In 1900, less than 10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones, and the Model-T was still a full decade away

This is the last episode in The Atlantic's trilogy on household spending in the 20th century. First, I followed shifting family budgets between 1900 and 2003. Second, I explained why food seems so much cheaper at the dawn of the 21st century. Those two posts were all about numbers.

But you can't measure a century's progress by numbers alone.

It's not just that life expectancy at birth has grown from 49 years in 1900 to 78 today, but also the quality of our lives has been improved by law (e.g.: new safety and anti-discrimination laws), by culture (e.g.: women's ascent in college and the workplace) and by technology.

That's why this graph below from Visual Economics, which shows the adoption rate of new technologies across the century, is one of my new favorites -- and a cousin to this beaut, which Alexis made viral ...

... Click it. Print it. Take your time with it. That's a lot of linear data. One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line:

-- In 1900, <10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones