Smartwatch health tracking is the latest step in a 2,000-year habit

mind & bodyanalysisWellcome CollectionAntiquity–present · Italy

Smartwatch health tracking is the latest step in a 2,000-year habit

the gist

Tracking health is much older than the smartwatch. Early censuses, for tax and military service, also revealed who was healthy enough to work or fight. In 17th-century London, the Bills of Mortality listed weekly deaths and their causes during plagues, and John Graunt analysed them in 1662, one of the first uses of statistics for public health. Governments and armies later tracked illness for planning, and in the 20th century individuals began measuring themselves with scales, thermometers and then wearable devices. Each step turned the body into data.

so what

The long history puts today's health apps in context, raising questions about who owns health data, and how tracking helps or distresses people.

fun fact

John Graunt, a haberdasher, was elected to the Royal Society in 1662 for his work on the Bills of Mortality.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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