Useless Information

I heard an interesting statistic which got me curious about how life expectancy has changed over the last 500 years. Here are some numbers.

Life Expectancy (USA):
born in 2000 77.0 years (source)
born in 1900 47.3 years (source)

France 1800, ~30 years (source)
UK 1800, 36 years (source)
Ireland 1800, 19 years (source)

In 1830 the average life expectancy for factory workers in Bolton (England) was only 17 years. {Due to sanitation conditions} (source)

London, early 1700's, more than 74% of children died before reaching the age of 5. (source)

France 1600's, 20 years - only 58% reached 15 years of age (source)

All this said, a low life expectancy number does not seem to be an indication of how long people lived so much as it indicates the child mortality rate.

Aristocracy in England, from the 1200's - 1700's lived to approximately 64 years of age, assuming they lived to their 21th birthday. (source)

What was the point of all that? There was none.

And just to let you know that the world may not necessarily be going to hell in a handbasket, "For every person murdered today, it is thought that ten were murdered in the Middle Ages. The murder rate has halved in the past two hundred years." (source, #1387)

The last source had many interesting facts. Becareful following that link. You could easily kill (no pun intended) an hour reading more useless trivia.