Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Speaker 1: Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So insurance is part
Speaker 1: of daily life for most people. You use it to
Speaker 1: help you manage financial laws, at least theoretically. You pay
Speaker 1: an insurance company for a policy. If something bad happens,
Speaker 1: that policy pays you out again. All of this theoretically
Speaker 1: and ideally one can hope that right policy will pay
Speaker 1: out right. The insurance company, in broad terms, makes money
Speaker 1: by pooling that money of its policyholders that it collects.
Speaker 1: It creates an investment portfolio, and then they use that
Speaker 1: to make money. Both sides of this arrangement are trying
Speaker 1: to manage their risk throughout, which brings us to actuarial science,
Speaker 1: which is of course all about calculating risk, risk of injury, illness, death,
Speaker 1: risk of life, market shifts, and financial outcomes. And I
Speaker 1: find actuary science fascinating, although sometimes slightly depressing, because it
Speaker 1: kind of takes all of the rich tapestry of life
Speaker 1: and boils it down to numbers and tables and formulas.
Speaker 1: But our reality is so deeply shaped by these things.
Speaker 1: So it got me thinking recently, where did these practices start?
Speaker 1: Because it's the beginning of the year. A lot of
Speaker 1: people's insurance. If you're like covered by group insurance with
Speaker 1: your work, sometimes those change at the beginning of the year,
Speaker 1: or your policy just changes, even if it's like with
Speaker 1: the same company. And I just have been thinking lately
Speaker 1: about it sounds so simple, like, wow, who does all
Speaker 1: the math on this? Yeah? Right, But somebody has to
Speaker 1: do all the math on that. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: actuary science and insurance and where these things kind of
Speaker 1: got their start in the sense that we know them today,
Speaker 1: and just as a level set, we're doing a two parter,
Speaker 1: but it's still just raising the surface of all of this.
Speaker 1: If you start looking for information on actuarial science history
Speaker 1: or insurance history, you will realize they are about two
Speaker 1: kajillion papers written every year about it's that's the real number.
Speaker 1: I just made up, two kajillion. So we're trying to
Speaker 1: like just kind of touch on an idea of how
Speaker 1: we got to the point that we're at today, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about some of the more interesting jumps forward
Speaker 1: as well as some stumbling blocks to this whole thing.
Speaker 1: That is so much of a part of our lives.
Speaker 1: And before we even get started, we have a brief
Speaker 1: note about vocabulary because the words assurance ass you are
Speaker 1: a NCEE and insurance I N s U are a
Speaker 1: ncee both come up in this episode. A lot of
Speaker 1: times these are used interchangeably. I like people use the
Speaker 1: word insurance for both of these a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: But there are differences, Yeah, there are differences between these two. Primarily,
Speaker 1: assurance deals with something that is definitely going to happen,
Speaker 1: like death. We're all eventually going to face that moment,
Speaker 1: except nandor. Insurance, on the other hand, deals with things
Speaker 1: that might happen, like a car crash or flood damage.
Speaker 1: So insurance also covers a term, and that's why you
Speaker 1: have to renew your policy, say once a year or
Speaker 1: every six months or at some other interval. The generalized
Speaker 1: usage of these words has made this distinction really fuzzy,
Speaker 1: like in the case of whole life insurance. Because whole
Speaker 1: life insurance includes a cash savings element that the policyholder
Speaker 1: can use before their death, it is called insurance even
Speaker 1: though there is also a payout portion of the policy
Speaker 1: that happens when the inevitable end of the policyholder's life arrives,
Speaker 1: so that might be considered assurance with an A if
Speaker 1: the policy weren't set at a specific term, And in
Speaker 1: casual conversation today, most people would probably use the word insurance,
Speaker 1: as I said, even when talking about things that are
Speaker 1: technically assurance. So we wanted to just level set a
Speaker 1: little bit because most of the policies and organizations that
Speaker 1: we're talking about today are really focused on what we
Speaker 1: would probably called life insurance, but in the historical record
Speaker 1: they are called assurance with an A. Yes, and some
Speaker 1: of that is we'll talk about assurance societies and how
Speaker 1: those are a little bit different. But London is generally
Speaker 1: recognized as the place where life insurance was born, and
Speaker 1: from there it spread throughout the globe via trade. But
Speaker 1: even before there was insurance or actuary tables, there were
Speaker 1: bills of mortality and these were weekly reports issued by
Speaker 1: parish clerks in London that list, most did the numbers
Speaker 1: of deaths in a given perish and their causes, and
Speaker 1: this practice began in the sixteenth century as a way
Speaker 1: to track disease. In sixteen sixty five, John Bell Clerk
Speaker 1: to the company of parish clerks compiled a book titled
Speaker 1: London's Remembrancer, or a True accompt of every particular week's
Speaker 1: Christenings and mortality in all the years of pestilence, within
Speaker 1: the cognizance of the Bills of Mortality, being eighteen years
Speaker 1: taken out of the Register of the Company of Parish
Speaker 1: Clerks of London, and together with several observations on the
Speaker 1: said years and some of their precedent and subsequent years,
Speaker 1: published for general satisfaction and for prevention of false papers.
Speaker 1: And in this he wrote about the Bills of Mortality quote,
Speaker 1: the Bill of Mortality is a very great use and necessity,
Speaker 1: and therefore not to be slighted, since it so much
Speaker 1: conduceth to the health of the city and preservation of
Speaker 1: the members thereof, in that it giveth the general notice
Speaker 1: of the plague and a particular act of the places
Speaker 1: which are therewith infected, to the end such places may
Speaker 1: be shunned and avoided. So the years of the publications
Speaker 1: of these they were not unbroken, but they were issued
Speaker 1: into the mid nineteenth century by some of the parishes.
Speaker 1: But though these were counts, they didn't really analyze the
Speaker 1: information in any kind of way, and things like ages
Speaker 1: and sex weren't usually included. Additionally, they came under a
Speaker 1: lot of criticism due to how they were collected and
Speaker 1: how the data was collected. This job normally fell to
Speaker 1: elderly ladies who were willing to help out the parish clerks,
Speaker 1: and while Bell defended this practice due to the fact
Speaker 1: that the women were selected by men of good judgment,
Speaker 1: there's some layers of bias here, but this does mean
Speaker 1: that they're just There wasn't really a strict methodology in
Speaker 1: place for how this data was gathered, so the numbers
Speaker 1: cannot be counted on to be accurate. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like if someone told Tracy and I both like, hey,
Speaker 1: go through your neighborhood and get account of how many
Speaker 1: people died this year. The odds are really good. We
Speaker 1: would approach that a little bit differently. And so even
Speaker 1: though you may have these like two numbers or even
Speaker 1: numbers with notations that you combine, they don't necessarily refer
Speaker 1: to the same things. So it's a little bit tricky.
Speaker 1: You could have a whole group of competent, detail oriented
Speaker 1: people not doing the thing the same way, right, and
Speaker 1: one of the earliest steps in the development of actuarial
Speaker 1: science is from what to me was a somewhat surprising source.
Speaker 1: That's a man more associated with astronomy, and that is
Speaker 1: Sir Edmund Halle. Halle has come up on the show before,
Speaker 1: so we're not going to rehash all of his details,
Speaker 1: but in brief, he was born on November eighth, sixteen
Speaker 1: fifty six, and he was still a child when Charles
Speaker 1: the Second granted the charter that established the Royal Society,
Speaker 1: So he grew up in kind of an interesting time Scientifically,
Speaker 1: he attended Queen's College and he was encouraged into astronomy
Speaker 1: through astronomer Royal John Flamsteed. Hallie published his Star Catalog
Speaker 1: in sixteen seventy eight and was elected into the Royal
Speaker 1: Society that same year. He famously identified the cycle of
Speaker 1: a comet that would eventually bear his name. Within the Society,
Speaker 1: he became close friends with Robert Hook and Christopher Wren,
Speaker 1: and he also began his association with Isaac Newton. He
Speaker 1: later edited Principia for Newton. The work, though, that makes
Speaker 1: him Germaine to today's topic is his Population Table, which
Speaker 1: was published in sixteen ninety three. This table was made
Speaker 1: using data from the city of Breslau, Germany. Today that's
Speaker 1: in Poland, in the city now known as Vortslav, And
Speaker 1: it's a little more than three hundred and fifty kilometers
Speaker 1: or two hundred and twenty miles west of Warsaw. This
Speaker 1: table is sometimes called a life table. It's sometimes called
Speaker 1: a death table. I feel like modern scientists and researchers
Speaker 1: have all agreed that it really should just be called
Speaker 1: a population table. It gathered together the simple information based
Speaker 1: on parish records of how many people were alive at
Speaker 1: each age. Hallie gives specific numbers of people for ages
Speaker 1: one to eighty four, and then for people eighty five
Speaker 1: to one hundred years old. He kind of lumps them
Speaker 1: in as one group in a summary column, and that
Speaker 1: groups all of the population of the city by seven,
Speaker 1: So you'll have the group that is ages one to seven,
Speaker 1: eight to fourteen, fifteen to twenty one, et cetera. And
Speaker 1: this basic table shows exactly what you would think. As
Speaker 1: the number related to age advances, the number of people
Speaker 1: surviving at that age goes down. So while the Breslau
Speaker 1: record shows one thousand infants under the age of one.
Speaker 1: It shows a total of one hundred seven people living
Speaker 1: that year between the ages of eighty five and one
Speaker 1: hundred altogether, and the total samples the population was thirty
Speaker 1: four thousand. So if you're wondering why a London based
Speaker 1: mathematician and astronomer was using data from a German city, uh,
Speaker 1: it's because they were a lot more mediculous with the
Speaker 1: record keeping than most other European cities were. Additionally, this
Speaker 1: is a place with low rates of immigration and immigration,
Speaker 1: so it was a good model of population over time
Speaker 1: for this one particular group. Part of that degree of
Speaker 1: isolation came from the fact that Breslau had a primarily
Speaker 1: Lutheran population at a time when it was under the
Speaker 1: rule of the Habsburg monarchy, which was Catholic, So it
Speaker 1: makes sense that the community there just it kept mostly
Speaker 1: to itself. We're going to pause here for a quick
Speaker 1: sponsor break, and when we're back we'll talk about the
Speaker 1: ways that Hallie thought that his table could be used.
Speaker 1: So Hallie's table, as we described it may sound pretty basic,
Speaker 1: but Hallie used this data to make some important determinations.
Speaker 1: For one, he noticed that the numbers of births and
Speaker 1: deaths were pretty comparable in each year that he looked at,
Speaker 1: which ranged from sixteen eighty seven to sixteen ninety one.
Speaker 1: He also showed various ways that such a table could
Speaker 1: be useful in the paper that he wrote to accompany it,
Speaker 1: in the Royal Society's publication Philosophical Transactions. He noted that
Speaker 1: if you subdivide the population information by gender, you can
Speaker 1: assess how many men might be available to fight in
Speaker 1: military conflicts, taking into account their age, although he just
Speaker 1: divided by two to estimate the number of men versus women. Again,
Speaker 1: this sounds pretty simplistic and it is. But a paper
Speaker 1: on Halle's tables by James E. Sieka, which I hope
Speaker 1: I'm pronouncing correctly, published in the Journal of Legal Economics
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, noted that Halle came up
Speaker 1: with the number of zero point two six as the
Speaker 1: proportion of the Breslau population that could potentially serve in
Speaker 1: the military, and that if you use that same calculation
Speaker 1: with the population of the US when that two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight paper was written, the number doesn't come out
Speaker 1: all that different. It's zero point two four. Because Halle
Speaker 1: was mathematically establishing some pretty basic truths about the makeup
Speaker 1: of human population groups. His table has remained relevant in
Speaker 1: some uses into the twenty first century. Halle also calculated
Speaker 1: survival odds at various ages of life, as well as
Speaker 1: chances of survival past certain ages, and then he makes
Speaker 1: the important note that he suggests that life insurance could
Speaker 1: be regulated based on these statistics. In nineteen forty four,
Speaker 1: statistician Irwin Ferrin called Halle's table quote the first real
Speaker 1: step in the art of life measurement. There had been
Speaker 1: another simpler table recorded before Halle's. This was compiled by
Speaker 1: statistician John Grant in sixteen oh six. Writing about Grant's
Speaker 1: table in nineteen thirty eight, statistician and epidemiologist Major Greenwood
Speaker 1: summarized its existence and lack of detail in the Royal
Speaker 1: Society Journal of the History of Science, as follows quote
Speaker 1: in the first edition of Grant's famous Natural and Political Observations,
Speaker 1: mentioned in a following index, and made upon the Bills
Speaker 1: of Mortality, Grant included a short table reporting to give
Speaker 1: the survivors of one hundred quick conceptions at the end
Speaker 1: of six sixteen, twenty six, thirty six, forty six, fifty six,
Speaker 1: sixty six seventy six and eighty six years. The bills
Speaker 1: of mortality in Grant's time did not record the ages
Speaker 1: at death, and he reached the second industry at in
Speaker 1: his table, that is sixty four survivors at the age
Speaker 1: of six, by a rough classification of the named causes
Speaker 1: of death into those which wholly affected children thrush, convulsion, rickets,
Speaker 1: et cetera, and those which he thought about half small
Speaker 1: swinepos et cetera. Affected children below the age of six.
Speaker 1: The remaining figures are conjectural. Some statisticians hold that Grant
Speaker 1: had discovered the principle that, under certain conditions, a survivorship
Speaker 1: table could be computed from a summation of deaths and
Speaker 1: age groups. Others believe that the table is a mere guess,
Speaker 1: and not even Grant's, but a contribution to his book
Speaker 1: from his friend William Petty. There is no doubt that
Speaker 1: as an instrument of computation, the table is of little value.
Speaker 1: So while Grant was onto the idea of measuring mortality,
Speaker 1: he wasn't really rigorous enough about the data to create
Speaker 1: something that had the kind of longevity that Hallie's table did.
Speaker 1: Hallie's table has been studied and analyzed and written about
Speaker 1: for centuries, including reconstruction of the methods that researchers believe
Speaker 1: he used to compile it. It never seems to stop
Speaker 1: fascinating statisticians, in part because Halle manipulated some of the
Speaker 1: numbers in ways that were intended to smooth out the
Speaker 1: data for easier consumption by non mathematicians and also just
Speaker 1: make it all work a little better. So this included
Speaker 1: things like rounding numbers. Since he was using an average
Speaker 1: of data collected from a five year period, there would
Speaker 1: be times where the average would come out to include decimals,
Speaker 1: and you can't have zero point five of a person,
Speaker 1: so Halle rounded out. In twenty ten, David R. Bellhouse
Speaker 1: noted in his paper A New Look at Halle's Lifetable
Speaker 1: that this need to round may explain why Halle grouped
Speaker 1: people in seven year increments, because the numbers just worked
Speaker 1: out best that way. But those roundings and the logic
Speaker 1: of the groupings isn't included in Halle's writings. He hasn't
Speaker 1: really notated why he did things or when he did them,
Speaker 1: so the granularity of the data is lost unless someone
Speaker 1: goes back to the letters from Breslau, which included the
Speaker 1: population data which some people have done. Life insurance was
Speaker 1: already in play well before Hallie made this table. In
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty four, Carnelius Walford, who was an actuary and
Speaker 1: historian of the field, wrote a paper on the history
Speaker 1: of life assurance in the UK, and that paper's opening
Speaker 1: summarizes the evolution of the field to the time of
Speaker 1: his writing, and it lays out the phases that assurance
Speaker 1: had been through in its development. Quote. Life assurance is
Speaker 1: the compound growth, first of our commercial necessities, aided largely
Speaker 1: by a love of speculation, and later of our progressive civilization.
Speaker 1: For the former, rough and ready means of estimation were
Speaker 1: resorted to. For the latter, a long and elaborate course
Speaker 1: of progressive investigation was needed. The development of the business
Speaker 1: has extended over some three or four centuries, perhaps more.
Speaker 1: It has passed through three distinct phases. One the experimental period,
Speaker 1: two the speculative or transitional period, three the period of
Speaker 1: scientific exactitude. These periods, of course more or less overlap
Speaker 1: each other, but they each possess very marked distinctions. So
Speaker 1: there is a little bit of speculation about types of
Speaker 1: insurance or assurance that could or could not be considered
Speaker 1: life insurance, going all the way back to ancient Greece
Speaker 1: and Babylon, although such things are mentioned in writing. Ever
Speaker 1: since money entered into the human timeline, people have sought
Speaker 1: ways to deal with the problem of that money running out,
Speaker 1: specifically when a family breadwinner passed. This issue was sometimes
Speaker 1: addressed as a public responsibility through things like charitable funds
Speaker 1: that were intended to be dispersed to the bereft right,
Speaker 1: so think things like widow's funds or even poorhouses or
Speaker 1: orphans funds, But those were obviously less than ideal and
Speaker 1: often stigmatized. But people who provided for their families eventually
Speaker 1: started to want to take a more proactive approach to
Speaker 1: ensuring that their responsibilities were taken care of, even after
Speaker 1: they had gone those with the means to accrue savings,
Speaker 1: they could easily just leave that to their loved ones.
Speaker 1: But for people who didn't have a lot of extra money,
Speaker 1: or had some but not what they felt like was enough,
Speaker 1: that wasn't really feasible. So various deals have been made
Speaker 1: throughout history to try to set up some sort of
Speaker 1: safety net. So we're talking primarily about life insurance today,
Speaker 1: but of course, in a lot of cases insurance was
Speaker 1: not about people's lives but the loss of goods. These
Speaker 1: arrangements originated primarily in maritime scenarios where the risk of
Speaker 1: losing cargo was high. There are references to arrangements that
Speaker 1: might be considered maritime insurance, going all the way back
Speaker 1: to Babylon's Code Haimarabi. The oldest insurance policy on goods
Speaker 1: that we know of was made in thirteen fifty and
Speaker 1: was financed by a man named Leonardo Cataneo to cover
Speaker 1: a shipment of wheat that was traveling from Tunis to Sicily.
Speaker 1: Cadineo would pay out if the goods were lost at sea,
Speaker 1: but that if they made to port as planned, he
Speaker 1: would be repaid the value with interest. So he was
Speaker 1: basically getting paid to assume the risk of losing money,
Speaker 1: and that arrangement was like a lot at the time,
Speaker 1: made between individuals. There weren't any assurance societies or insurance companies.
Speaker 1: Yet there've also been insurance arrangements that were made to
Speaker 1: cover the loss of enslaved people by their enslavers, although
Speaker 1: those arrangements were more about recovering the value of humans
Speaker 1: who were perceived as property rather than lives, so they
Speaker 1: aren't generally classified as life insurance. Marine insurance on cargo
Speaker 1: was pretty common by the fifteen hundreds, but life insurance
Speaker 1: is a little harder to establish because there are just
Speaker 1: a lot more variables. So the Walford paper that we
Speaker 1: mentioned a moment ago makes the case that the experimental
Speaker 1: phase of life assurance, which we don't really have a
Speaker 1: lot of primary sources for, would have tied into the
Speaker 1: marine industries, just as insurance on cargo had. Walford explains,
Speaker 1: would make assurance deals quote against death or captivity during
Speaker 1: the prosecution of their voyage, in ensuring merchants against captivity
Speaker 1: by pirates, for in early times merchants accompanied their maritime ventures.
Speaker 1: The mode of undertaking these risks was by individual underwriters
Speaker 1: taking certain defined portions thereof at so much percent premium.
Speaker 1: There were also types of insurance that benefited not a
Speaker 1: person's next of kin should they die at sea, but
Speaker 1: their creditors. Sometimes those were taken out by the creditor.
Speaker 1: On the flip side of that, sometimes travelers lent money
Speaker 1: that they would not need on their travels to people
Speaker 1: at their point of origin. And that money would be
Speaker 1: collected with interest when they returned, but then if they
Speaker 1: didn't return, those loans became sort of a payout. The
Speaker 1: first life insurance policy that's normally cited as such was
Speaker 1: a term life insurance policy taken out to cover the
Speaker 1: life of Willie Gibbons on June eighteenth, fifteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: So he paid a small sum, reportedly thirty pounds on
Speaker 1: a policy that would pay four hundred pounds if he
Speaker 1: died within twelve months of issue. Gibbons's age at the
Speaker 1: time the policy was issued is not known, but he
Speaker 1: died on May twenty ninth, fifteen eighty four. The underwriters,
Speaker 1: who were a group of businessmen who thought they would
Speaker 1: win what was essentially a bet, tried to argue that
Speaker 1: a month is twenty eight days, and then, using that calculation,
Speaker 1: Gibbons had lived for twelve months. That argument did not
Speaker 1: fly in court, and the group was ordered to pay.
Speaker 1: The business community got a little trepidacious about life insurance
Speaker 1: for a bit after this. Yeah, there were still deals
Speaker 1: being made, but it had this gone the way that
Speaker 1: those underwriters wanted, there probably would have been a bigger
Speaker 1: explosion in life insurance earlier on the first line of
Speaker 1: that policy contract on William Gibbons, had read Richard Martin,
Speaker 1: Citizen and aldermen of London, doth make assurance and causeth
Speaker 1: himself to be assured upon the natural life of William Gibbons, Citizen,
Speaker 1: Insulter of London. Four and during the space of twelve
Speaker 1: months next ensuing after the underwriting hereof by the assurers,
Speaker 1: hereafter subscribed fully to be complete and ended. If you're
Speaker 1: wondering where the idea came from for a one year
Speaker 1: term for the policy on William Gibbons, it was from
Speaker 1: the rules set forth by the Office of Assurances at
Speaker 1: the Royal Exchange in London. That office was established in
Speaker 1: fifteen seventy five as a place where people could engage
Speaker 1: in what were called public assurances, meaning that the agreements
Speaker 1: were made there on the premises and paperwork was filed
Speaker 1: so that if there were any arguments about how the
Speaker 1: business went, it could be legally contested. And the office's
Speaker 1: regulation stated that you could only insure a person's life
Speaker 1: for one year at a time, and part of the
Speaker 1: reasoning was that up to that point, mutual contribution societies
Speaker 1: which anyone could pay into and have some sort of
Speaker 1: payout to their next of kin when they died. Were
Speaker 1: operating in a really precarious manner where all members, no
Speaker 1: matter how old or young, were being admitted under the
Speaker 1: same agreements. So if a lot of elderly people joined
Speaker 1: one year, it meant that there was a greater likelihood
Speaker 1: that the funds would significantly be depleted in the following years,
Speaker 1: and there was not a guarantee that members who joined
Speaker 1: when they were younger would benefit from their longer membership.
Speaker 1: This was part of what is considered the speculative or
Speaker 1: transitional period of insurance. There just wasn't enough scientific data
Speaker 1: to really assess the situation and make value judgments on
Speaker 1: the way that benefits were being managed. That one year
Speaker 1: limit meant that one or both parties could reconsider the
Speaker 1: agreement and its value and risks regularly, even though they
Speaker 1: didn't really have the math in place yet. In just
Speaker 1: a moment, we will talk about the way literal dice
Speaker 1: rolls played into all of this, but first we will
Speaker 1: pause for a sponsor break. Several things happened in the
Speaker 1: gap between the Gibbons Policy and the Hallie Table that
Speaker 1: started to form a more coherent picture of how insurance
Speaker 1: could actually work as a business that was a little
Speaker 1: less like a gamble. For one thing, public sanitation improved,
Speaker 1: which in turn improved health and life expectancy. The Bills
Speaker 1: of Mortality started to be seen as a data point
Speaker 1: for predictability models, although there still weren't any formulas in
Speaker 1: use to really plug that data into. It's more like
Speaker 1: just pattern recognition. Definitely more of a ViBe's and forecasting
Speaker 1: situation at this point. But then a big step forward
Speaker 1: came once again from a surprising source. A number of
Speaker 1: mathematicians interested not in life insurance but in games started
Speaker 1: to develop the laws of probability. As men like Blaise
Speaker 1: Pascal and Pierre de far Matt and many others started
Speaker 1: to consider ways to predict the likelihoods of outcomes in
Speaker 1: dice rolls. They were also advancing the mathematics that the
Speaker 1: data points held in documents like the Bills of Mortality
Speaker 1: could be used in This is the start of the
Speaker 1: phase that Walford called the period of scientific exactitude. Just
Speaker 1: two years before Hallie's table was published, an early instance
Speaker 1: of insurance fraud was tried in the London Court of Chancery,
Speaker 1: and in that case, a man named Thornborough had taken
Speaker 1: out a year long policy on a man named Edward Harwell,
Speaker 1: and Thornborough's insurance broker had collected subscriptions to underwrite that policy,
Speaker 1: with a testimonial from one of Edward Harwell's neighbors that
Speaker 1: he was in good health. Harwell died not long after
Speaker 1: the policy was issued, and the court found that Thornborough
Speaker 1: had taken out the policy on a man he knew
Speaker 1: was in poor health, and that he had no real
Speaker 1: connection to Harwill, and that he had duped the subscribers
Speaker 1: into giving up their money. And it was found to
Speaker 1: have not been the first time that Thornborough had mounted
Speaker 1: such a scheme. Remember this story. Will reference it briefly
Speaker 1: in Part two. In a way more than one hundred
Speaker 1: years after the death of Gibbons and the subsequent payout,
Speaker 1: Hallie was offering the business community a way forward that
Speaker 1: would give them a better method to determine the risks
Speaker 1: and potential benefits of issuing a policy. And he was
Speaker 1: working at a time when insurance law, while it had
Speaker 1: been around for more than a century in England, was
Speaker 1: still in its infancy. For example, several years after Halle's
Speaker 1: Table came out, there was a lawsuit that established very
Speaker 1: specific rules regarding wording in insurance contracts and what they meant.
Speaker 1: In this case, the playwright Sir Robert Howard had died
Speaker 1: on September third, sixteen ninety eight, at one a m.
Speaker 1: The time is important to the case. You have probably
Speaker 1: seen a portrait of Sir Robert Howard. Flemish painter Anthony
Speaker 1: van Dyke made a a well known portrait of him.
Speaker 1: Howard had taken out an insurance policy on September third,
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety seven, exactly one year before his death, and
Speaker 1: that policy had a term of one year. The underwriters
Speaker 1: claimed that the policy had expired when Howard died, making
Speaker 1: the case that after midnight on the evening of September second,
Speaker 1: the contract was done, so a one a m. September
Speaker 1: the third death was not covered in the one hundred
Speaker 1: pound policy. This led to a pretty fascinating judgment by
Speaker 1: the court. The phrase quote from the day of the
Speaker 1: date in the contract, it ruled meant that though it
Speaker 1: was signed on September third, it didn't go into effect
Speaker 1: until midnight, starting coverage on September fourth. If the policy
Speaker 1: had used the language from the date, it would, according
Speaker 1: to the Court, have meant that the coverage began on
Speaker 1: the day the contract was signed, and that would have
Speaker 1: ended at midnight on September second. Additionally, the establishment of
Speaker 1: timing specifics included a note from the court the days
Speaker 1: could not be argued fractionally, so the time of the
Speaker 1: day that he died did not matter. Hallie's table was
Speaker 1: in regular use less than a decade after he prepared it.
Speaker 1: The Society of Assurance for Widows and Orphans was formed
Speaker 1: in sixteen ninety nine. The idea was that its members,
Speaker 1: of which there could be two thousand at most, would
Speaker 1: each pay five shillings whenever a member died, and that
Speaker 1: would mean that the bereft would receive five hundred pounds
Speaker 1: if everyone paid their portion. And the interest of transparency,
Speaker 1: the society kept its books publicly. There was one register
Speaker 1: for the list of members and one that included a
Speaker 1: list of their family members who would receive benefits. Claims
Speaker 1: were paid out after they were approved by a group
Speaker 1: of thirteen trustees who were members who were elected to
Speaker 1: that committee on a yearly basis. When someone died, the
Speaker 1: society had to be notified immediately so that one of
Speaker 1: its members could view the body and confirm the death.
Speaker 1: Membership was contingent on certification of the subscriber's age and
Speaker 1: that he had an affidavit from a qualified person that
Speaker 1: he had quote not known not any known distemper upon him,
Speaker 1: and that he was in a very good state of health.
Speaker 1: A person could be denied membership if the trustees thought
Speaker 1: they looked sickly or elderly. Over time, additional limitations were
Speaker 1: placed on membership, including age limits. Both Halle's Table and
Speaker 1: the Bills of Mortality were used as a foundation of
Speaker 1: the Society of Assurances workability. The potential mortality rate and
Speaker 1: potential expense for members was explained in their documentation this way,
Speaker 1: quote the probable charge of this society may be thus calculated.
Speaker 1: The number of people within the limits of the Bills
Speaker 1: of Mortality are supposed by some to be two millions,
Speaker 1: by others one and a half million, by all to
Speaker 1: be at least a million. Out of these there die
Speaker 1: about twenty thousand a year, appears by the general Bill
Speaker 1: of Mortality et cetera, which is one in fifty. Supposing
Speaker 1: the number of people to be one million, Now, if
Speaker 1: but one in fifty dies out of the whole number,
Speaker 1: including women and children, sickly and infirm people, and such
Speaker 1: as are ancient and decrepit, we may reasonably calculate that
Speaker 1: not above one in fifty shall die in our society,
Speaker 1: which is to consist of such persons as are in health,
Speaker 1: and of the different ages above mentioned. And this is
Speaker 1: but forty in two thousand, so that the probable charge,
Speaker 1: when tis full, will be but ten pounds per annum.
Speaker 1: And while tis increasing in proportion to what it has
Speaker 1: hitherto done, the advantage must be very great. So that's it.
Speaker 1: Everybody gets life assurance. Of course, not not really. At
Speaker 1: this point the idea of a payment to a person's
Speaker 1: bereaved dependence was still in a pretty early phase. But
Speaker 1: that's where we're going to end things for today. On
Speaker 1: Wednesday will talk about another assurance society and the person
Speaker 1: who's considered the first actuary, and whether or not insurance
Speaker 1: is a form of gambling, which is a pretty fun
Speaker 1: discussion to have. I have a really fun listener mail. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is from our listener Erica, and it's titled Rue
Speaker 1: for the Freezer, So you know, I love it. I
Speaker 1: have to pull up a little thing on my phone
Speaker 1: because I made ready for this. Erica writes, Hi, there
Speaker 1: in an episode from like the Summer or Something, Holly
Speaker 1: mentioned a cookbook had a recipe for a large batch
Speaker 1: of rue that you kept in the freezer and scooped
Speaker 1: out as needed, and it came out perfectly every time.
Speaker 1: I cannot find the episode so I could see if
Speaker 1: the recipe made it to any show notes. Can you
Speaker 1: direct me to the instructions? Thank you, Erica, Oh, Erica,
Speaker 1: I'm here for you. Because one I love to talk
Speaker 1: about food too. This lets me talk about one of
Speaker 1: my favorite show topics of all time, Vincent Price Kay
Speaker 1: because it was his cookbook that he wrote with his
Speaker 1: wife Mary called A Treasury of Great Recipes, which is
Speaker 1: a really, really lovely cookbook because it's all of the
Speaker 1: recipes that they collected from their favorite restaurants and chefs
Speaker 1: and they put together. But they also have a lot
Speaker 1: of their good cooking tips. And of course this is
Speaker 1: a tip I keep on my phone, so I have
Speaker 1: it ready for you. It's a very short entry from
Speaker 1: the book, so I'm going to read it. It is
Speaker 1: rue for the roo. We let one half cup butter
Speaker 1: soften at room temperature. Then mix this to a smooth
Speaker 1: paste with one cup flour. The butter absorbs the flour
Speaker 1: and we end up with one of the third cup's room.
Speaker 1: This we freeze in a small pot or bowl covered
Speaker 1: with aluminum foil. When a recipe specifies to stir in
Speaker 1: one tablespoon flour mixed to a smooth paste with one
Speaker 1: tablespoon butter, we simply stir in one rounded tablespoon of
Speaker 1: our frozen room set. Yeah that's great. I will add
Speaker 1: this is an also on the subject of freezing things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: someone whose name I sadly did not write down set
Speaker 1: on our social media that a lot of gaspacho recipes freeze.
Speaker 1: Well ah, following my discussion of how delighted I was
Speaker 1: that there was gaspacho in the freezer section in Barcelona
Speaker 1: grocery stores. So again, it is wintertime. This is not
Speaker 1: the season for cold soup for me, but this summer
Speaker 1: I am definitely gonna try freezing some gaspacho. Yumo. That
Speaker 1: all sounds great? Yeah, uh, that's how you could put
Speaker 1: your roo in the freezer. I would recommend for me,
Speaker 1: not foil but an air tight container. Yeah, that would
Speaker 1: that's what I would do. I usually put mine in
Speaker 1: a pyrex with a lid, and I will say this,
Speaker 1: everybody's my lid is going to be different. I get
Speaker 1: some inflammation from wheat gluten, so I started using coconut
Speaker 1: flour in mine. That is the most velvety I've ever made, really,
Speaker 1: but it does have a little bit of a different
Speaker 1: flavor profile, So keep that in mind. But like for me,
Speaker 1: that is the one. Yeah, and you can, like I said,
Speaker 1: that's one tiny, tiny piece of a book that is
Speaker 1: full of beautiful recipes and really lovely writing and a
Speaker 1: lot of good cooking tips. So, like I said, any
Speaker 1: anything that can prompt me to talk about Vincent price,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take it. So thank you. If you would
Speaker 1: like to write to us with questions about Vincent price
Speaker 1: or cooking that we may or may not have an
Speaker 1: answer to, or anything, you can do that at History
Speaker 1: Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're also on social media
Speaker 1: as Missed in History, and you can find us for
Speaker 1: subscription in the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.