Samuel Turner Benner

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Samuel Turner Benner (August 17, 1832 – January 2, 1913) was an American farmer and self-taught cycle analyst, best known as the author of Benner's Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices (1875), one of the earliest attempts at systematic, cycle-based commodity price forecasting in the United States. Writing under the byline "an Ohio Farmer," Benner identified what he believed to be a recurring nine-year cycle in pig iron prices, along with cycles in corn, hog, and cotton prices and in financial panics. His pig iron forecast was later tracked for more than eighty years by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, which reprinted his book in full and repeatedly cited it as one of the most successful price forecasts in the history of cycles research.

Early life

Benner was born on August 17, 1832, at Bloom Furnace in Lawrence County, Ohio, the son of Judge John Benner and Ann Turner Benner, and grandson of Christian Benner, who had emigrated to Ohio from Pennsylvania in 1803. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Mary Ann Forge, an ironworks near Bainbridge, Ohio, where he spent his boyhood. After attending the academy at Chillicothe, Ohio, he took charge of his father's furnaces at Callia, Keystone, Eagle, and Latrobe. In 1855, at the age of 23, he was appointed postmaster at Latrobe, Ohio.

Benner served in the 12th Ohio Cavalry during the American Civil War, being made corporal on February 1, 1864, and sergeant on July 1, 1865, at Lexington, Kentucky. In 1868 he married Ellen Salts, daughter of Senator Stephen Salts of Dundas, Ohio; they had one son, Stephen.

The Panic of 1873 and the origin of his research

By 1871 Benner was a prosperous farmer near Bainbridge, Ohio, raising farms, hogs, and corn. The Panic of 1873, combined with an outbreak of hog cholera, ruined him financially. He and his family relocated to his wife's farm in Dundas, Ohio, and from that point Benner devoted himself to investigating the causes of financial panics and of the recurring rises and falls in commodity prices.

Benner's Prophecies (1875)

In 1875, at the age of 43, Benner copyrighted a book titled Benner's Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices, subtitled What Years to Make Money on Pig-Iron, Hogs, Corn, and Provisions. Published in Cincinnati by the Robert Clarke Company, the 131-page book went through numerous editions over the following decades, with later printings extending the forecast tables to cover years well into the 20th century.

Drawing on annual average prices for No. 1 anthracite foundry pig iron at Philadelphia from 1844 to 1874, compiled by the American Iron and Steel Institute, Benner proposed that pig iron prices moved in a recurring nine-year cycle, with high years arriving in a repeating sequence of 8, 9, and 10 years apart, and low years in a sequence of 7, 9, and 11 years apart. He also described a roughly 5.5-year cycle in corn prices (which he characterized as an alternating 5-year/6-year pattern), a similar cycle in hog prices, an 11-year cycle in cotton prices, and an 18-year cycle (varying between 16, 18, and 20 years) in the timing of financial panics.

Assessment by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles

Benner's work came to the attention of Edward R. Dewey and the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, which reprinted the book in its entirety in 1948 as Foundation Reprint No. 24 and returned to it repeatedly in the Foundation's monthly bulletin, Cycles, over the following decade. Dewey, whose own research headquarters near East Brady, Pennsylvania he noted had been built at "just about the time the 9-year cycle was first being observed by Samuel Benner ... and by Clément Juglar of France," described Benner's pig iron forecast as "the most notable forecast of prices in existence."

Testing Benner's pig iron formula against actual prices from 1875 through 1935, the Foundation calculated twelve profitable hypothetical transactions against only two unprofitable ones, for a gain-loss ratio of 31 to 1 - rising to 44.8 to 1 if the World War I price rise of 1915—1918 were included. The Foundation similarly tracked Benner's corn-price cycle across 28 transactions from 1875—76 through 1952—53, finding 21 profitable and 7 unprofitable, for total net gains of 542.3 percent - an average return of about 19 percent per transaction. A follow-up analysis in 1957 reported that the corn cycle had "come true for 82 years since discovery," with monthly data suggesting an actual cycle length of approximately 5.5 to 5.6 years (~67 months) rather than the perfectly regular 5.5 years Benner had assumed.

The Foundation was careful to note that Benner's forecasting record weakened considerably after 1935: his pig iron cycle projected a low for 1942, a year instead dominated by wartime demand; a high for 1945, a year of postwar price controls; and a low for 1951, a year affected by the Korean War and the Fair Deal. Dewey and his colleagues attributed this drift to Benner's imprecise measurement of cycle length - an unavoidable limitation given the "crude and inadequate" statistical techniques and limited data available to him in 1875, rather than to any failure of the underlying cyclical pattern itself, and undertook their own revision of Benner's cycle lengths using later data.

Family and biographical sources

Little independent biographical material on Benner survives outside the Foundation's own account, which was compiled with the assistance of a grandson, Col. Ralph C. Benner of Washington, D.C., who supplied a family portrait and biographical details published in the Foundation's magazine in 1955.

Legacy

Benner's book remains in print in facsimile editions and is held by numerous research libraries, including the Library of Congress and Columbia University. His pig-iron cycle, sometimes called the "Benner cycle," continues to be referenced in later financial and technical-analysis literature discussing historical approaches to cyclical price forecasting, and his original forecast tables - extending, in later printings, to the year 2059 - are still occasionally reproduced by market commentators.

See also

• Edward R. Dewey
• Foundation for the Study of Cycles
• Clément Juglar
• Kondratiev wave
• Business cycle

References

External links

• "Benner's prophecies of future ups and downs in prices". Library of Congress. — digitized 1905 edition
• Columbia University Libraries: Benner's Prophecies — exhibition entry
• Foundation for the Study of Cycles — official website