Statistics are woefully incomplete, but between 1850 and 1880 the likelihood that American males between ten and fifty would die from accidental death rose by two-thirds, from 7 percent to 12 percent of total deaths. In 1860 railroad accidents accounted for fewer than 1 percent of the deaths among this male cohort; in 1890 the figure jumped to 3 percent. The dangers of work rose in every industrial country in the late nineteenth century, but they rose faster and higher in the United States, where work was more dangerous than elsewhere and far more dangerous than it would be a century later.21
