Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [64]
And then what appeared to be an inexhaustible resource was—quite suddenly and, in retrospect, quite obviously—heading toward exhaustion. Too many ships were hunting for too few whales. A ship that once took a year at sea to fill its hold with whale oil now needed four years. Oil prices spiked accordingly, rocking the economy back home. Today, such an industry might be considered “too big to fail,” but the whaling industry was failing indeed, with grim repercussions for all America.
That’s when a retired railway man named Edwin L. Drake, using a steam engine to power a drill through seventy feet of shale and bedrock, struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The future bubbled to the surface. Why risk life and limb chasing underwater leviathans around the world, having to catch and carve them up, when so much energy was just waiting, in the nation’s basement, to be pumped upstairs?
Oil was not only a cheap and simple fix but, like the whale, extraordinarily versatile. It could be used as lamp oil, a lubricant, and as a fuel for automobiles and home heating; it could be made into plastic and even nylon stockings. The new oil industry also provided lots of jobs for unemployed whalers and, as a bonus, functioned as the original Endangered Species Act, saving the whale from near-certain extinction.
By the early twentieth century, most infectious diseases—smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and the like—were on their way out. But polio refused to surrender.
It would be hard to invent a more frightening illness. “It was a children’s disease; there was no prevention; there was no cure; every child everywhere was at risk,” says David M. Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Polio: An American Story. “And what this really meant was that parents were absolutely frantic.”
Polio was also a great mystery, spiking in summertime, its cause unknown. (In a classic case of mistaking correlation and causality, some researchers suspected that ice cream—consumed in far greater quantities in the summer—caused polio.) It was first thought to target immigrant slum children, especially boys, but it struck girls too, as well as kids in the leafiest suburbs. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was far removed from immigrant slums and, at thirty-nine, from childhood as well, contracted the disease.
Every outbreak prompted a new round of quarantines and panic. Parents kept their kids away from friends, from pools and parks and libraries. In 1916, the worst polio epidemic to date struck New York City. Out of 8,900 reported cases, 2,400 people died, most of them children under five. The disease roared on. Nineteen fifty-two was the worst year yet, with 57,000 reported cases nationwide, 3,000 of them fatal and 21,000 resulting in permanent paralysis.
Surviving a bad case of polio was only marginally better than dying. Some victims lost the use of their legs and lived in constant pain. Those with respiratory paralysis practically lived inside an “iron lung,” a huge tank that did the work of their failed chest muscles. As the population of living polio victims grew, the cost of their medical care was staggering. “At a time when less than ten percent of the nation’s families had any form of health insurance,” Oshinsky writes, “the expense of boarding a polio patient (about $900 a year) actually exceeded the average annual wage ($875).”
America was by now the most powerful country on earth, the victor in two world wars, possessor of a blindingly bright future. But there was legitimate concern that this single disease would consume such a large share of future health-care dollars that it would cripple the nation.
And then a vaccine was developed—a series of vaccines, really—and polio was effectively stamped