This improvement in the quantity and quality of index numbers is as marked in the United States as elsewhere. Price quotations had been published with more or less care and system by various newspapers and periodicals for many years before the first effort to compile an average of price variations was made. In 1881, Mr. H. C. Burchard, Director of the Mint, made an index number covering the years 1825 to 1880 from quotations that had been printed in certain reports of the Secretary of the Treasury, supplemented by quotations from a New York newspaper. But his data were of uncertain quality and his series was allowed to lapse after 1884. After an interval of eight years, the Senate Committee on Finance authorized a more ambitious effort. Under the direction of Dr. Roland P. Falkner, the statistician of this committee, the (then) Department of Labor made a huge collection of price quotations, running back as far as 1840, and compiled an index number including more than 200 commodities for the years 1860 to 1891, and 85 commodities for 1840 to 1891. But this also was a single investigation, and the United States did not have an index number regularly maintained year after year until the establishment of Bradstreet's series in 1897. A quasi continuation of the Senate Finance Committee's work, covering the years 1890-1899, was prepared by Dr. R. P. Falkner, and published by the Department of Labor in March, 1900. Another shortlived series was begun by Prof. John R. Commons and Dr. N. J. Stone in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Bureau of Economic Research later in the same year. In January, 1901, the second continuous American series was started by Dun's Review and gradually carried back to 1860; the third, covering the years 1890 to date, was added by the Federal Department of Labor in March, 1902. Other series of this type were begun by Thomas Gibson's weekly market letters in 1910, by the New York Times Annalist in 1913, and by the Federal Reserve Board in 1918.
This activity in the making of index numbers was accompanied by a rapid growth of the literature of the subject. Among the later contributions dealing with theoretical issues, the first place belongs to the work of an American scholar, Mr. C. M. Walsh. His great treatise upon the Measurement of General Exchange-Value, published in 1901, is still the most comprehensive book upon the subject. But the bibliographies that aim to cover the field now include hundreds of items, and to them must go the student who wishes a guide to further reading.
Some of the more important new series known to have been established since the war are the series compiled by the Price Section of the War Industries Board and published in its "History of Prices During the War," the series compiled by the Federal Reserve Board from data gathered by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the series designed by the same board for making international comparisons, the series published by the United States Food Administration in 1918 in a pamphlet entitled "General Index Numbers of Food Prices on a Nutritive Value Base," the series established by the London Times for Great Britain and by the Handelstidning for Sweden, the series for Italy compiled by Prof. Riccardo Bachi, the series compiled by the Bank of Japan, and those published by the Governments of South Africa and New Zealand.