Swat the fly campaigns when kids were paid to kill flies

Anyone ever participate in a Swat the Fly campaign? ;)

@dr..eeks In this episode of Public Health is Weird… Public health has tried a lot of things over the years. At one point, some communities literally paid kids to kill flies. I’m less interested in the campaign… and more interested in the person whose job was counting millions of dead flies. 🪰 I’d love to hav’em as a guest on the podcast! 🙂 #publichealthisweird #didyouknow #weirdhistory #sciencetok #healthhistory ♬ original sound – Dr. EeKS

In the early 1900s, public health had a fly problem.

Houseflies were increasingly recognized as potential carriers of disease-causing organisms. They landed on human and animal waste, picked up microbes, and then flew off to land on food, dishes, and pretty much anything else they pleased.

So public health officials did what any reasonable early-20th-century public health official might do:

They recruited children to kill them.

Cities across North America launched “Swat the Fly” campaigns, complete with educational programs, prizes, and fly-killing contests.

In Montreal in 1912, nearly 1,000 children participated in a campaign that reportedly resulted in roughly 25 million dead flies. Other communities got creative with incentives. In West Virginia, children could reportedly earn 10 cents for every 100 dead flies they turned in.

Which raises what I considered the most important public health question:

Who counted the dead flies?

I picture some poor soul sitting behind a desk:

“Ninety-seven… ninety-eight… wait, is that one fly or two?… ninety-nine… one hundred. Congratulations, kid. Here’s your dime.”

An important update from the world of historical fly accounting

Apparently (based on my Facebook video comments), people have strong feelings about how the flies were counted. Slow day at the office, I suppose, so let me be extra accurate for your panties:

Some of these contests weighed the flies rather than counting each one individually. Montreal, for example, used weight as part of its tallying process. Other campaigns, however, really did report counting dead flies. For example, this Scientific American article from 1911 states the following about a Swat the Fly contest in Washington, “Each contestant is furnished with a fly swatter, and paper boxes for the dead fies were distributed. Each day the boxes contairing the offerings of the workers are collected and the flies so exterminated are first counted at the Health Office, and then cremated.”

So yes: flies were weighed. Flies were counted. Different campaigns used different methods, it seems.

But I do regret any distress my imaginary fly counter may have caused the historical fly-accounting community.

But weighing containers filled with thousands of dead houseflies doesn’t make the job sound substantially better to me. ;)

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When Kids Were Paid to Kill Flies

An important update from the world of historical fly accounting