The Birth of Actuarial Science and Life Insurance, Pt. 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and we are continuing
our discussion of actuarial science and insurance. And if you

(00:21):
didn't listen to part one, go back and do that.
This is part two. We're jumping in right where we
left off in the story that includes actuarial science, assurance
and insurance. We define what assurance versus insurance means at
the top of part one, so you'll want that information.
When we left off, we had just discussed the Society

(00:43):
of Assurance for Widows and Orphans, which formed in sixteen
ninety nine to ensure that a person's next of kin
had a financial cushion when the family breadwinner died. And
today we're going to talk about another assurance society and
the various problems that both insurance and assurance companies ran
into in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as
a look at gambling. In seventeen oh six, the Amicable

(01:07):
Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office was founded, and this
is often called the first life insurance company, although technically
it was assurance and not insurance. As with the society
that we mentioned at the end of Monday's episode. Membership
to the society was also capped at two thousand. Members

(01:27):
paid six pounds four pence each year, and at the
close of each year, money that had been collected was
split among the next of kin of any members who
had died that year. If no one had died, or
if very few people had died, the funds could be
unencumbered to pay out annuities to members or for investment

(01:48):
by the society. Those investments included malt tallies, mine venture bonds,
hollow sword blade bonds, and lottery tickets yes, lottery tip.
There was an age requirement that was based in part
on Hallie's tables. Members had to be between the ages

(02:11):
of twelve and forty five to minimize the risk of
too many members dying in any given year. That would
of course drop the payout amounts at the end of
the year, and it would leave the group with far
fewer contributors into the following year. Yeah, in case you
didn't recall, this is different from the assurance society we
talked about at the end of part one, where they

(02:33):
had to pay an amount every time someone died. Everyone
chipped in a set amount to create their payout, whereas
in this case you paid a flat fee every year
and that pool of money was then used to make payouts.
So set up a little bit differently. Things were evolving, Yeah,
try to find the best way. It reminds me a

(02:55):
little bit of some of the mutual aid societies that
numbers on the show before that some times would run
into trouble with just being financially insolvent as their membership
base aged over the years. Yep, we'll talk a little
bit about similar things happening here in a bit. But
in seventeen fifty six James Dodson created the first table

(03:17):
of annual assurance premiums and that used the Edmund Hallie
table that we talked about in Part one as a foundation.
Dodson was born in seventeen ten and became a mathematician,
and at the age of forty he wrote a book
titled The Accountant or The Method of Bookkeeping, and this
laid out how various businesses might model their account keeping

(03:37):
to know at all times what their debts and profits were,
as well as how future expenditures and income might play out,
and these were not theoretical models. It was like a workbook.
He laid out, for example, how exactly a shoemaker should
set up their books, with lists of raw materials that
might be part of that industry to include in their expenses,

(03:58):
calculations they should make for retail space, etc. It really
was a how to manual, and when he prepared his
table of premiums, he was motivated by frustration at having
been excluded from the Amicable Society as they did not
admit anyone over the age of forty five, and he
was forty six at this time. There is also a

(04:19):
version of this story that he was actually asked by
other people who were interested in forming a new society
to do this, but we do know that there was
this age issue. So he envisioned, with this new data set,
a new insurance company that could use more up to
date information to create more inclusive insurance options, and his

(04:40):
table was a way to modernize Hollie's data for the
mid eighteenth century, and just as he had laid out
how to's on setting up various other businesses in his
earlier writing, he wrote out what was essentially a guidebook
for insurance companies, including the principles of a good business
and ways to be both equitable and profit. In the

(05:01):
documents he prepared for the more comprehensive assurance operation, he
included the following four tables. A table of decrements wherein
the hazard of life is esteemed to be as great
as any author has conceived it to be, or as
can be deduced for many bills of mortality hitherto made public.
A table of the present values of annuities of one

(05:23):
pound each for single lives, computed at three percent compound
interest from the beforegoing principles. A table of premiums payable
for ensuring at one payment one hundred pounds on a
life of a given age, deduced from the preceding table
of the values of annuities on lives. A table of
annual premiums payable for ensuring one hundred pounds during the

(05:46):
whole continuance of a single life of any of the
following ages, according to the beforegoing principles. Dotson died at
the age of forty seven, seven months after his work
was used to petition the Privy Council for a charter
for a new company. So that seems kind of like
a cruel twist of fate. Yeah, So just to clarify
in case any of that didn't make obvious to you,

(06:09):
he was basically going, okay, but what if we included
people that are older than forty five, but they just
have to pay a different amount, Like they pay in
a little bit more because we know there's greater risk.
Like he was the first one who really laid out
how that might all work. The first mutual insurance company
was the Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorship.

(06:31):
That company was established in London in seventeen sixty two
by Edward Rowe Moores, who had known Dodson and had
literally picked up where Dodson had left off. Two hundred
years later, Dodson was still invoked by actuaries when speaking
of his contribution. Ah Rowle, writing for the Journal of
the Institute of Actuaries in nineteen sixty two, states quote

(06:54):
life assurance was born in the middle of the period
seventeen forty to seventeen eighty. Johnson's England came when it
did because the climate was favorable. England was prosperous. The
mathematics of life contingencies was at hand, and there was
an unsatisfied demand for the protection that life assurance can give.
It also came when it did because one man, James

(07:16):
Dodson FRS, was determined that it should largely responsible as
he was, for the availability of the necessary mathematics. He
also realized fully the benefits that life assurance could confirm.
He conceived the vision of a mutual life assurance society
conducted on scientific lines, and was all in all the

(07:36):
ideal architect of the equitable to be. Morris is often
cited as the first person to assign the title of
actuary to the work that he and others were doing.
Was described by an actuary historian as having quote exceptional
ability in academic studies, yet with a quarrelsome temper. He
probably needed to have some fight because setting up a

(07:59):
new sort of businessiness was a lot of work, and
both the establishing process in the early days of explaining
how the whole operation worked to clients was arduous. He
received his master's degree at the Merchant Taylor's School at
Queen's College, Oxford in seventeen fifty three. He was very smart,
with a broad range of knowledge, and was considered to

(08:20):
be an eccentric. We don't know really why he started
using the word actuary for the work that was being
done in the field of assurance calculation. It's chalked up
in some accounts as possibly just being a word he
plucked from history because of his eccentricity. Yeah, we'll talk
a little bit about his eccentricity on behind the scenes,

(08:41):
because he's a pretty interesting figure. But regarding the use
of the title of actuary, M. E. Augborn, Joint Actuary
of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, wrote in the Journal
of the Institute of Actuaries in nineteen fifty six about
Moores's claim to the term, opening with actuary, it is
a curious word by which to describe the profession to

(09:02):
which it has become attached. There is no obvious connection
between the meaning of the word and the professional duties
which it signifies. Moreover, the title of actuary is still
in use for other officials who may buy their duties.
Have a more direct claim to the title from its
original derivation. The Latin word actuarius is the word that
actuary is derived from. In Latin, this could be assigned

(09:27):
to various jobs, including wage disbursement as a borrow word.
Actuary in the English language referred to registrars or clerks,
or to secretaries or accountants who kept a company's books,
But then, thanks to Mores's use of the word, it
also came to mean an insurance official who used to
statistical tables to calculate premiums or manage financial risks. But

(09:51):
Mores included the list of duties he thought the actuary
of the company should perform in the Equitable Society's formation paperwork,
and it included things that were not just calculations of tables.
The actuary was expected to go to work each day
except Sunday, write and keep the books, enter the applications
for membership and all transactions into a daily journal, and

(10:14):
enter the minutes of the society's meetings. People of a
higher rank were actually the ones responsible for the decisions
regarding finance numbers. Yeah, so it's not quite the role
of actuary as we see it now. So next we're
gonna jump to Wales and talk about a man who
redefined what that role was to be more like what
we would think today. But before we talk about William Morgan,

(10:37):
we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. William Morgan was
born on May twenty sixth, seventeen fifty in Newcastle, Glamorgan, Wales.
It's believed that his birth date is based on the
Julian calendar, as other records show his date of birth

(10:59):
as June sixth. That was likely the date after the
Gregorian calendar was adopted, which happened just two years after
he was born. His father, also named William Morgan, was
a physician and an apothecary, and his mother was Sarah
Price Morgan. The Morgan's had eight children. William was the
third and the first son, and his father decided that

(11:19):
he should also go into medicine. There's a gap in
the records regarding William's early schooling. The Dictionary of Welsh
Biography notes that there aren't records of his attendance at
the Cowbridge Grammar School, although his brother George is listed
as a student, but it seems likely that William also
attended the school is mentioned by him in his writings.

(11:40):
William was not it seems entirely sure about the plan
for him to become a doctor, but he left home
at nineteen to go to London for medical study. His
first apprenticeship with an apothecary, appears to have ended in
some kind of physical altercation with his boss, at which
point his uncle on his mother's side, Richard Price, helped

(12:01):
him get a second apprenticeship. During this same period, Richard
Price published the book Observations on Reversionary Payments that was
in seventeen seventy one. Price's book established systems and formulas
that laid out how annuities could work for pensioners and widows.
Not long after Price released the book, his brother in

(12:22):
law and William Morgan's father died, and this meant that
even though William was still technically a medical student, he
had to go home to Wales to try to keep
his father's medical practice running. This did not go well
at all. I saw one write up that suggested he
was too young and people didn't trust him. He also

(12:43):
may have had a mild physical deformity that made people
think he was not capable of being a doctor, which
is beloney. But it just did not work out. He
was not going to have a career in medicine. So
soon he went back to London and he asked his
uncle Richard Price for advice, and Price reportedly asked William
if he knew anything about math, and William told him

(13:04):
that he did not, but he sure would be happy
to learn. So Price, who was working at this point
with the Society for Equitable Assurances, found his nephew a
low level job there. In less than two years into
his time with the company, then twenty five year old
William became its actuary and he served in that role
for more than fifty years. This is an important moment

(13:27):
in actuarial history because William, working with his uncle, refined
actuary science in significant ways. Richard Price published a data
set called the Northampton Table in seventeen eighty. It used
a long term study of the parish of Northampton to
assemble detailed mortality statistics. The table included more than four

(13:48):
decades of information, so it was pretty robust, and William
Morgan used this table to further refine the formulas that
were used in calculating premiums. He wrote two papers on
the matter, both of which were presented by his uncle
to the Royal Society, and this resulted in William being
made a fellow there. William's entry into the actuary field

(14:09):
is recognized as important because he was able to advance
the mathematics of it to a point where the Equitable
Assurance Company flourished, and he advised other companies at a
time when many were still struggling to make policy payouts
and stay afloat. In eighteen oh six, the Amicable Society
reorganized and they adopted a graduated scale of premiums based

(14:30):
on Morgan's work. Though many other men were working on
these concepts before him, Morgan's contributions to the advancement of
his field were so significant that he's often called the
father of actuarial science, and he has often called the
first true actuary because of his valuable service to the company.
When he retired after fifty six years, he continued to

(14:53):
receive his full salary amount annually until his death. He
sometimes considered the first real actual wis in the sense
that we used the word today, because he had both
medical and mathematical expertise, and he could use those to
elevate the position of actuary beyond the more secretarial duties
that had initially been laid out for the position. He

(15:14):
could make and refine tables, really analyze liability from a
medical standpoint, and calculate premiums based on both. When William
Morgan was right in the middle of his career. A
man named Jacob Shoemaker opened the first actuary office in
North America. That was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in eighteen oh nine,
and that was the Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on Lives

(15:37):
and Granting Annuities. By eighteen twenty three, Boston also had
a life insurance company, and in eighteen thirty so did
New York. The first mutual life insurance company in North America.
That's a company that's owned by its policyholders open in
the eighteen forties. Forming a society of actuaries in the
US was discussed for decades before it finally got off

(16:00):
the ground. The Actuarial Society of America was established in
eighteen eighty nine with just thirty eight members, and it
began publishing an actuarial periodical called Transactions. As actuary work
and insurance companies were growing in the US and Europe,
Britain experienced an event called the Insurance Controversy in eighteen

(16:21):
fifty two. A growing concern about the way insurance and
assurance companies were operating led to a call to the
Board of Trade to investigate, and it became apparent that
over the course of several years at the end of
the eighteen forties and into the eighteen fifties, a group
of new assurance associations had taken in seven hundred forty

(16:42):
five thousand and ten pounds, They had disbursed eighty seven thousand,
nine hundred and eighty nine pounds in claims and annuities,
and had spent two hundred eighty seven thousand, three hundred
thirty nine pounds on operating expenses. That meant they had
spent more than fifty fifty percent of the money they
had taken in, leaving a relatively small sum to invest

(17:05):
and to pay out as claims arose. That led to
accusations of ignorant business practices at best and corruption at worst.
Ys Tracy mentioned often these kinds of societies would start
to break down because the finances just didn't work out,
and like right out of the gate, they were spending
way more than they should be, and this led to

(17:26):
an examination of existing laws and calls for reform from
the Institute of Actuaries, including the recommendation that a person
had to pass examinations to become an actuary. You couldn't
just say I'm good at math. This is my job.
The Parliamentary committee that prepared an extensive report on the
matter noted that one big problem was that you couldn't

(17:47):
really legislate away fraud. It was already against the law
and swindlers were always going to try it, but that
a need for change was really recognized. The committee report
noted that the field of assurance operated very differently from
almost any other business, so trying to adapt existing business
law to it was obviously not working. The remainder of

(18:09):
the eighteen fifties were a time of new legislation and
efforts to head off abuses in the industry in the UK,
and one of those changes was that life assurance companies
were protected by a limited liability law, meaning members were
protected at new upfront how much they could lose if
things went completely wrong with the assurance association. In eighteen

(18:29):
sixty nine, the Institute of Actuaries published a new, more
accurate mortality table and that was considered far more accurate
and scientifically compiled than its predecessors. To collect data for it,
the Institute collected information from twenty British life assurance offices,
which included a total of one hundred and forty seven
thousand counted people who had health exams when they joined

(18:52):
assurance societies and were pronounced healthy. It tracked the number
of deaths within the group. The Institute published alongside this
table a monetary analysis of it. So we're going to
talk about some of the challenges that faced the actuarial
sciences and the insurance industry in the twentieth century, right
after we hear from some of the stuff you missed in

(19:14):
history classes sponsors. On September second, eighteen ninety five, the
first International Congress of Actuaries was held. Brussels, Belgium was
the host city, and many cities have hosted it over

(19:34):
the decades. It moves every time. It has convened at
roughly four year intervals ever since, the most recent having
been held in Sydney, Australia in twenty twenty three, and
September second remains International Actuaries Day. The organizing group was
named the Comitte Parmenent de Concreis dactua, or Standing Committee
of Actuarial Congresses. It was officially renamed the International Actuarial

(19:59):
Association in nineteen sixty eight. The early twentieth century was
a time of extreme challenge and growth for actuarial science.
There were suddenly a lot of new circumstances that changed
life expectancy, in some cases dramatically, in the course of
just a few decades. The airplane was invented. Maybe not

(20:20):
as big of an effect now, but early airplanes. Yes,
there were two World wars. There was an influenza epidemic,
the Great Depression, the beginning of the social security system
in the US, and advances in science and technology that
changed quality of life while also introducing new risks. At

(20:40):
the same time, an insurance shift that came from the
corporate sector had to be incorporated into actuarial science. As
companies started to offer group insurance to employees and pension
plans became both more common and more complex, All of
those benefits and their costs had to be accounted for
so that insurance companies could set their rates and know

(21:02):
both the risks and potential profitability of their plans. Also,
during the first half of the twentieth century, multiple professional
actuarial organizations formed in the US. This resulted in a
lot of cases where an actuary was a member of
multiple groups that essentially had the same purposes and goals,
and in nineteen forty nine, several of these groups merged

(21:25):
to form the Society of Actuaries, headquartered in Chicago. In
the time since then, of course, actuarial science has continued
to encountershifts that impact the way their work assesses things
like life expectancy. Additionally, the computer age has meant that
not only has computing power enabled great calculation capability and

(21:46):
machine generated tables, but it's also brought more variables with it,
so the work continues to evolve. I imationed that COVID
threw a big wrench into all of all of actuarial scie.
I remember seeing some threads that were about like actuarial

(22:06):
data that was tracking what was happening in terms of
like life expectancy and long COVID and all of that stuff.
And I'm saying that from memories, not something I could
suddenly call up without doing some more googling. Today, though,
becoming an actuary takes a while. In addition to schooling,

(22:29):
there are multiple exams and additional certifications that are pretty
important to career development and progression. That said, though, it's
a career that routinely appears on best jobs lists because
it remains in demand with a good salary range and
growth opportunities. US News and World Report ranks actuary as

(22:50):
number eight in Best Business Jobs, number thirteen in Best
stem jobs, and number twenty two in best paying jobs,
and number twenty seven in one hundred Best Jobs, with
a salary rating of eight point one out of ten
and above medium scores and growth stress and work life balance. Listen,

(23:11):
did I have a moment while doing this research where
I went, should I have become an actuary? Not that
my job isn't great, but like I don't know, it
doesn't show up on the top top one hundred lists. Yeah,
I'm not gonna lie. I had the same thing when
I read this paragraph, and then I thought about, you know,
my lifelong math struggle, right right, this is the trick

(23:35):
if only. The thing that we have not talked about
yet and I feel like is almost becoming the elephant
in the podcast room is the perception that insurance is
a form of gambling. But it is sometimes described that way,
and whether it is or isn't has been debated by
people for a very long time. Writing for the Connecticut

(23:57):
Insurance Law Journal in two thousand and eight, Timothy Auburn
opened his analysis of the matter with quote. More directly
than any other enterprise apart from slavery, life insurance set
a price on human life. As it evolved in Britain
during the nineteenth century, the insurance industry introduced a dizzying
number of variations on this theme. For the individual purchasing

(24:20):
an insurance policy, the value of life was translated into
the sum required to care for dependence, loss of access
to a wife's inheritance should she die before her father,
the sum lost to a creditor in the event of
death occurring prior to repayment, and the loss of livelihood
suffered by a tenant whose lease ended with the life
of a third party. All these reasons for buying insurance

(24:42):
established an equivalence between mortality and monetary value, a death
nexus that precisely and morbidly expressed the cash nexus derided
by Thomas Carlyle as the moral failing of British society.
Auburn also notes that quote, since nobody knew for certain
when they would die, a life insurance policy was also,

(25:03):
by definition a wager, and since wagers occupied a quite
different category, there was always at least a potential for
the Life office to take on the darker colors of
the gambling den. To be clear, in case you think
I'm saying he's saying something he isn't. Auburn is not
saying that insurance is gambling, but he's setting the stage
for the discussion of how Britain addressed this concern from

(25:26):
a legal perspective. In Part one, we mentioned the sixteen
ninety case in which a man named Thornborough took out
a policy on a man he was not related to
who was ill as an act of fraud. That kind
of thing started happening frequently, and over a few decades
it became tied to another rather callous sort of entertainment

(25:46):
that was popular in gentlemen's clubs in the eighteenth century,
and that was betting on the deaths of strangers. Taking
out life insurance policies was a way to get around
gambling laws. If a person held a policy on somebody,
it was defensible, at least per the letter of the law,
for them to speculate on when that person might die.
But in reality, the money spent on the policy was

(26:08):
often from a gambling pool. The betters would pay in
to cover the premium and each place a bet on
when the insured person would die, and then the winner
got the payout. It's so troubling to me that this
was an activity in clubs that were considered gentlemen's clubs,
because it's the least gentlemanly behavior I can imagine. But

(26:32):
to combat this grisly form of amusement and the insurance
fraud that was often hand in hand with it, Britain
passed the Life Assurance Act of seventeen seventy four. It
was also known as the Gambling Act, and the language
of that act stipulated that no one could hold a
policy on another person's life if they did not have
a legitimate interest in that person's life, and that all

(26:53):
life insurance policies had to include a list of beneficiaries' names.
It also forbid ensuring you couldn't, for example, take out
a policy on someone that was worth a great deal
more than they were worth financially. This was to deter
people from trying to get rich from the passing of
a family member through insurance. This act impacted insurance in

(27:15):
ways that it really didn't intend to. Its language was
ambiguous in some areas, and it enabled people to find loopholes,
there were instances where the difference between insuring people and
ensuring items got kind of fuzzy. Additionally, as insurance became
less exclusively in upper class luxury and something that the

(27:35):
working class also used, some of the provisions of the
Act excluded financial interests of beneficiaries that were actually completely reasonable.
One of the main reasons people took out life insurance
policies was so that their families wouldn't be unduly burdened
by the expense of a funeral at a time when
they were grieving. That's something people still use it for today,

(27:58):
but per the Gambling Act, burial was not an insurable interest,
but policies continued to be issued knowing that the money
would be used that way. Eventually, the law caught up
to reality with some amendments, but for a while insurers
were issuing policies that they knew were technically illegal. Yeah,

(28:19):
I didn't see this. I don't remember the statistic, but
I saw one that was like more than fifty percent
of policies could have technically been stricken because people knew
that's what they were being taken out for. This issue
of people thinking of insurance as gambling is not exactly settled.
There are plenty of fairly recent articles about it. In
twenty seventeen, a BBC News article written by Tim Harford

(28:42):
sums up the distinction this way. Legally and culturally, there
is a clear distinction between gambling and insurance. Economically, the
difference is less visible, and an article published in the
journal Gaming Law Review in Economics in twenty fourteen, gambling
law expert I nelsonsse noted that quote insurance is of

(29:02):
course gambling. Looking at just the required three elements, insurance
has consideration, prize, and chance. A policyholder puts up a
sum with the expectation of winning a larger sum if
a certain contingent future event occurs. Insurance meets the legal
definition of gambling. The big difference, according to Rose, is

(29:22):
that in the case of gambling, the gambler hopes the
payoff event will happen, and in the case of insurance,
the insured hopes it won't. Dune dun dumn. That's really
the big distinction, sort of. There are still people. I mean,
you'll find it literally anywhere. If you google is insurance
gambling on the Internet, you will find people on both

(29:43):
sides of that debate. That are very very adamant of
the correctness of their position. Anyway, that's our really very brief.
I feel like look at insurance, assurance and actuary science,
which I find quite fascinating. Now I have some fun

(30:05):
to me listener mail. Okay, this is from our listener Caroline.
He writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy Seasons, greetings in a
happy new year to you both from Harrow in England.
After listening to the seventeenth century roots of the metric system,
I thought I would write to tell you the effect
of growing up in England in the seventies and eighties
on the way I measure things. As mentioned in the podcast,

(30:26):
this was when schools in the UK started teaching the
metric system. However, the outside world was still very much imperial.
We have a little progress in using the metric system,
but it has stalled, leaving me and others as a
kind of hybrid. To give you some examples, when talking
about the weather, I only understand how hot it is
if the temperature is in celsius. But if taking a
child's temperature, I'm a nanny, I find it easier to

(30:48):
tell if they have a high fever. If I'm measuring
in fahrenheit. When measuring lengths, I can only use millimeter, centimeter,
and meter, but long distances need to be in miles.
I have no clue about what feet and yards, but
most people around my age do. When cooking or baking,
I can use both metric and imperial measurements for both
wet and dry ingredients. While having a stalled system change

(31:11):
may sound like it would be confusing, it actually seems
like it's the best for the moment. I suspect there
would be pandemonium if they tried to make a full
change all in one go. Thanks so much for your podcast.
I love the topics you talk about, and I always
learn something new. I also love the behind the scenes.
They're my favorite episodes. You both have amazing sounding lass,
which always makes me feel happy. Kind regards, Caroline, Caroline,

(31:32):
this is such a sweet email, but also this is wonderful.
I kind of love this idea of living in both,
but also I can see how it would become tricky
potentially when traveling, Like if you go to a country
that is all metric, how do you know if someone
is running a fever? I think that's thank goodness, is

(31:57):
what I will say. For smartphones because I'm whipping that
out to do calculations all the time. I remember when
we went to Italy, which was a trip that got
delayed several times because of COVID, and when we were
there there were rules about, you know, isolating if you
had symptoms and stuff, and I remember the like it

(32:22):
was a metric fever line, yes, and being like, oh,
this is good to know it's in metric. And then
I was like, wait a minute, my thermometer. It's not
it's not in celsius. It's in fahrenheit. Yeah. Yeah. I
on the flip of that, when the pandemic was really

(32:42):
like at its you know, early manifestation, when it was
a very panicky time, I realized I didn't have a
working thermometer, and I ordered one online, but of course
supplies were low because everybody was doing that, and the
only one I could get was Celsius. We now accidentally
have four because when COVID finally struck our household, Patrick

(33:10):
was trying to isolate in the attic and he had
one up there, and then I also got sick and
I was like, I can't go into the attic, it's
too far, and so I just ordered another one, and
then that became the one that I would just put
in the bag for when traveling, and then couldn't find
it in the bag. It was still in the bag,

(33:33):
it was just sort of like tucked in a weird place.
Since like, so I replaced it again and I'm like,
there's just there's just thermometers everywhere. Now, listen, there's no
problem with having lots of thermometers. One day, one day
I'll develop my ability to do these calculations in my head. Maybe, yeah,
maybe that'll be a twenty twenty five resolution. In the meantime,

(33:53):
if you would like to write us, you can do
so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
also find us on social media. Is Missed in History?
And if you would like to subscribe and have not
done so yet, that as easy as pie. You can
do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class

(34:15):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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Holly Frey

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