The Written Record
Last updated 8 September 2026
This is the reference behind the calculator: what each of the eight yardsticks actually measures, which publisher every figure comes from, the questions people arrive already holding, and the code to put the tool on your own site. The calculator itself lives on the front page.
Try one: everyday prices since 1913, gold since 1913, housing since 1940 or federal debt against GDP since 1939.
Every series is refreshed on one pass on the same day each month, so no two yardsticks are ever quoting different months at each other. All of it is published, and all of it is free to check:
The dividend toggle is the one figure here that is an approximation rather than a publication: it compounds a decade-level average yield, which is a good deal closer to the truth than leaving dividends out, and is not exact annual dividend data. Everything is for historical and educational use, and none of it is investment advice.
Measured in everyday consumer prices, $1 in 1913 takes about $33.45 to match in 2026 — the CPI-U index went from 9.9 to 331.18 across those 113 years. Turned around, a 2026 dollar stretches about as far as three cents did in 1913.
About $854 in 2026 dollars, priced in everyday goods. Measured against gold it is a different answer, and against housing a different one again — which is what the eight tabs are for.
Because they answer different questions. Consumer prices ask what a dollar buys at the till; gold asks what a dollar is worth against a fixed weight of metal. Gold went from $20.67 an ounce in 1913 to about $4,596 in 2026, roughly 222 times over, while consumer prices rose about 33 times across the same span. Neither figure is wrong. They are measuring different things.
On the Everyday Prices tab, yes — it uses the measure the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes, CPI-U annual averages, so it agrees with the official calculator on the same two years. The other seven yardsticks are ones the official calculator does not offer.
That depends on the yardstick, because each one starts where its published record starts: silver to 1792, the Dow to 1900, consumer prices and gold to 1913, the S&P 500 to 1926, federal debt against GDP to 1939, housing to 1940, and Bitcoin to 2010.
Yes. Type any year up to 2101 and the series is carried forward at an assumed annual rate you can drag. Each yardstick opens on its own historical average, and the projected stretch of the chart is drawn dashed on purpose: it is an assumption, not a forecast.
It is gross federal debt measured against everything the country produces in a year. It stood at 51.6% in 1939 and is around 122% now. It belongs here because it is the other half of the same story — every dollar of debt is one more claim on the same dollar you just measured.
The counter starts from the Treasury's last published Debt to the Penny close and counts forward at the pace the debt has actually averaged over the trailing year. Annual output comes from the Federal Reserve's GDP series. Both are re-read on the server rather than estimated.
On the Dow and S&P 500 tabs, if you ask it to. Price alone badly understates what holding stocks did over decades, so a toggle compounds an era-by-era average dividend yield on top of the index level.
Yes, free of charge, using the embed code below. It is a single iframe, and it lays itself out for a narrow column without being told to.
Free, no attribution required beyond the link the snippet already carries, and no sign-up. A framed copy notices it is in a frame and lays itself out for the column it has been given.
<iframe src="https://dollartimemachine.com/" title="The Dollar Time Machine — inflation calculator" width="100%" height="1180" loading="lazy" style="border:0;max-width:720px"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://dollartimemachine.com/">The Dollar Time Machine</a> by Kerry Lutz</p>Kerry Lutz has spent years on the Financial Survival Network interviewing the people who watch these numbers for a living. He was born in 1957, which is why the calculator opens on that year, and he built this because the honest answer to “what has happened to the dollar” depends entirely on what you measure it against — and no single calculator would show him all of them at once.