For my ngram I chose commodities. This was a rather broad subject and it did lead to a rather predictable amount of word spikes, however, they were all very informative and a few surprising bits of information associated with them poped up. My words were cotton, tea, silk, and whales.

Cotton was the most predictable since it spiked right around the beginning of the Civil War and then again at the rise of World War I. This is really rather apparent considering the vast amount of uniforms and war materials being made out of cotton.

The surprising thing was the use of silk went up during the time of WWI (I extended my search to 1920).

Apparently silk postcards and handkerchiefs were bought as souvenirs by soldiers on the western front and became a source of income for families in Belgium and France. This turned into an entire cottage industry due to the war. We have to remember that the total amount of casualties for both sides combined was ten million men so this amounts to a lot of silk being used. The other interesting spike I found was in the word “whales”.

As one can see there is a rather large spike in the use of the word “whales” around 1820. Whale oil was the fuel of choice before kerosene, unfortunately for the whales, and the animals were hunted near to the point of extinction. When most of the northern whaling stations had begun to run out of whales to hunt a new whaling ground was opened up in Japan and Australia for the British fleet. Another reason for this spike was the incident that inspired Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. In 1820, a sperm whale sank The Essex whaling vessel and the twenty-man crew spent months at sea until finally having to resort to cannibalism to survive. Eight men were finally rescued from the doomed ship. The Essex was considered a “lucky” ship to be on.

I found Ngrams to be a lot of fun and it was enjoyable to be able to try to dig up the secrets of the words. It was elementary.