vitrine · a statistical atlas of ordinary life

The median family's century, on the record

A decade-by-decade museum of the median-income four-person family's lifestyle. Every fact carries its source card and confidence tier; where the record is silent, the museum shows the gap.

The composite family. Each room is a statistical composite, assembled from separate distributions with separate sources. The family at the median income did not also have the median house, the median car, and the median diet. No single family described here ever existed; each fact tells you, in its provenance drawer, which real population it was measured from.

The record at a glance

Every room × every case, counted. The sliver under each count is the tier mix (green A to grey D — see the legend); an ember line marks documented silences the museum renders instead of guessing.

Exhibit counts per decade room and display case
Room	The home	The budget	The table	The day	What had arrived	A day's work buys	Room total
1900s	3	6	3	13	1	3	29
1910s	31 gap	21 gap	31 gap	6	2	21 gap	184 gaps
1920s	31 gap	11 gap	31 gap	8	2	21 gap	194 gaps
1930s	31 gap	11 gap	31 gap	7	2	21 gap	184 gaps
1940s	5	71 gap	41 gap	9	2	3	302 gaps
1950s	6	9	6	10+1	6	4+2	41+3
1960s	5	7	11	11	5	3	42
1970s	6	8	13	10	5	4	46
1980s	6	12	11	9	6	4	48
1990s	8	11	12	92 gaps	10	4	542 gaps
2000s	7	12	11	11	6	4	51
2010s	5	12	12	10	6	4	49
2020s	6	13	14	10+1	7	3+4	53+5
Corpus · 498 facts	66 · 3 gaps	101 · 4 gaps	106 · 4 gaps	125 · 2 gaps	60	48 · 3 gaps	+8 computed · 16 gaps documented

Counting rule: N sourced facts, +M exhibits computed at build from sourced inputs. A "gap" is a curated, documented silence — never a value. 95 sources stand behind every cell.

Ways in

01 · Browse

Enter the rooms

Move decade by decade through the house cutaway, six ledgers of exhibits, and every specimen record.

Begin in 1900s → 02 · Compare

Follow the trends

Trace diffusion, work, budgets, health, and family life across the century without flattening the gaps.

Enter the corridors → 03 · Tour

Take the transect

A guided three-stop view of paid work, unpaid work, childhood, and the changing home.

Start the transect →

The wings

Each country is its own wing: its rooms interlink, and its exhibits never borrow another country's record. A wing without curator's routes shows bare stages over complete, sourced ledgers.

Wing · JP

The JP rooms

7 rooms · 88 sourced facts · routes not yet written.

Begin in 1950s → Wing · UK

The UK rooms

7 rooms · 69 sourced facts · routes not yet written.

Begin in 1950s → Wing · US

The US rooms

13 rooms · 498 sourced facts · curated routes.

Begin in 1900s →

Docent tours

Short curated walks through the evidence — every figure bound to its exhibit.

One paycheck

How a single production wage stopped covering the median family — and what moved in to cover the gap instead.

The work that moved

For most of the century the week's biggest job paid nothing at all. Then the hours fell — and the pay envelope, the appliances, and the second job moved to fill the space.

Confidence & flags

A — official statistical series

B — official microdata, computed by this project

C — reconstructed from period surveys

D — scholarly estimate

Gap — no reliable record; shown as the gap it is

Reading the atlas

Provenance is in the scan-line: every exhibit's row names its value, confidence tier, the population actually measured, and the source record. Chart points and stage glyphs open the same record.

Rising series draw in petrol, falling in ember. Absent technology isn't drawn — a bare house says more than ghosts.