1/00Estimated gross global product per capita in the year 1000: $133
Amount by which it had changed by the year 1700: +$31
1/00Estimated number of people today who live on less than $30 per month: 1,300,000,000
Estimated number who are enslaved: 27,000,000
1/00Rank of the African king of Mali among 14th-century rulers most noted for their riches by a Majorcan mapmaker: 1
1/00Estimated number of years by which the earliest known African ironwork predates Europe’s Iron Age: 1,800
1/00Number of ships that sailed in the first expedition of Cheng Ho, the 15th-century Chinese explorer: 287
Minimum number of countries Cheng Ho visited over the course of his seven voyages: 30
1/00Miles that Leif Eriksson sailed from his father’s home in Greenland before “discovering” North America in 985: 230
1/00Years by which new evidence suggests that the age of the first human migration to the Americas should be increased: 20,000
1/00Percentage of the world’s land that was claimed by centralized sovereign governments in 1500: 21
Percentage today: 91
1/00Number of years after Jews settled in China that they were first allowed to live in Russian territory: 1,045
1/00Months after publishing The Communist Manifesto that Karl Marx became editor of a newspaper funded by industrialists: 2
1/00Months’ worth of salary lost by Groucho Marx in 1929’s stock market crash: 28
1/00Number of U.S. banks in 1921, 1933, and 1999, respectively: 30,456, 14,207, 8,675
1/00Percentage change in the average amount of cloth required to clothe a U.S. woman between 1913 and 1928: -64
Number of World War I battleships said to have been built from the steel donated by U.S. women from their corsets: 2
1/00Year in which Marie Antoinette convinced France’s King Louis XVI to declare that all handkerchiefs be square: 1785
1/00Percentage of the French government’s 1788 expenditures that went to support the court at Versailles: 6
Percentage that went to finance war debt resulting from France’s support of the colonies in the American Revolution: 50
1/00Votes by which 18th-century U.S. lawmakers rejected outlawing slavery in all future states beyond the original thirteen: 1
1/00Estimated number of anti-slavery petitions sent to Congress between 1835 and 1836: 500
1/00Factor by which the Constitution allowed a state to count its slaves when allocating House seats and electoral votes: 3/5
1/00Chance that a New York State resident in 1776 was a slave: 1 in 7
1/00Chance that an African American who is a New York State resident today lives below the poverty level: 1 in 4
1/00Year in which South Africa’s Natal Law Society apologized for trying to thwart Mohandas K. Gandhi’s law practice there: 1999
Percentage change in the amount of British cotton products India imported during the same period: +1,500
1/00Estimated number of pairs of gloves owned by Elizabeth I: 2,000
1/00Number of Americans now employed as “ serfs ” or “wenches” at Medieval Times entertainment complexes in the U.S.: 1,400
1/00Number of the universe’s spatial dimensions of which physicists now believe we are unaware: 7
1/00Age at which Albert Einstein spoke his first words: 3
1/00Estimated amount lost by Isaac Newton in South Sea stock speculation in the 1720s: $2,000,000
1/00Days of imprisonment and torture undergone by Niccolò Machiavelli after falling out of favor with the Medicis in 1513: 28
Number of years later that his book The Prince was published, with a dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici: 19
1/00Factor by which Microsoft’s average monthly campaign contribution in 1999 exceeded its monthly contribution in 1995: 8
1/00Number of the ten largest multinational corporations that produce automobiles or gasoline: 9
1/00Percentage change since 1990 in the number of prison beds in privately owned or managed U.S. prisons: +856
1/00Number of years after North America’s first library opened in 1638 that it published a subject guide: 152
1/00Number of years between the invention of the first photocopier technology in 1938 and the first commercial-copier sale: 21
Average annual number of copies produced per American six years later: 52
1/00Number of pages accumulated in the FBI’s Sex Deviates file by the time the program was abandoned in 1977: 330,000
1/00Number of the world’s 6,000 living languages that are indigenous to Papua New Guinea: 1,000
1/00Percentage change in enrollment in U.S. college-level French and German courses since 1995: -4.5
Percentage of Muslims who were Shiites in 1000 and percentage who are Shiites today, respectively: 5, 14
1/00Estimated percentage increase since 1000 in the number of Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, respectively: 2,450, 2,300, 1,025
1/00Chances that one of the 49 armed conflicts fought worldwide since 1990 relied exclusively on small arms: 9 in 10
1/00Hours required to assemble a prefabricated nuclear-bomb shelter, according to a 1961 Life magazine cover story: 4
1/00Number of New York City children issued Civil Defense dog tags by 1952 to identify them after a nuclear attack: 2,500,000
1/00Number of false alarms of nuclear missile attacks generated by the U.S. early warning system between 1977 and 1984: 20,784
1/00Number of U.S. nuclear bombs currently on “high alert”: 2,380
1/00Rank of “shed[ding] my enemies’ blood and wring[ing] tears from their women” among Genghis Khan’s greatest joys: 1
Rank of “crush[ing] your enemies … and hear[ing] the lamentations of the women” among Conan the Barbarian’s: 1
1/00Year in which a medical dictionary defined heterosexuality as an “abnormal or perverted appetite” for the opposite sex: 1901
1/00Year in which the New York Times first reported a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals”: 1981
1/00Chance that a 14th-century European was killed by bubonic plague: 1 in 4
1/00Number of Chinese engineers who accompanied the Mongol Khan Hulägu on his siege of Baghdad in 1257: 1,000
1/00Years after Portuguese adventurers brought guns to Japan in 1543 that Japan owned more guns than any other country: 57
1/00Estimated number of Japanese peasant uprisings in the following 268 years under the Tokugawa regime: 3,000
Number of these that were begun in the name of the Catholic Church or to reinstate a deposed monarch: 7
1/00Number of popes stabbed, strangled, or poisoned to death in the last three decades of the 10th century: 5
1/00Percentage of the 14,000 Bulgar survivors of the 1014 battle at Kleidion who were blinded by the victorious Byzantines: 99
1/00Ratio of the number of U.S. soldiers who died from disease during World War I to those who died in combat: 1:1
Chance that a civilian who died in a 20th-century war was American: 1 in 62,000
1/00Projected rank of heart disease and severe depression among the leading causes of death and disability in 2020: 1,2
1/00Acres of hemp grown by “patriotic” U.S. farmers in 1942 at the behest of the U.S. government: 36,000
1/00Estimated number of non-native species that have entered the North American ecosystem since 1500: 50,000
1/00Estimated bushels of maize paid annually to the Aztec rulers of the city of Tenochtitlán by their subjects: 210,000
1/00Estimated temperature of Hell, according to two Spanish physicists ‘ interpretation of the Bible: 832° F
Estimated temperature of Heaven: 448°F
1/00Estimated number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, according to the American Institute of Physics: 1064