A price tag in dollars hides the thing you really pay with: your time. Divide a price by an hourly wage and you get how long someone had to work to buy it. Do that across a century and you can see where work bought more over time, where it bought less, and how much of the change was the dollar itself losing value.
Pick an everyday item, or type your own price, and compare any year since 1900 with today. Hours are at the average US hourly wage of each year (factory earnings before 1964, then all private-sector production and nonsupervisory workers); type your own pay to see today's number in your own hours. The last chart shows the same idea in bitcoin: how many sats one hour of average work bought each year.
The prices and wages are the same sourced annual series used by The Dollar Since 1792, so the two pages always agree. A "~" marks a year the source data estimates. A price you type yourself is moved through time by the Consumer Price Index alone, so treat it as a rough guide.
Related lessons: Inflation, explained, Time preference, What happened in 1971.