded in history books forever.  Let you give you a few examples:

During the Battle of the Bulge, when the 101st Airborne Division was surrounded at Bastogne with little hope of survival, the German army sent a demand for the Americans to surrender.  While few remember that it was General Anthony McAuliffe who replied, most people do know his answer, “Nuts.”  

Before King Xerxes invaded Greece, he attempted the impossible: he tried to get the warlike Spartans to surrender and accept Persian rule.  Confident that his much larger army could conquer the independent city-states of Greece, he implored the Spartan King Leonidas to surrender his arms.  In a reply that would later be echoed by numerous armies in later wars, Leonidas answered, “Molon labe.” (“Come and take them.”)

As a Roman statesman, Cato the Elder was furious that Rome had ended each of her two wars with Carthage by demanding only a tribute instead of the city’s total destruction.  For years, Cato ended each of his speeches in the Senate with the phrase, "Carthago delenda est!" (“Carthage must be destroyed.”)  Cato eventually got his wish when Carthage was burned in the Third Punic War and her surviving inhabitants were enslaved.  (The notion that the Roman army sowed the ground of Carthage with salt so that nothing could grow there is a 19th century invention.)

I was tempted to add the battle cry of the Finnish troops fighting the Russians during World War II, "Tulta munille!" (“Fire at their balls!”).  Unfortunately, this seems to be an invention of Väinö Linna's World War II novel, The Unknown Soldier.  If you have never read this excellent novel, you can read it free here.

As you have probably guessed by now, I have a nomination for another great line from a leader—one you have probably never heard of.  

Pascual Orozco was not your typical general of the Mexican Revolution.  Of Basque heritage, he was tall, fair-haired, and well-educated, and he had been a fairly successful businessman before the fighting began.  Born in the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico, Orozco was a muleskinner and was experienced in using long lines of mules to move men and supplies through the rugged terrain of the Chihuahuan mountains, which skill would become useful during the violent years of fighting in the Mexican Revolution.  The small mines of the region were yielding significant amounts of gold so that Orozco hired armed guards and earned enough transporting ore for the miners that he was able to purchase his own small gold mine. Then, recognizing a business opportunity, Orozco set up a series of small stores in the remote towns that made up border regions just south of the United States.

Dissatisfied with the corrupt government of President-For-Life Porfirio Diaz (who had made life difficult for businessmen who lacked political connections or great wealth—neither of which Orozco possessed), he raised a band of soldiers and joined the nascent revolution of Francisco Madero in 1911.  Since Madero’s revolution was incredibly small and highly unlikely to be effective against the large, professional army of a Mexican president who was backed by the United States, Madero eagerly accepted the support of inexperienced men like Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa (the bandit and cattle rustler who was also remaking himself into a military general).

Orozco, the experienced muleskinner, proved to be very effective at logistics and led his army to a series of small victories.  Mexico’s professional army depended on the nation’s railroads for deployments and the revolutionary forces soon learned that they were relatively safe if they moved through the canyons and deserts where there were no railroads.  When Mexico’s government seemed to be powerless to stop the revolution, popular support for President Diaz gradually vanished like the morning fog when the sun rises.  President Porfirio Diaz (until then the longest ruling dictator in Latin American history) eventually bowed to the inevitable and fled—along with the contents of the Mexican treasury—to a comfortable exile in Paris.

Madero became Mexico’s president and quickly learned that starting a revolution was a hell of a lot easier than ending one.  As he appointed men to various offices, there was no good office for a muleskinner/general who had little professional training.  When he offered Orozco a position in the Army—the same army that Orozco had so recently been fighting—Orozco had his feelings hurt and abandoned Madero.  Before long, he was again part of the revolution, fighting this time  against his former leader and within a few short years, the revolutionary general was ambushed and killed in West Texas by the Texas Rangers as he gathered men and horses for yet another revolution in Northern Mexico.

However, Orozco’s death occurred years after he uttered one of those great lines that deserves to be reprinted forever in the history books.  While fighting in the mountains of Chihuahua for Madero, Orozco proved to be a ruthless, if opportunistic, military commander.  There is ample evidence that he frequently used his army to attack his business competitors, “requisitioning” goods from the stores of his rivals while sparing his own stores.  Nor could captured soldiers expect clemency, as Orozco usually had prisoners quickly executed.

Early in the revolution, Orozco led his men into the badlands of Northern Mexico, and set up an ambush at the Cañón del Mal Paso (Canyon of the Evil Pass).  When the Mexican soldiers of General Navarro blundered into the trap, most of the men were slaughtered and the rest hurriedly retreated.  (You would kind of think the name of the canyon might have warned the men.)

Orozco had his men strip the bodies of the dead soldiers and sent their uniforms back to President Diaz with a note that read, "Ahí te van las hojas, mándame más tamales". 

In English, that translates as "Here are the wrappers, send me more tamales." 

We’re Poised to Fail Again

Even as the White House press secretary was denying the existence of inflation, the Treasury Department was announcing a 6.2% cost of living adjustment for Social Security recipients.  The first conclusive evidence of inflation is always the denial of its existence.

Unfortunately, the second sign of an imminent period of rising inflation is always some elected fool (pardon the redundancy) calling for price controls in an effort to stop it.  It is simply amazing how many times the same failed tactic has been tried to stop a market from following its inevitable path—Without one exception or even a marginal success in recorded history.

Don’t just take my word for it:  I recommend reading "Forty Centuries of Wage & Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation” by Robert L. Schuettinger and Eamonn F. Butler.  The book brilliantly outlines how the attempt to “set” prices always fails to reduce prices or to even eliminate shortages.  Using examples from Hammurabi, Ancient Egypt, Rome, Nixon, and all the way to today’s inept leaders, the result of such practices has always inevitably been abject failure.  To quote the authors:

By giving producer and consumers the wrong signals because “low” prices to producers limit supply and “low” prices to consumers stimulate demand, price controls widen the gap between supply and demand.

Of particular interest is the chapter on the French Revolution and the “Law of the Maximum”.  Over roughly twenty months, the Revolutionary Committee tried just about every form of price control (before or since), ultimately managing to “control” the most agriculturally rich country of Europe into a protracted period of starvation and economic collapse.

Despite price controls having a long record of total failure as an economic policy, politicians keep finding new ways to repackage the same old failures.  Under the guise of rent controls, minimum wages, or moratoria on evictions—and despite the name changes—these measures are all simply price controls and they will end up doing more harm than any supposed good.  The eviction moratoria will inevitably lead to higher rents and a housing shortage.  Even as you read this, landlords all over the country are converting apartments into condominiums.

Recently, I read of a proposal for a novel new method of price control that started in France, under which grocery stores are to be forbidden by law from disposing of unsold produce—it has to be donated to the poor.  Although it’s supposed aim is charity, it will inevitably lead to the stores’ purchasing less produce from farmers, lowering production, and leading to higher prices and less choice.   (Notice how the people who passed the law are being charitable with the property of someone else.)

Despite anyone’s best intentions to the contrary, market forces are as fixed as mathematics.  You can no more change the laws of supply and demand than you can pass a law successfully invalidating the Pythagorean theorem…Not that politicians haven’t tried.  Let me tell you about my favorite example.

My parents were older than sliced bread.  Literally, since sliced bread was invented in 1928 and both of my parents were born years before Otto Frederick Rohwedder started selling bakeries a single loaf slicing machine that rapidly changed the industry.  (While not the first bakery to use the new machine, it was Wonder Bread that made the novelty of uniformly sliced bread known across America.  

Sliced bread was more convenient to use, and housewives with large families hated the chore of slicing large amounts of bread before meals.  More convenient to use meant that more people ate bread, increasing sales and rewarding the stores, the bakeries, and the wheat farmers.  

Then came World War II and an era of price controls and rationing to meet the needs of full mobilization.  As is usually the case, the price controls created an active black market and raised prices, but because of international demand, production stayed high.  In America, the price of wheat grew by 25% while production rose by 50%, with most of the excess production being used to feed our allies.

While direct examination of the American wartime wage and price controls is made difficult by the elimination of some models of production, a steady decline in quality, and an active black market, it is obvious that the mandated measures failed—wages and prices still rose.

On January 18, 1943, the Food Administrator, Claude R. Wickard mandated that bakeries cease the production of sliced bread.  Reasoning that the metal used to create the slicing machines were needed for the war effort and that sliced bread needed heavier wrapping paper to keep the bread from drying out and becoming stale, Wickard banned the production of sliced bread as a measure to win the war.  The announcement was timed to come out simultaneously with a 10% rise in the cost of bread, hopefully encouraging less consumption.

Unfortunately, there were several things wrong with the plan.  First, the bakeries already owned the slicing machines and couldn’t have bought new ones since the factories that normally manufactured them had found more lucrative contracts producing war materials.  Second, after more than a year in the war, the bakeries were used to the vagaries of interrupted supplies and thus had already stocked up with a large supply of the waxed paper to wrap the sliced bread.

Bread consumption actually went up, since most people were unable to slice their bread into uniformly thin slices.  At any rate, there was little need to reduce wheat consumption by 1943:  Rising prices meant that the farmers were already growing more wheat and the government had already stockpiled over a billion bushels of wheat (enough to supply the needs of American consumers for over two years, even if no wheat were grown during that time).  

None of the above reasons was as important to the bureaucrats as the outcries of an angry public.  The public might be willing to ration sugar, automobile tires, and coffee, but even rationed gasoline wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread.  In less than three months, the War Food Administration reversed itself and the supply of sliced bread returned to store shelves on March 8, 1943.

Even with this dismal history, the United States seems poised to once again experiment with price controls.  Gee, I wonder what the results will be.

We Learned This at Valley Forge

The news today carries the tragic story of a Dickenson, Texas city councilman who died of Covid-19 just days after posting on social media about “the folly of vaccinations”.  It is strange to read about so many people being opposed to vaccinations, since I (evidently mistakenly) thought that this was a long-settled topic. 

Being almost as old as dirt, I remember the mass inoculations against smallpox and polio of the fifties—I still have a faint smallpox vaccination scar to prove it.  The vaccines were an incredible success—smallpox has been completely conquered and polio remains endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan.   

And those mass vaccinations some seven decades ago are far from the first such endeavors in American history.  Indeed, the very existence of our country may have depended on the very first large-scale inoculation program conducted at public expense.

In the mid eighteenth century, while smallpox was ravaging most parts of the world, the small British colonies of North America were usually spared from the epidemic.  Outside of a small handful of large settlements like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, most colonists lived in relatively isolated settlements with very little contact with the rest of the world.  While smallpox was not unknown, it was relatively rare.

In 1751, seventeen-year-old George Washington took his half-brother, Lawrence—then suffering from consumption (tuberculosis)—to Barbados for his health.  While there, he accepted an invitation to dine with a wealthy planter despite being warned that members of his family had contracted smallpox.  Ominously, Washington recorded his misgivings about the visit in his diary.  Shortly after the dinner, he writes “Was strongly attacked with the small Pox,”—his last entry in the diary for 24 days.  Washington, of course, eventually recovered, though it took weeks.  Having once had smallpox, Washington carried antibodies, making him immune to the disease.

During the American Revolution, most of the European troops brought to America were immune or benefitted from herd immunity because most had contracted the disease in childhood.  Not so, the American troops:  For the first time in their lives, these soldiers were brought from all of the corners of North America, living in camps with poor sanitation, which provided a perfect breeding ground for all kinds of diseases.  The cases of smallpox immediately began to increase.

There was something that Washington could do:  he could inoculate his troops against smallpox through a process called variolation (named after variola, the virus that causes smallpox).  It involved infecting a thread with live pustular matter from someone with the disease, then embedding the thread into an incision on a healthy person’s arm, deliberately infecting the person with smallpox.  While the patient always became sick, the disease was usually a milder form of the disease.  Still, depending on the source you read, somewhere from 3 to 5% of those treated died from the inoculation…And the patient always took weeks to recover.

Variolation had originated in Western Asia—probably Turkey—and had slowly spread west across Europe.  While the preventive treatment was known, it was still highly controversial and seldom used in the New World.  

Note.  There is a persistent story that Washington inoculated his troops with a different but close variety of the disease, specifically cowpox.  The story goes that milkmaids caught the disease from the cows they cared for, and some alert doctor realized that these milkmaids never caught the more virulent form of the disease.  While the story is quite true, the cowpox method of inoculation was not discovered by Edward Jenner until 1796, well after the end of the Revolutionary War.

Washington had considered inoculating his troops in 1775, but rejected the idea because the treatment would incapacitate at least a third of his troops, inviting an attack from the British.  The general issued orders forbidding the army doctors from using the variolation technique on the troops.  Instead, the general issued travel bans, forbidding visitors from Boston (which was then suffering from a smallpox epidemic) from entering his camp.  In addition, those soldiers who did come down with smallpox were quarantined at a special hospital near Cambridge.

Then, as now, quarantines and travel bans had only limited success.  Over the next year and a half, increasing numbers of Washington’s troops succumbed to the disease.  There were even rumors that the British were intentionally sending infected people to strategic areas in a deliberate attempt to spread the disease.  Though this theory remains unproved, England had employed this tactic during the earlier French and Indian War.

Washington grew increasingly desperate, forcing him to reconsider using variolation to treat his troops.  In a January 6, 1777, letter to John Hancock, Washington wrote "Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army . . . we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy."

Finally, in February 1777, Washington ordered a mandatory inoculation of the troops, to be done in absolute secrecy to prevent a British attack, and to be carried out in stages beginning with the new recruits.  It was hoped that by the time the recruits received their uniforms, weapons, and a modicum of training, they would have recovered from the symptoms caused by the inoculation.  

This was the first mass public health initiative of the new country—one carried out with government funds.

“Finding the smallpox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our army, I have determined that troops shall be inoculated,” he wrote. “This expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects.”

Seldom mentioned in history books, but among the horrific conditions experienced by the troops during the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge was that the poorly fed, inadequately clothed, freezing troops were also suffering from the fevers and chills as a result of variolation.  Still, because of the treatment, not a single regiment among the revolutionary army was unable to fight due to the disease.

While Washington treated his troops, the British felt no need to initiate a similar program in their troops who enjoyed a measure of herd immunity.  As a result, the disease quickly spread among colonials, Native Americans, and slaves who chose to fight alongside the British, often making such units more of liability to the British cause than assets.

By the end of the war, Washington had inoculated some 40,000 of his troops and had lost only fifty due to the illness.  Despite the horrors of battle, a little math reveals that compared to the general population of the colonists left to suffer the ravages of smallpox epidemics that swept across America as the European troops traveled across America, a colonist had a better chance to survive the war as an inoculated soldier on the battlefield than as an uninoculated civilian.  

Then, as now, while there are a few dangers of being vaccinated, they pale in comparison to not being vaccinated.  There is no way of telling how many people have been saved by vaccinations, but the number is at the very least many millions of souls.  Vaccines work so well that most of us—unlike any previous generation in America—do not personally know anyone who has died of smallpox, diphtheria, measles, or polio.  After 250 years, you would think this debate would have ended.