Did you know that factories used to have people who would read stories out loud
in order to keep workers entertained? Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of
Mental Floss.com. This practice, of hiring lectores, appeared in Cuban
cigar factories in the 1860s. The lectores would audition for workers, and once
hired would read what those workers wanted to hear—usually a combination of
the news and literature. And that's the first of many weird old jobs from a
hundred years ago that I'm going to share with you today.
Being a lector wasn't the only job that required public speaking skills. You had
to be pretty comfortable in front of a crowd to be a town crier. They would
stand around and shout announcements, like court orders. While they were
extremely common for centuries before losing their importance, there are still
town criers today. Some places include them in parades and ceremonies. There
are even town crier competitions, for the real experts. This year's international
town crier competition took place in Holland, Michigan. Participants were
judged on things like clarity, sustained volume and demeanor. John Webster, who
hails from Ontario, took first place. Another profession that peaked around
the 19th century but can still be found today is lamp lighting. In cities, people
would use long sticks to light gas street lamps at night then put the
flames out in the mornings. To this day London still has five lamplighters who
manage 1,500 gas lamps. Clearly, they love lamp.
And now for another profession requiring a long stick. Before iPhone alarms, people
still had to wake up for work. And even though mechanical alarm clocks were
invented in the late 18th century, they weren't cheap. Starting around the
Industrial Revolution, a person called a knocker up or a knocker upper would use
a long stick to tap windows in the mornings to wake up residents. This was
primarily a job in Britain in Ireland, and in some towns it didn't phase out
until the 1970s. Thanks to Joshua Pong, among others, who
suggested that job in a comment on our last episode. We couldn't resist a job
title like knocker upper. He wasn't the only one on top of his old jobs, though. A
lot of the submissions were for jobs we already had in the script, but we
appreciate you all, too. Stay tuned til the end of the video to find out what kind
of facts we're crowdsourcing for the next episode. People who have seen Hidden
Figures will be familiar with human computers, people who were hired to do
mathematical calculations by hand. Probably the first great moment in human
computing occurred in 1757, when French mathematician Alexis Claude Clairaut had a
few people help calculate when Halley's Comet would be visible from Earth.
Machine computing wouldn't fully supplant humans until around the 1970s.
Human computers were used during both world wars, as were dispatch riders. These
were people who used motorcycles or other means of conveyance, like camels
and horses, to transport important messages across the front lines. Another
surprising World War One and Two job was cavalryman, a soldier who fights
while on horseback. Despite technology like guns, tanks and
cars becoming more common, every major army that fought in World
War One had a cavalry, and World War Two had a substantial cavalry charge in the
Soviet Union. But that was probably the last major one in history. And before
radar was a thing people in the military still needed to know when enemy planes
were nearby. This became a job, too: aircraft listener. The British especially
had acoustic mirrors that enhanced hearing and helped determine where an
airplane was coming from. Some of these mirrors still exist and are even being
restored. The Japanese, meanwhile, used war tubas. And yes, they're exactly what they
sound like. Starting in the 19th century soda jerk became a popular job. These are
people who created and served drinks like malts, milkshakes and, of course,
sodas. Before cocaine became a controlled substance in 1914, it wasn't unusual for
soda fountains to dole out syrup with cocaine and caffeine in it. Luckily, soda
was good enough that even after removing the cocaine, people still wanted to visit
their local soda jerk. During the 1930s and 40s half a million people had this
job in the US, but the rise of fast food and drive-ins, along with some other
factors, ended the era of the soda jerk. But speaking of people who provided milk:
milkman was once a job all over the world. It's much rarer now. In the 1920s
most people had milk delivered directly to their doors. In 2005, just point four
percent of milk consumers used a service like this, though since some grocery
stores offer at home delivery we are reportedly seeing an uptick in milk
delivery once again. Until the early 20th century, most ice
was made naturally by cutting into frozen lakes, which led to a very cold
job: ice cutter. People did collect and store ice during the winter time in
ancient Greece, Rome, Persia and China, and then use it during the warmer months, but
the ice cutting industry really ramped up in the early 19th century. Ice cutters
would find spots on frozen water where there was ice buildup, cut it out, and
then move it along to the storage and delivery stages. But as cooling
technology like refrigeration got better, there was less and less need for manual
ice cutting. For this next job we have to go back to Victorian England, which was a
little over 100 years ago. But we can't not talk about toshers, who spent their
days (and sometimes their nights) going through the sewers to look for anything
that could be sold for money, like coins or silver spoons.
Toshers carried big sticks—really?? Another job with a big stick?? But these were used
to sort through sewage stuff to find shiny objects they were looking
for. Which leads me to my movie pitch: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles go back in
time, end up in Victorian England, and team up with the toshers to save the world.
Hey! That's another profession that uses a big stick: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
Where there were no sewers there were night soil men, or jake's farmers. These
were people who emptied toilets, often at night, because the waste couldn't just be
conveniently flushed away. The modern era of sewage systems in the U.S. began
around the mid-1800s. A very small number of people could have had a job as a
sagar maker's bottom knocker. Basically, a sagar maker was a skilled pottery maker.
They could make adjustments to the pottery while it was in the sagger, a
vessel that held the pottery while it was in the kiln. But the sagar maker's
bottom knocker was responsible for putting clay through metal loops to
create the bottom of the sagger. Not many places made saggers. This job was most
common in Staffordshire, England. Sagger maker's bottom knocker sagger maker's
*Devolves into gibberish* If you were good with technology
there were a couple of job options in the early 20th century. A telegraphist
was the person who operated a telegraph to get messages from senders to
recipients. Linotype machines changed the print world by making it much easier
to create newspapers, and this led to a new profession: linotype operator. The linotype machine
contained mouds for all of the letters of the alphabet. As the linotype
operator typed, the letters would be assembled into a line. The machine then
used hot metal to create a strip of metal that basically looked like a stamp
of that line. When you put a bunch of these lines together you could create a
whole newspaper page. But it was important for the linotype operator to
type each line perfectly into the machine, or else a mistake would be
copied onto every paper. After the telephone became more popular than the
telegraph, telegraphists were increasingly replaced by switchboard
operators, who connected callers to the telephone line of the person they wanted
to talk to. At first the job was done by teenage boys, but apparently they had bad
manners so someone had the idea to hire women. Emma Nutt is generally considered
to have been the first female switchboard operator, earning $10 monthly
for 54-hour work weeks after she was hired in 1878. Switchboard operator
wasn't the only job that children held during this time. In the U.S., slobber
doffers were children who changed the bobbins in textile mills. Some kids swept
mill floors and some even became spinners themselves. Textile mill
accidents resulting in death weren't uncommon, and these children were
also more at risk of respiratory and other diseases. Then, in the 1930s, the
U.S. passed child labor laws at the federal level. Before bowling alleys had
machines to reset the pins after someone's turn, that was the
responsibility of a pin setter or pin boy. Former pin boy Paul Retseck
described the job to Scientific American like this, quote, "You really had to work
fast or the bowlers would yell at you, 'Hey! Get moving!" The machine started
appearing in the first half of the 20th century, but that didn't stop people from
yelling in bowling alleys. Another job that has largely been replaced by a
machine: elevator operator. Before elevators had buttons, a human needed to
run them with a lever, making sure they stopped at the right places. They were
also responsible for opening and shutting the doors. In 1900, the passenger-
operated elevator was invented, and by 1950 they had become commonplace. And no
one would blame projectionists for having a beef with machines, either. Films
used to arrive at movie theaters in multiple reels. The projectionists had to
watch the film each time it played, changing over the reels when they saw
the cues, like a circle in the corner of the screen.
Nowadays, digital projection is primarily used, meaning a single projectionist can
go from theater to theater simply pressing play and moving on. And
according to a projectionist interviewed by NPR, they often only need to come in
one day of the week for an entire multiplex. Finally, a signalman had
several roles to keep railways running smoothly. One famous signalman was Jack
the Baboon, who worked at a train station in South Africa. His owner, James Edwin
Wide, was a signalman, but Jack eventually learned how to pull the levers himself
based on the toots of approaching trains. He kept his job for nine years and it's
said that he never made a mistake. Our next episode is about ways school was
different a hundred years ago. We had a ton of fun reading your suggestions for
old jobs—even the ones we didn't have time to fact-check—and we'd love to hear
your favorite facts about school around the turn of the century. We'll
incorporate one of those facts into that episode, coming out September 4th.
Share your favorite facts in the comments, and make sure you subscribe
here so you don't miss the episode. We'll see you then!