July 17, 2018 • 60 mins
Join Josh and Chuck today as they take a fun look at some of the strange jobs that our ancestors did. It's a SYSK top 10, meaning there will only be eight or so.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan, there's Casper the Ghost
or your producer. Hi Casper. Yeah, Jerry's on vacation. Guest
(00:23):
producer Tristan came in and tapped the record button with
his nose as his per tradition, and then he left.
Here we are. That's the new tradition. People just come
in and be like, yeah, here you go. See remember
the old days when guest producers would claim her to
get in here and witness the magic. I remember, I
can remember. Now they draw lots and just go all right.
(00:44):
I guess I'll go hit record and leave. I'd like
to think it's because they're all overworked. That's why it's
not like, you know, we're past a No, it could
be both, though. I guess how you doing. I'm doing
good man. I'm excited about this one. It's nice to
have something that doesn't, you know, have that much weight
to it. Yeah, I needed a little lighter break. Uh
(01:08):
and big thanks by the way to Denver, Colorado. Just
came back from Denver for two sold out shows. Two
great shows. Yeah, and it was. It was a lot
of fun. I had fun as well. It was a
good show. I think that second one, for my money,
is the one we should release, as are the version
of that show. Which live shows have we released? I
(01:29):
know Chicago was Pinto's pr PRR toes was Atlantic because
that was the benefit show? And what about dB Cooper
dB Cooper with Seattle I believe, and then Grave Robbing
was somewhere in the UK, I would imagine. I think
I think it was London, all right. So we have
not released a Denver show. No, we definitely haven't. We
have not, so this could be the one. If you
(01:51):
ask me, it was just on and popping well money,
You know me, I don't like to overthink these things,
so I'm generally just prone to say it's good enough
for you, it's good enough for me. That's very nice
of you. Let's me get away with a lot. That's right. Um,
all right, well chuck, um hmm. I'm prepared now, are you? Yes? Well,
(02:13):
then let us speak in talking about jobs that just
aren't around anymore, the old stuff you should know. Top ten,
which means we'll do what eight maybe if we feel
like it certainly not ten. I'll tell you that I agree.
So there's actually this article I thought started out pretty
cleverly talking about some jobs that are probably going to
(02:35):
be extinct in the near future, at least as far
as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is concerned. I
didn't even look at that part. So so there's a
few coming up word processors and typists. Not not a
lot of time left on that profession. Door to door
sales workers, which I took issue with because I can
(02:57):
see people wanting that personal touch of being bothered and
harassed by a salesperson. You know happened, Yeah, I think
now it mostly happens like didn't you want to sign
this this um petition or something like that, especially the
door to door thing, not like here's a vacuum cleaner
or set of Encyclopedia Britannicas. I do you know how
just blown away you would be if somebody came up
(03:18):
to your door and tried to sell you a vacuum cleaner.
You'd be like, what's your angle? Are you case in
my house or Encyclopedia's I mean, that's even moral fashion.
At least you still use vacuum cleaners. Yeah, for sure,
that's true. The last one on this list was mail carriers,
which will I don't know, man, I could see, I
could see there's always going to be a need for
physical correspondence, or there will be for a very long time.
(03:42):
I don't know about that one. But the upshot of
all this is is this, Chuck, there's this guy who
you boat you and I know, uh named John Maynard Keynes,
and he is an economist. He was an economist liberal economist,
and he will wrote back in an essay called Economic
Stabilities of our Grandchildren, and it's actually like a quick
(04:03):
easy read. But then he basically said a hundred years
hence so by we will have done away with work,
will have automated basically every process you can think of,
and humans will be totally out of work. And he
said that will be a really good thing, because we
will still be generating wealth, but we just won't have
to work. So people will start writing bad poetry and
(04:26):
painting terrible paintings, and eventually we'll get better and better,
and there'll be like a big blooming of the arts
and of like interpersonal relationships and things like that, and
we'll just be able to hang out and chill, and
we've come close to that. But there's a lot of
a lot of holes in Keynes's argument, whereas like if
you if you're gonna do this, you kind of have
(04:48):
to figure out a way to distribute the wealth evenly,
or else you just end up with the people who
own the machines are the ones who get wealthy, and
everybody else is just out of work. But setting all
of that aside, there is a silverlyinging to the idea
that jobs can be extinct. And these this list of
jobs to me kind of shows like, Okay, you know,
(05:08):
we move on without this kind of stuff. Yes, it's
rough for the people who had that job, but you
can get new training and learn another job, which for
my money is part and parcel with getting rid of
one job. You need to train somebody for another job
as long as we humans can work. Yeah, And it's uh,
I think with most jobs it's not like I mean,
(05:29):
in some cases the thing just no longer exists, but
if it's replaced by a better or newer technology or both,
then then that becomes the job. So I've never bought
into this whole, like, you know, we need to protect
these jobs that are surely antiquated just to keep these
(05:51):
people in work. It's like, no, man, you've got to
roll at the times you do. But I think that
one of the rules of like government or even industry
is to to provide training to keep up with those times.
Sure if if so, someone so chooses for sure. Sure. Yeah. Now,
if it's all robots doing everything all the time, then
we should be able to choose not to and you
(06:11):
should have a nice universal basic income. But someone has
to build and fix those robots, and well you build
other robots to do that, all the materials and at
some point, I just I don't think I agree with
him fully that nobody will be working at some point
you disagree with Can's all right, let's get to it.
(06:32):
Because first, the first job on this list, I don't
think anybody was really sad to see go, although that's
not necessarily true. There were fans well, and I know
one person in particular it was probably pretty sad. Oh well,
we'll get to him, okay. Chariot racing, Yeah, that's an
extinct job. You cannot anywhere in the world find a
(06:53):
professional chariot racer as far as we know. Yeah, but
this was one that was a very very big sport
back in the day and was literally like NASCAR was today,
very much so. Yeah, I mean they had, uh, if
you if you look at let's say they called this
the tracks circuses, if you look at Circus Maximus in
(07:14):
ancient Rome, this thing, I mean, these things started out
where people could just like sit on the hillside and
watch races, but it evolved into Circus Maximus, which held
a hundred and fifty thousand spectators. I saw two hundred
and fifty really. Yeah, well, let's just say it's somewhere
between that then, right between those two numbers. Either way,
it's super impressive, agreed. Yeah, And of course, if you
(07:37):
don't know what a chariot races, it's very simple. It's
just a race where a horse pulls a man in
a in a little two wheeled vehicle called a chariot. Yeah.
Everyone's seen a chariot, and the depictions I've always seen
from cartoons to movies actually apparently were very um accurate.
It's like closed off in the front and then kind
(07:57):
of tapered down the sides and open in the back.
There was one axle with two wheels and it was
connected to a team of horses. Usually about four horses,
maybe two maybe six um and it went really really
fast and it was really really flimsy. So if you
collided with another chariot, there was a pretty good chance
your chariot was going to disintegrate and you were going
to be in trouble. Yeah, I mean just sort of
(08:19):
like modern race cars. The chariots they designed for military battle,
we're not like this. They were very sturdy, often had
a lot of metal and reinforcements. But if you were
out there racing, you know, you wanted to win, so
your chariot was super light, probably just made of wood.
You were probably standing on that axle. It's not like
they you know, you were sitting on some big throne
in the center of your chariot. And uh, it was
(08:42):
sort of like horse racing. They would you would draw
lots for position, they would drop the white cloth, uh,
and then up to twelve racers at a time, you know,
the gates would open and you were off. Yeah, and
there were the height of the Roman Empire. There were
four and then later on six teams. It was a
red team, a white team, a blue team, and a
green team originally, then they added purple and gold and
(09:06):
like you said, this is like NASCAR. Are people devoted
to these teams like they're devoted to racers today, or
like to football or soccer today? Um? Just fanatics. There
was a story that Pliny wrote of a guy who
is a fan of the Red team and when one
of the Red team racers died, the fan threw himself
onto his funeral pyre killed himself out of grief. Wow,
(09:30):
which you know that happens weekly in NASCAR, you know, Uh,
except they throw themselves on their their turkey friar. I
don't know why I think that. I think that's probably
pretty accurate, man. I bet there's a lot of turkey
friars or maybe their barbecue pit, how about that? Sure?
(09:51):
So the dude I mentioned that was probably pretty sad
to see it go, although he did finish his career,
it's not like the sport went away. His name was
Gaius Diocles. I haven't heard of this cat. He was
someone who was likely one of the most rich people
in ancient Rome that was not a member of you know,
(10:11):
royalty or whatever. He raced from the eighteen to the
age of forty two, close to races, and I was
trying to find out some sort of some kind of
ballpark conversion of their money compared to our money today,
and most everyone with a brain on the internet and
(10:31):
internet said no, don't even bother, although some people were like,
it's really just like a one to one ratio, So
I don't buy that. But supposedly he amassed a wealth
of thirty six million whatever you however, you pronounced that
sesster cs. I haven't seen that word before. Ever, that
was their money. I don't know s E S T
(10:53):
E r c E s. Yeah, I've never seen that.
So I mean, let's say it is a dollar then
about thirty six million bucks, which made him one of
the richest people. Yeah, it is. It is impossible that
the ratio or the conversion is a dollar to like
one to one, I would think, so right, Yeah, that's
(11:14):
totally impossible. Yeah, that was just some dummy on answer
this dot com or something. Yeah, I'm tired of thinking
about this. Just say it's wonder why. I think it
was from the webs website take a stab at it
dot com. But that guy raised from eight to two
huh eighteen years old, and apparently he not only was
super rich, but he kept a lot of records of
(11:34):
his races. So he's one of the only people we
can look back on and say, you know, he raced this.
I mean he only one about a third of his
races to it looked like so. But even still just
surviving that many races as boggling, like this is really dangerous.
You know, like if you're if your chariot basically exploded,
you had lashed the reins to your horses around your
waist to stabilize yourself better, and you were still connected
(11:57):
to your horses by your waist and now they were dry.
I give you possibly to death. So most most most
racers carried a knife on them to cut themselves loose
in case they weren't always quick enough with it. Yeah,
and then you had to get your knife out while
you're being drug at however many miles an hour or
whatever they used to distinguish speed. Plus there's always like
(12:20):
a bad guy villain like in the ban Her race,
who was trying to like chop up your chariot and
whip you. Yeah. I didn't see rules as far as
that went, is like were they clean races or was
it you could you know, stick a a staff through
somebody's wheel and flip them over. I did not see.
I thought there was a range of activities. Yeah, that'd
(12:41):
be my guess. You want to take a break. We
already I mean that chariot race took up a lot
more time than I thought. This is gonna be like
a three hour episode. Uh, yeah, let's take a break
and we'll do what four more? Yes, didn't take another break?
Sounds good. Alright, we're back Chuck with another old job
(13:23):
that's not around anymore. This one's armorer, Yes, which is
hard to say. It really strains the back necks, the
back neck muscles. Yeah, I mean, there is a modern
job called an armorer, but we're talking about the dudes
in the Middle Ages who would build your body armor,
which was I mean extraordinarily skilled craft like you couldn't
(13:47):
go to school to learn how to be an armorer.
You basically had to be born the son of an
armorer because the skill was passed along from father to son,
and secrets of how to make these these suits of
armor were kept very closely secret by um by the
people who knew what they were doing, because they had
(14:08):
a lot of competition, and so as a result, historians
and I guess armor specialists of today still have questions
about how some of these guys made some of these
amazing suits of armor because they didn't leave any evidence
of exactly how they did it. Yeah. I mean the
process would start as just like a we are the
(14:30):
people that make suits, uh Taylor Taylor, like a tailor
might today. So you would lumber up, you would uh,
you would strip down to your linen's and they would
take your measurements and then make a replica of your body,
uh if they so had the time out of wood
(14:51):
or something. Because it would take a long time, Like
you couldn't if you wanted a quality suit of armor,
you couldn't go in there and say turn it around
in a week, like sometimes it would take months and
even more than a year. Yeah, I saw years in
some cases. Yeah, because if you want the good stuff,
you gotta go. And these people made a lot of money.
They they were like a subset of the smithies, like
(15:11):
you said, like it was not something that everyone was
good at. So they would spend a lot of time
with wealthy people. They made a lot of money themselves,
and so they had kind of a much higher standing
as opposed to like a regular smithy might yeah, and
and the suits of armor that we see today, um,
the ones you think of usually like a British night
(15:33):
or something like that wearing it, those were made of
like high quality steel. But steal back then this is
like fairly fairly early after we really figured out how
to make steal reliably. And um, it was a real
bear to work with because you would have to you'd
hammer it and then you'd have to heat it up
again and hammer it some more, and it would cool
(15:55):
as you were hammering it and you have to heat
it up again. So it was really tough to work with,
but it was pretty strong. Um. The thing is, because
steel was rare, it was also very expensive to work with.
And so the suits of armor we see today, like
in museums and things, usually come from the sixteenth century.
And even though they were making suits of armor similar
(16:15):
to that and as far back as like the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, you don't see those because they reused
that old steel from the old suits of armor into
the new ones. And then they finally ended in the
sixteenth century when they stopped making suits of armor. But
that's why you only see almost exclusively sixteenth century suits
of armor that makes sense. Also saw that, um they
(16:37):
tried to set up shop near the materials, so instead
of having the transport stuff long distances and and it
sounds like it was in pretty high demand if like
you know, let's say someone died in battle and then
they would say they wouldn't just leave that stuff out there.
Somebody would go and gather up all this stuff. UM.
So I think just living near the product or the
(16:59):
base materials was a big advantage if you were an armorer. Yeah,
and armors kept up their trade. I mean eventually the
the so muskets came along well. At first it made
armor even better. It like pushed the development of armor
plating along even further. But then it outpaced musket development,
(17:22):
outpaced armor development, and then there was no reason to
have um armor any longer because you could just shoot
right through it. But but up to that point, the
armor plating got better, but then people stopped wearing as
much of it, until you basically had a chess plate
in a backplate and you would see people battling still.
I think even uh Napoleon's troops wore chest and backplate
(17:44):
armor and in the American Civil War and that's it,
they were naked right, like, it's so cool, but the well,
no one more thing. In the American Civil War, there
were people who sold chess plates. Yeah, and I think
that was about as as late as it went, late
nineteenth early twentieth century, you could still find an army
(18:06):
here they're wearing a breastplate. Maybe. Yeah. I imagine that
even later on with the advent of muskets, uh, something
that could stop an arrow or or a sword, like,
you would probably still feel pretty good about wearing that.
It wasn't too heavy. One thing I saw that I
thought was pretty ridiculous was that one of the reasons
(18:29):
soldiers didn't didn't wear a more widespread in the Civil
War in America was one it was tough to to
lug around. They got heavy, so when you're on the march,
I don't really want to carry that. But then secondly,
like they would be chided as cowards by their by
their fellow soldiers, which is like, are you a coward
just for taking an extra step of protection and extra
(18:52):
measure of protection when you're out there on the battlefield.
I'm wondering if I'm missing something. I don't know. I mean,
maybe back then it was just getting that time where
they were like old Sally backplate over there, right, he
didn't want to take an arrow to the back. Or
if you were richie rich, because you could afford a
breastplate and everybody else couldn't. So they just kind of
(19:12):
peer pressured you into dying along with them. Maybe maybe
peer pressure you into dying pressure. It's pretty bad. You
don't want to succumb to that peer pressure. So in
this case, the armorer, and we didn't say in the
last one, the chariot racers went away with the fall
of the Roman Empire. This job armor went away basically
(19:35):
when when muskets became capable of piercing steel. Yeah, and
after that, like I said, it may help with the
odd arrow or knife thrust, but maybe a throwing star,
the famous throwing stars of the Civil War. Uh, shall
we move on? Yeah, man, moving along, We're gonna stick around.
(19:56):
In the Middle Ages, it just kind of head on
over to the court jester. Yeah. I think this is
one where there's a lot of misconceptions because while in
the Middle Ages there were court jesters who would dance
around with the colored cloths and the and the little
hat with the bells on it and stuff like that
(20:19):
that did occur, but from what I gathered, the general
court jester didn't really wear that that often. No. And
I think one of the other misconceptions too, is that
they were kind of lunkheads or dummies or just simpletons
who knows, however you want to put it, when actually
they were extraordinarily stu usually among the highest educated people
(20:44):
in in any given country, certainly in a court. Um.
And that they were less fools and more satirists. Yeah, alright,
so let's let's break this down. There were a few
different types. The type you're talking about is the the
legit court jester who would generally perform at the behest
(21:05):
of the court. Uh. And those are the ones that
were sometimes some of the only people who could speak
ill of the king or queen as a satirist. Uh.
You know, but you still would run a risk, you know,
if you took it too far. Imagine there was more
than one court jester who found their their head on
a stake at some point, for sure. Actually, I think
the last one known to have lived, um Dicky Pierce,
(21:27):
who was the fool to the Earl of Earl of Suffolk,
fell to his death from a pulpit and they think
they The official line is that he slipped, but um,
somebody thinks that he may have actually been pushed by
somebody who didn't like his little shove his stick. Yeah.
So uh, it says in this one article, I found
(21:48):
that three types of fool emerged, and that one was
the official court jester. Uh. A lot of times they
would just wear normal clothes rather than that little outfit
that we all know is the court ester. But then
there were definitely noble families and wealthy people who would
adopt men and women who had mental illness or some
(22:09):
sort of physical deformity, and they were a little more
They called them innocent fools, and they weren't paid. They
were just kept around, almost like amusing pets, like wild
Peter from the Feral episode the Fear of Feareral Children episode. Yeah,
and they would get like food and clothes and lodging
and stuff like that, which I think was saying quite
(22:30):
a bit, yeah, because that was that value, you know. Uh.
And then they said the third class was were people
of the members of the fool societies that were big
in France. And I think these were more of like
what we would consider now like a rin fair performing yea,
and they would definitely wear those outfits and really played up.
(22:53):
So um the the type of fool that that belonged
to a court that um they actually had like a
really important position in the kingdom because like you said,
they were satirists, um, and they could satirize at their
own peril. But they were also capable I think of
surviving by bringing it right up to the line, by
(23:15):
knowing just how how far you could press the king
or the queen um or the court. But in doing
this you could you could you you provided a service
to your fellow countrymen, and that you could keep the
king from getting bored and maybe going off to war
um uh inadvisable, or coming up with some terrible new laws.
(23:36):
Or if there were some terrible new laws, the gesture
was in a position to make fun of them satirically
and maybe make the king rethink these policies, to help
out your fellow your fellow people. So it was a
very important position because you were basically the only person
in the entire court who had the ability to speak freely.
And again it was at your own peril to an extent,
(23:58):
but for the most part it was accepted that you
could poke fun at the king and the court and
policy and the state of affairs. Imagine it was a
bit of a nerve wracking job. You would also do
other things. Sometimes you would have other jobs like keeper
of the hounds. Sometimes they would buy the livestock for
the family. Uh. And then during times of war they
(24:19):
would actually function, um almost as like a us O might.
Like they would be brought to the front lines to entertain,
uh well to to to do two things. They would
entertain their own troops to kind of try and ease
them before battle, or they would mock the other side
uh and try and like try and actually thwart their
(24:39):
plan because they would get so mad at the jester
they would not be thinking clearly and like make some
kind of mistake because the haunting. Yeah, because the jester
farted in their general direction. Well, it's funny you mentioned that,
because I did see a lot of times they would
be rewarded with land at the end of their tenure.
And King Henry the Second gave his jest your thirty
(25:00):
acres upon retirement as long as he came back every
Christmas to leap, whistle and fart. That's it. He's like
you get one leap, one whistle, and one far and
if your fart sounds like a whistle, then he just
knocked out two birds of once. Nice. So this with
this job, I'm not entirely sure why it went away.
I think we need gestures more than ever. Um. But
(25:22):
the last one, like I said, was Dickie Pierce, who
was full to the Earl of Suffolk, and he died
in seventy of misadventure. Really well, yeah, he felt that
maybe shoved. Yeah, possible homicide. I guess the closest thing
we have now are either political cartoonists or the White
House correspondence dinner or the Onion or the onion. Who. Man,
(25:46):
they've just been killing it since day one. Still, after
all this time and an evolution, the onion is still
just doing great stuff. Agreed. Um, Moving on. Yeah, So
we're gonna advanced forward a little bit. Lulu new to
the Victorian England to the late nineteenth century. And I
(26:08):
had never heard of this job before. You no, but
we have talked a lot in the past about the
sheer build up of horse manure before cars weren't invented.
I can't remember the stat in New York City but
it's astounding. I found one in London that there were
a thousand tons of horsepoop generated a day in London streets,
(26:29):
a thousand tons, and like this stuff would just be
right there in the middle of the street. There was
also trash, there was also human waste. There was just
all sorts of stuff, terrible stuff everywhere. And part of
the problem was that the Victorian era was really big
on pomp and overdoing fashion. Um. There were long trains, addresses,
(26:50):
lots of skirts over skirts and all this stuff. So
the idea of walking through horsepoop was not not very
pleasing to the upper echelons of English society at the time. No,
they would mean one of their many employees would have
to clean that up later, exactly right. But apparently they
were very big with um appearances, so they didn't want
(27:11):
to even go a second without with getting like any
horsepooper or any trash or anything on them. So thus
evolved a job from this, uh this era called crossing sweepers. Yeah,
and this I saw a lot of different reactions to
this from various historical websites that I went into. Some
people saw this as a pretty valuable job, um, and
(27:33):
then most people I saw found it a bit of
an annoyance in that it was if you had any
skill or were physically able, you would not be a
crossing sweeper. It was what they called a last chance job.
I saw, I saw both, I saw a combination of those.
Read an article by a woman named Jerry Walton, who
I think did pretty good um his historical research on it,
(27:57):
and she seemed to come up with the idea that
you're right on both counts. There were some people who
had who dedicated themselves to this. They were regular crossing sweepers,
and they had like posts like there, They had a
corner that was their corner, and over time they became
kind of a fixture of the neighborhood, maybe the eyes
and ears in the neighborhood. I read of one um
(28:19):
crossing sweeper who actually helped apprehend a murderer by by
going to the cops and telling him what telling them
what he saw. UM. But I also saw that there
were that this was basically the the last stop before Baker,
but but much more respectable than just being an outright beggar.
At least you were providing a service. You could also
(28:39):
very easily become a nuisance though too if you held
your hand out afterward, or pestred people who are just
trying to cross the street. Yeah, I mean they like
in it in this article maybe a little insensitively to
people who will clean your windshield at a stoplight today. Uh.
But again even with that have seen a range of
(29:00):
window cleaning services that range from like nice work, here's
a good tip, to like, let me spit on your
wind shield and rub it with my sleeve. And I
think it was kind of probably similar back then. Sometimes
there were little kids who would do it, or super
old people, or you might be disabled and that is
your last chance to make money. Uh. And people like
(29:22):
you said I had had one of two attitudes. Either
you're doing it right and this is a good service,
or this is sort of a glorified begging. Yeah. And
I saw that for the most part it was kids.
The proclaimed king of the crossing sweeps was eleven years
old and eleven year old boy, and that they would
also add some acrobatics in on the side to really
(29:44):
to really drive home just how great what they were
doing was. Well, it's like what like little flips and
like probably probably what we would call parkour here there
today something like that. But you know this little nimble
like kids who were able to just hop around, do
some some quick acrobatics and then probably hold their cap
(30:04):
out and say thanks, have a good day, what time? Yeah?
So um. One thing though, that was good about this
is that it was something that anybody could start as
a business and take seriously with just the investment of
a broom. That's all you needed. Low barrier to entry
is what they call that, exactly right. And then eventually
(30:24):
it's like sanitation improved and fashions change. The crossing sweeper
was less and less necessary, and they evolved into the
grocery store bagger. You were playing them that one. It
just rolled off on my tongue. Yeah, alright, good And
as I was saying, I was like, man, this is
(30:46):
gonna offend the baggers, and I don't mean it like that.
That's right, all right, especially public baggers who bagged delicious
cake all the time. Thank you for what you do.
Should we break now or do the last for or
do one and then three? Let's do one and then three.
I'm I'm I'm feeling good about things all right. Well
(31:07):
we'll move on to the lamplighters. No way, I changed
my mind. Okay, well we're gonna take a break. Okay,
we'll get too lamp lighters right after this. Okay, okay, Chuck,
(31:37):
thanks for rolling with me on that one. So you
said lamplighters were doing next. I mean, I guess we're
doing all this chronologically, right, Well, that sort of is
in a way, yeah, because we started with cheritots and
now we're up we're still in the late nineteenth century. Yeah,
and this is, man, this is something. I had a
gas lamp growing up at my house, and I really,
(31:59):
really I would like to get a gas lamp put
in on the front porch of my house. You know
that can happen. Yeah, I mean you just gotta run
gas to it, right, Yeah, that's it, and then come
and pay a lamp lighter to come lighted every every
evening and cut it off every every morning. Yeah. I
just love to look like there's a few in our neighborhood,
and every time I see one, I pine for it.
(32:22):
I think you should treat yourself to a gas lamp. Yeah.
It really says a lot, you know, it does. It
says I have conquered fossil fuels in my very own house.
I wonder how wasteful that is compared to electricity. I
don't know, I really don't know. Yeah, I think you
should find out and just do it. I think you
(32:44):
should do it and report back on Okay, I can
always buy carbon offsets, right, totally, alright, So lamp lighters,
like we said, in the days in the nineteenth century
of gas lamps lighting up all of of let's say London. Again,
someone had to light these and there were a lot
of them. So it's not like I mean this was
(33:05):
there were a lot of people doing this job. Yeah,
usually you would have something like under a hundred, but
over fifty lamps I saw, um, at least for Lowell, Massachusetts.
But um, I think Lowe was a midsize city at
the time, said seventy thousand people in the like I
think eighteen eighty census, So that's decent size for the
(33:26):
nineteenth century, you know. Um, but it's certainly nothing like
what London had at the time. They had tens of
thousands of lamps, right, right, But I imagine that that
they probably didn't overtax their lamp lighters more than say
low did, so say, say somewhere around seventy to eighty
lamps um is what one lamp lighter would be responsible for.
They'd have a beat. Yeah, I mean that's a I
(33:47):
don't know how far apart their position, but that's a
that's a full day's work. I would imagine her full evening. Well, yeah,
it could. It lasted for a while, and I didn't
get the impression of what you do in between, but
you would wait around until dusk came, and then you
would start your your route and start lighting the lamps.
And then after any respectable person was asleep, you would
(34:12):
go out and extinguish them, or before daybreaker, around daybreak
you go extinguish them, and then you would eat your breakfast,
and then you set about repairing the lamps, refilling them
as need be, and like getting it rid of any
soot and smudge, and maybe if the lamp got knocked over,
you'd have to set it back up again. So it
sounded like it was, you know, there's a decent amount
(34:32):
of work to it, but supposed it was a very
safe job from whatever. And yeah, I mean they do
mention ladders in here, but I also saw that many
of them were uh lit from below with a long
lighter or and extinguisher that was all kind of in
on one pole. Very ingenious. Yes, I don't know that
they were climbing ladders all over town. No, you could
(34:55):
just raise it up. It would be easier to walk
with just that long staff than to walk with the
lad her. So yeah, because you could also stab somebody
in the eye with it, right any master comes at you,
bam Bamuh. Mainly men held these job, but there were
some women apparently in London that did so. And like
you said, it was pretty safe. It's not like these
(35:17):
things weren't running on gasoline, you know, like whale blubber.
I don't think is the most combustible thing in the world. No, um.
And then I think there were there was also natural guests.
They eventually laid gas lines to these things too, so
all you had to do is walk around with a
like a whale probably whale blubber torch on the end
(35:37):
of your staff and just touch touch the lamp wick
and there you go. And then I think they made
something like two dollars a day for this, at least
in Lowell, mass It's not bad King's ransom. I did
see that there are still some people that do this today.
There are certain parts of England where they still light
(35:58):
the lamps, and I'm sure it's a bit of a novelty.
But um, I don't know that it's necessarily like like
Colonial Williamsburg or anything. I think it's not like it
has to be an old relic themed town, just one
that's involved in being charming. Yea, yeah, lamplighter and if
(36:19):
you see a lamplighter, give him a little how do
you do? Yeah? Off your cap? Yeah, So it's not extinct.
It really doesn't belong on this list at all, though.
A couple of pints their ways, their ways Tuppins. Remember
that song from Mary Poppins so depressing. No, but I
have high hopes for that reboot. Oh, I hadn't heard
(36:40):
anything about that. Please do tell well there's a new
movie coming out they're redoing, uh, Mary Poppins, and and
Emily Blunt is Mary Poppins, which I think it's fine casting.
And I think what's his name? Lynn? Manuel Miranda himself
is in the ABU say the Dick Cabitt part. But
that wasn't Dick van van Dyke, the chimney sweep Dick Abbott.
(37:03):
That would have been a much different role. Yeah, tell me, Mary,
tell me about your life. Shall we move on to
ice cutting? Yeah? This one I love. It's fascinating. You
know my grandmother Bryant said, ice box. Yeah, yeah, I
would imagine that that was like part of her jam, right,
like an actual like something you would point to and say,
(37:25):
that's a refrigerator. But no, no, no, friend, there's no
refrigeration going on whatsoever. It's just an insulated wooden box
that you jam a block of ice into the top
of and let it cool the rest of it down. Yeah.
I mean if she she loved to be a hundred
and she passed away probably I don't know, like eight
or ten years ago, so she was definitely rocking the
(37:46):
ice box when she was a kid for sure, and
into her probably like um married life, I would guess,
the early married life. Yeah, I mean, she told me
a story one time about when she was like twelve
or thirteen, she and her two friends stole the uh,
the horse and carriage that delivered the mail and rode
it around town for a joy ride. That sounds awesome,
(38:09):
so that she was definitely a link to the past.
It was great hearing those stories. The male horse hats
off to you. Granny Bryant. Yeah, hats off Granny Bryant.
So she had an ice box. I just described an
ice box. But the question is this, chuck, Let's say,
where was Granny Bryant born and raised? I didn't know
(38:30):
where she was born, but she generally lived in most
of her life in Tennessee. Okay, in Tennessee. So it's
the middle of the summer and it's super hot, but
you have an ice box. What are you gonna do
for ice? Well, Fortunately, the good folks up in Illinois
and Wisconsin and Minnesota spent the winter harvesting ice. And
(38:51):
that was a job you could have, was an ice harvester,
because before there was the advent of making mechanical ice
and mechanical refrigeration, we got ice by literally harvesting it
from frozen ponds and lakes and rivers during the winter,
packing it away just so, and then come summertime it
would be distributed throughout the country and delivered two homes
(39:12):
by again horse and carriage like the mail. Apparently amazing.
So here's how it would work. You would uh, sometimes
they could use a pond, but generally very slow moving
water was best because it formed really good clear ice.
I saw something about ponds weren't great because the ice
could become kind of stagnant and not not super great. Gross. Yeah,
(39:36):
so maybe a very slow moving uh river would be great.
And the first thing that you want to do is
is probably use a horse drawn plow because you don't
want that thing packed up with snow on top of it. No,
because the snow actually keeps the ice from freezing as
as well, because you want cold wind on it, not
cold snow. Right, right, So you got the horse keeping
(39:58):
the the snow clear. That's one, one step one and
that's what they would call these ice farms. And like
you would have an ice farm, like if somebody came
and tried to poach your ice, you had a legal
dispute going on, like this is a big deal. And
during the summer it was just like a river or
a an aer raided pond or something like that. But
(40:20):
come come wintertime it became like big business. You'd have
whole crewise and operations going on. Right, So you've got
this the horses clearing the snow, and every once in
a while a horse would fall through the ice. It
is sad and you would think, well, so long horse,
But Apparently somebody figured out that you could strap a
rope around a horse's neck and it would be struggling
(40:41):
under the water, and if you pulled the neck tight,
I guess you kind of cut off its air enough
to get it to quit struggling. It does and then
other horses would pull that horse out of the water
and giving it a fighting chance to survive. So that
was a big hazard, not just for horses, but for
the people working there too, and they would wear special
horse shoes that would prevent them from slipping and breaking
(41:05):
through as much as possible. But yeah, I would imagine
a horse drawn plow on ice is just an accident
waiting to happen. I remember growing up in Toledo, we
were allowed to ice skate on some of the ponds
on the golf course, like across the street from US
and UM, but not until Dad went out with his
(41:25):
work boots on stomped around the pond to make sure
that it didn't crack. And it was like, that was
really great that he was doing that for uce, but
it was also not the best technique you could think of,
although it's the only technique I can think of, really,
But hats off to Dad. Too, for stomping on the
pond ice for us to make sure we didn't fall through.
(41:47):
Your dad would do that, Oh yeah, every every winter,
some sometimes a couple of times in winter, depending on
whether the ice had started all or not. Yeah, I've
seen too many movies that just scares me. Yeah, yeah,
I guess. Uh, well I didn't. You don't really think
much about your mortality as a youngster, you know, no
kind of invincible. Uh So, all right, so they're clearing
(42:08):
the snow, but it gets super frozen when there's no snow,
like really frozen, and then you would come in and
score the ice because just cutting it is is too
tough by that point, so you score it by cutting
into it I guess a few inches and getting it
going depending on your operation, dependent on the kind of
(42:30):
size of an ice block you want. But they said
in our article maybe two ft by six ft was
pretty standard. And then you would cut it all the
way through with another horse drawn device, a horse drawn saw,
I think, almost all the way through, and then humans
would saw it the rest of the way, and then
(42:50):
you've got like a floating two ft by six ft
by However thick the ice was chunk of ice, right,
and that's heavy. That's a very heavy thing. So you
would kind of push it with sticks through a channel
that you had to carve out to the shoreline, and um,
then you had to figure out a way to raise
it out of the water onto like a cart or
(43:12):
something like that, and then take it to the ice house,
which was a probably a cement like cinder block building
that um you would pack with sawdust so that this
ice wouldn't melt onto one another or melt at all
during the summer, and then just wait for summer to
come and then bam, start charge of people money, yep I.
(43:32):
And this was a job through like the nineteen thirties
until you know, refrigeration became a thing, and then people
like my grandmother, they couldn't You couldn't stop saying ice
box or tinfoil, Yeah, tin foil. I hadn't thought about that.
I mean, I'd still say tinfoils. Seat and olio she
(43:53):
said olio instead of butter. That's that's growdy. How could
you eat that if you call it olio? You know,
I don't know she never I don't know why she
said that because she didn't use butter. She used the
big bell jar bacon grease that she collected sitting on
the stove, like even on bread. No, no, no no, just
for cooking. I got you. But she was old school man.
(44:14):
It's kind of neat when you have a link to
the past like that. One more thing about ice cutting. Um,
one of the best three stooges ever was called an
Ache and every Steak, and they were ice delivery men.
I think I remember that. Yeah. They had a lot
of trouble with it, as as you can expect. There
were probably some tongs placed in the wrong area at
(44:34):
one point where Mo yeah and Curly Yeah. I think
they both got it. Probably Curly did it first accidentally
to Mo, and then Mo retaliated on purpose, I remember correctly.
All Right, two more to go. Yeah, we really are
doing eight this time? Huh. I think so so, Chuck.
When you go to a bowling alley, right um, and
(44:56):
you roll the ball, I'm gonna go ahead and give
you the benefit of the out. You would hit a strike,
Thank you, Steve ruck In the how you say, I
don't think so. Um, When you knock all his pins
down an awesome machine comes down, well, there wouldn't be
any pins left. But if there was one standing, a
machine would come down, grab it, raise it, and then
(45:18):
a sweeper would come and push all of the knockdown
pins that you hit, which are called deadwood by the way,
back into a little pit, and then a new set
would come down and reset and your ball would shoot out.
And the whole thing is a marvel of mechanical engineering.
It's all mechanical. But there was a time where if
(45:39):
you went bowling, there were little boys back there who
did all the jobs that I just said that machine did.
They were known as pin setters. That's right, and we
have Mr Gottfried Freddie Schmidt to thank for the automatic
pin spotter, where he debuted this thing at the American
(45:59):
Bowling con Grits Tournament. But like you said, previous to that,
they had little pin boys who would for about what
ten cents per game, per bowl or per games. So
if you had like six bowlers bowling in a in
a game, you would you'd make sixty cents a game. Technically.
Oh really, Hi, Yeah, you could make some dough if
you really hustled. Wow. That's not bad for a ten
(46:21):
year old at the time, not at all. But here's
the thing too, I mean, I guess it's the great
way to the best way to pay them for a
bowling alley. But because you don't want to pay them
while there's no one bowling. No, no, it's like per
bowl or per per game. So yeah, if you're just
standing around, you're not making any money. Yeah, So they
would they would set the pins up. They would uh,
(46:44):
they would wipe the pins away by means of carrying them.
And they actually had pinbars that they would step on
to raise these little metal spikes and that's how they
would align the pins. They just didn't eyeball it right.
And I read an account by a former or pin
pin setter. Um, and so you're hanging out there where
(47:04):
people are throwing the bowling ball where it hits the back,
like you're hanging out back there. So there's a couple
of things going on. Um. Apparently teenagers would love to
take aim, sometimes drunken adults, so you had to watch
out for people bowling at you. Pins sometimes would get
knocked to the back and hit you in the shin
or the head or something like that. But this account
(47:25):
that I read was, Um, this guy, this kid was
saying like there was no better way to like secretly
enter the world of adults than to be a pin setter,
because adults would go bowl and get drunk and you
were in the back basically invisible, but you're hearing everything.
You're seeing everything. You could hear something from way down there. Yeah,
from way back there. From what this guy said, at
the very least you can watch their their physical behavior
(47:47):
or whatever. But um, yeah, he said he learned quite
a bit about human nature by being a pin setter. Yeah.
I guess the the equivalent of trying to throw your
ball at the pin setter is when you go to
a golf driving range. Slightly dude comes out in the
in the sixty Volkswagen Beetle with a ball trough on
(48:07):
the front of it, and everybody on that driving range
tries to hit that car. In Unison, it's just I
think one of the things you do. I haven't been
to a driving range and forever, but when that car
comes out, there's one objective, see if you can hit it,
and then that guy driving or the girl driving to
screams at the top of their lug stop stop. I'm
(48:29):
a human being. Well, and for the for people who
don't understand these these old cars are heavily caged, so
it's not like you're gonna hit anybody or breakthrough a
window or anything like that. Sure you're not. But they
also electrify the cage so that the person can't get out.
It's pretty fun. I've always wanted to drive one of those.
I've never seen a beetle. I've always seen like some
(48:50):
sort of like a lawn tractor or something like that
with a pokemobile top on it. Oh see back, I
don't know. I've been by golfing a long time, but
all the courses I went to you had just old gelopes. Yeah,
it sounds like the people running the courses you went
to were smoking grass, growing grass and smoking grass. Right,
Uh so what else about these people? Basically overnight they vanished.
(49:16):
The first moment those automatic pin setters came about. That
was that was that? But the that kid whose account
I read or the man whose account I read as
a kid, No, that still doesn't work, you know what
I'm saying. Yeah, I'm not gonna say it a third way. Um.
He said that it took him about two months to
realize that you set set the pins and then you
(49:38):
roll the ball back to give yourself time to get
out of the way. If you roll the ball back
and set the pins. By that time the person's got
their ball ready and they take aim for you. Jerks. Jerks, indeed,
bowler's notorious jerks. Hmm some of them, sure, Like John Leguizamo, No,
John Toturo, Oh, Jeseus. Yeah, like Tsus you did huh well,
(50:02):
except for the fact that he was a petterist. He
was a bit of a jerk too. Yeah, he was
a better and I forgot about that part. Uh. Yeah, okay,
so pin setters, Uh, the last one. This is my
favorite of all time. Yeah. Party line operator. Not to
be confused with the party line operators from the party
(50:23):
lines of the eighties and nineties. These are the much
more innocent party lines of the early twentieth century. Yeah. So,
here's how telephoning used to work back in the old days.
If you lived out in the sticks, uh, and imagine
even in certain city blocks, but if you lived out
in the rural areas, you would have a shared telephone
line between sometimes ten or twenty houses. Uh, and you
(50:49):
would have your own special ring that you would be
able to recognize. And when someone calls all twenty houses,
the phone rings and you have to know your ring
to answer, or you're gonna pick up and be listening
to your neighbor's conversation, which which happened a lot. Yeah,
apparently that was called rubbering. You have no idea why,
(51:12):
but it's what you were doing, your eaves dropping on
your neighbor. And it's called a party line. Yeah, and
so the party line. Um, they they had party lines
because this is at a time when running telephone line
and operating and maintaining it was very, very expensive because
it was early in the telephones infancy. Right, So you
(51:34):
rural Nebraskan should just thank your lucky stars that you
even have a telephone. Don't don't try to get all
fancy and ask for just your own line. That would
come later. But um, when you had this party line,
you you could ring your own neighbor on the same
party line if you knew their ring. Like when you
look at the old telephones where you have the receiver
(51:56):
that you hold up to your ear and you speak
into the mouthpiece, you see people crank it. Sometimes what
they're doing is they're actually turning a magnet inside a
spool of copper coil um. So that and there's they're
turning it in a way that it's mimicking the ring
of the family on their party line they're trying to reach.
So if the family's ring is a long, short long,
(52:19):
they're like ring, ring, ring, that's how they're they're spinning.
The magnet creates a current which translates into the ring
on all of the other phones in the party line.
So you could call people yourself, but if you wanted
to call outside of your party line, you had to
dial the operator, yes, which was a long ring. Uh.
And you would call central what they called Central, which
(52:41):
is where the switch board was, and they were you know,
someone was there twenty four hours a day, lived there. Yeah,
and like in their little apartment that they would they
would have set up for them. And uh, if you
if you needed an emergency, it was generally agreed upon
that the longest ring possible was an emergency. So if
you're on a party line of like let's say fifteen
(53:01):
houses and there's a tornado coming through, you're the first
one to see it. You would do a long, long, long,
long ring, and everybody on that party line would either
just know that's a warning or they would know to
pick up all, everyone could pick up the phone at
once and Elmer could say we got a tornado come in,
and then it was like the origins of pretty much. Yeah. Yeah,
(53:25):
it was a good way to communicate quickly with your neighbors.
It was. It was a lifesaver. Yeah, another reason you
should just be happy to have any kind of phone line,
you hay seed. So this rubbering thing was was like
you said, it was quite a as you can imagine,
since there have been neighbors, there have been neighbors trying
to get another neighbor's business, So, uh, it was. It
(53:47):
was a big deal. Like sometimes they even said in
here you could kind of fashion a speaker phone if
you just wanted to listen in but not stay in
there by just letting the earpiece drop into like a
bucket or something ooops, and it would just you know,
to amplify the sound and you could go about cleaning
your house and listening in on your neighbor's conversation. Yeah.
And something Granny Bryant knew but took to her grave
(54:09):
and never share with anybody is that if you hung it,
dangled it into a croc a bacon fat, it would
really amplify it. That's I'm sure she had a party line.
There's no way she lived in Tennessee. Starting in the
nineteen d and part yeah for sure. And this actually,
I mean party lines went on for a while, as
(54:31):
you know, in the city, um where you know, people
demanded respect from phone companies. You you got your own
line sooner than later. But out in the rural areas
they continued on quite a while. And there's actually a
movie called Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
Pretty great, cute little romcom from the late fifties, but
(54:52):
it was from nineteen fifty nine and the whole basis
of the plot revolved around a party line. Oh yeah,
like a mix up and it tensional mix of he
toyed with her a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that's a
good one. I like it. Well that's it man. Oh yeah,
party line operators they went the way of the dinosaur
(55:12):
when everybody started getting their own line and you didn't
need the party line operator. Nope, So long, get out
of get out of this office that you live in.
And now we've evolved to the point where everyone has
their own WiFi that's locked down by password and nobody
couldn't use it. Yeah, think about it. Do you remember
the times when you would call a number and you
(55:37):
you you could get any one of a number of
family members at the same number. And now it's like
you call somebody and you're calling that person. Everyone has
a phone number. It's like the next evolution from a
party from party lines to individual household lines. And now
individual people have lines. Because you would call and say,
(55:57):
can I speak to Josh, and then Mom would say,
Josh phone, and then after a couple of minutes, you'd
hear Mom hang up, stop rubbering, and then Mom would
fake it because she needed to know about all your
AH cigarette activities. Yeah, that's right. She'd be like, I
didn't know he switched to men thal. That's it, all right,
(56:22):
I got nothing else? All right? Extinct jobs? Will yours
be next? We'll find out in ten years. If you
want to know more about extinct jobs, there's a there's
an article we didn't cover two of them on the
site at how stuff works dot com. And since I
said that, it's time for a listener, mayo, I'm gonna
call this uh Christiania m follow up. We heard from
(56:46):
quite a few people that have been to this little
idyllic or is it a dyllic village in uh near
Copenhagen in Denmark? Yeah, Denmark, which is where Copenhagen is, right. Hey,
I's been an Abod listener for about five years. I
do not live in Christiania. Is that it's pronounced Christie?
(57:07):
I think Christianna. All right, you may have misspelled it,
but I did visit about five years ago. My cousin
lives in Copenhagen. I live in Ireland, and he took
me on a trip there after dark, in the middle
of winter. It is a beautiful place, filled with arts,
crafts in striking architecture. When we first entered, my cousin
was quick to point out the sign that said have fun,
(57:28):
don't run no photos. Asked him why, and he said,
due to the nature of the site, like the sale
of cannabis and other soft drugs that are otherwise illegal. Uh.
And in fact, I'm adding this part myself, they're illegal
there as well. Um. Because apparently other people said the
cops will rate it sometimes uh. And in fact she
says occasionally it is rated by police and running is
(57:49):
seen as a threat of danger and as his photography
for the same reasons. So apparently you don't run there, brother, No,
you just chill. Yeah, just take its low man. At
just nineteen, I was pretty intimidated. But why what I
saw is lawlessness? Until my cousin mentioned we go for
dinner there. He took me up a stairway covered in
graffiti and artwork, only two open heavy doors into what
(58:13):
remained my favorite restaurant of all time. Yeah, this sounds
pretty amazing. Low wooden beam ceilings, white table cloths, and
a simple, gorgeous, entirely in Danish menu that my cousin
kindly translated. What followed was the most beautiful and memorable
meal I've ever had, and it changed my idea that
this place was lawless and scary. Since then, I've urged
any friends to visit Denmark to stop by. Next time
(58:34):
I visit my cousin, I'll be sure to go during
the day and taking the beautiful murals in the sun
between you guys and the mcelroys. Hope to never run
out of informative and entertaining podcasts. You never will. Lots
of love your Irish Pal. Thanks a lot, Irish Pal.
That was a great story man. The idea of going
to the best restaurant you've ever been to in an
(58:54):
anarchist project in Denmark is pretty awesome. Yeah, and other
people's you I should point out just that went during
the day talked about how just insane some of these
houses were because at one point, I think there was
a a contest or something and all of these houses
or a lot of these houses were built during that
time frame, and you know, they just range from these
(59:16):
crazy art looking homes to just very modest things. But
it just sounds like some people did send a few
pictures like decorating your cubicle around a holiday or something,
which no either do you know. So if you want
to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can
follow us on social you can go to stuff you
(59:38):
Should Know dot com and all of our links are there.
You're gonna love it, And you can also send us
an email, right, Chuck, that's right. Send it to stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan, there's Casper the Ghost
or your producer. Hi Casper. Yeah, Jerry's on vacation. Guest
(00:23):
producer Tristan came in and tapped the record button with
his nose as his per tradition, and then he left.
Here we are. That's the new tradition. People just come
in and be like, yeah, here you go. See remember
the old days when guest producers would claim her to
get in here and witness the magic. I remember, I
can remember. Now they draw lots and just go all right.
(00:44):
I guess I'll go hit record and leave. I'd like
to think it's because they're all overworked. That's why it's
not like, you know, we're past a No, it could
be both, though. I guess how you doing. I'm doing
good man. I'm excited about this one. It's nice to
have something that doesn't, you know, have that much weight
to it. Yeah, I needed a little lighter break. Uh
(01:08):
and big thanks by the way to Denver, Colorado. Just
came back from Denver for two sold out shows. Two
great shows. Yeah, and it was. It was a lot
of fun. I had fun as well. It was a
good show. I think that second one, for my money,
is the one we should release, as are the version
of that show. Which live shows have we released? I
(01:29):
know Chicago was Pinto's pr PRR toes was Atlantic because
that was the benefit show? And what about dB Cooper
dB Cooper with Seattle I believe, and then Grave Robbing
was somewhere in the UK, I would imagine. I think
I think it was London, all right. So we have
not released a Denver show. No, we definitely haven't. We
have not, so this could be the one. If you
(01:51):
ask me, it was just on and popping well money,
You know me, I don't like to overthink these things,
so I'm generally just prone to say it's good enough
for you, it's good enough for me. That's very nice
of you. Let's me get away with a lot. That's right. Um,
all right, well chuck, um hmm. I'm prepared now, are you? Yes? Well,
(02:13):
then let us speak in talking about jobs that just
aren't around anymore, the old stuff you should know. Top ten,
which means we'll do what eight maybe if we feel
like it certainly not ten. I'll tell you that I agree.
So there's actually this article I thought started out pretty
cleverly talking about some jobs that are probably going to
(02:35):
be extinct in the near future, at least as far
as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is concerned. I
didn't even look at that part. So so there's a
few coming up word processors and typists. Not not a
lot of time left on that profession. Door to door
sales workers, which I took issue with because I can
(02:57):
see people wanting that personal touch of being bothered and
harassed by a salesperson. You know happened, Yeah, I think
now it mostly happens like didn't you want to sign
this this um petition or something like that, especially the
door to door thing, not like here's a vacuum cleaner
or set of Encyclopedia Britannicas. I do you know how
just blown away you would be if somebody came up
(03:18):
to your door and tried to sell you a vacuum cleaner.
You'd be like, what's your angle? Are you case in
my house or Encyclopedia's I mean, that's even moral fashion.
At least you still use vacuum cleaners. Yeah, for sure,
that's true. The last one on this list was mail carriers,
which will I don't know, man, I could see, I
could see there's always going to be a need for
physical correspondence, or there will be for a very long time.
(03:42):
I don't know about that one. But the upshot of
all this is is this, Chuck, there's this guy who
you boat you and I know, uh named John Maynard Keynes,
and he is an economist. He was an economist liberal economist,
and he will wrote back in an essay called Economic
Stabilities of our Grandchildren, and it's actually like a quick
(04:03):
easy read. But then he basically said a hundred years
hence so by we will have done away with work,
will have automated basically every process you can think of,
and humans will be totally out of work. And he
said that will be a really good thing, because we
will still be generating wealth, but we just won't have
to work. So people will start writing bad poetry and
(04:26):
painting terrible paintings, and eventually we'll get better and better,
and there'll be like a big blooming of the arts
and of like interpersonal relationships and things like that, and
we'll just be able to hang out and chill, and
we've come close to that. But there's a lot of
a lot of holes in Keynes's argument, whereas like if
you if you're gonna do this, you kind of have
(04:48):
to figure out a way to distribute the wealth evenly,
or else you just end up with the people who
own the machines are the ones who get wealthy, and
everybody else is just out of work. But setting all
of that aside, there is a silverlyinging to the idea
that jobs can be extinct. And these this list of
jobs to me kind of shows like, Okay, you know,
(05:08):
we move on without this kind of stuff. Yes, it's
rough for the people who had that job, but you
can get new training and learn another job, which for
my money is part and parcel with getting rid of
one job. You need to train somebody for another job
as long as we humans can work. Yeah, And it's uh,
I think with most jobs it's not like I mean,
(05:29):
in some cases the thing just no longer exists, but
if it's replaced by a better or newer technology or both,
then then that becomes the job. So I've never bought
into this whole, like, you know, we need to protect
these jobs that are surely antiquated just to keep these
(05:51):
people in work. It's like, no, man, you've got to
roll at the times you do. But I think that
one of the rules of like government or even industry
is to to provide training to keep up with those times.
Sure if if so, someone so chooses for sure. Sure. Yeah. Now,
if it's all robots doing everything all the time, then
we should be able to choose not to and you
(06:11):
should have a nice universal basic income. But someone has
to build and fix those robots, and well you build
other robots to do that, all the materials and at
some point, I just I don't think I agree with
him fully that nobody will be working at some point
you disagree with Can's all right, let's get to it.
(06:32):
Because first, the first job on this list, I don't
think anybody was really sad to see go, although that's
not necessarily true. There were fans well, and I know
one person in particular it was probably pretty sad. Oh well,
we'll get to him, okay. Chariot racing, Yeah, that's an
extinct job. You cannot anywhere in the world find a
(06:53):
professional chariot racer as far as we know. Yeah, but
this was one that was a very very big sport
back in the day and was literally like NASCAR was today,
very much so. Yeah, I mean they had, uh, if
you if you look at let's say they called this
the tracks circuses, if you look at Circus Maximus in
(07:14):
ancient Rome, this thing, I mean, these things started out
where people could just like sit on the hillside and
watch races, but it evolved into Circus Maximus, which held
a hundred and fifty thousand spectators. I saw two hundred
and fifty really. Yeah, well, let's just say it's somewhere
between that then, right between those two numbers. Either way,
it's super impressive, agreed. Yeah, And of course, if you
(07:37):
don't know what a chariot races, it's very simple. It's
just a race where a horse pulls a man in
a in a little two wheeled vehicle called a chariot. Yeah.
Everyone's seen a chariot, and the depictions I've always seen
from cartoons to movies actually apparently were very um accurate.
It's like closed off in the front and then kind
(07:57):
of tapered down the sides and open in the back.
There was one axle with two wheels and it was
connected to a team of horses. Usually about four horses,
maybe two maybe six um and it went really really
fast and it was really really flimsy. So if you
collided with another chariot, there was a pretty good chance
your chariot was going to disintegrate and you were going
to be in trouble. Yeah, I mean just sort of
(08:19):
like modern race cars. The chariots they designed for military battle,
we're not like this. They were very sturdy, often had
a lot of metal and reinforcements. But if you were
out there racing, you know, you wanted to win, so
your chariot was super light, probably just made of wood.
You were probably standing on that axle. It's not like
they you know, you were sitting on some big throne
in the center of your chariot. And uh, it was
(08:42):
sort of like horse racing. They would you would draw
lots for position, they would drop the white cloth, uh,
and then up to twelve racers at a time, you know,
the gates would open and you were off. Yeah, and
there were the height of the Roman Empire. There were
four and then later on six teams. It was a
red team, a white team, a blue team, and a
green team originally, then they added purple and gold and
(09:06):
like you said, this is like NASCAR. Are people devoted
to these teams like they're devoted to racers today, or
like to football or soccer today? Um? Just fanatics. There
was a story that Pliny wrote of a guy who
is a fan of the Red team and when one
of the Red team racers died, the fan threw himself
onto his funeral pyre killed himself out of grief. Wow,
(09:30):
which you know that happens weekly in NASCAR, you know, Uh,
except they throw themselves on their their turkey friar. I
don't know why I think that. I think that's probably
pretty accurate, man. I bet there's a lot of turkey
friars or maybe their barbecue pit, how about that? Sure?
(09:51):
So the dude I mentioned that was probably pretty sad
to see it go, although he did finish his career,
it's not like the sport went away. His name was
Gaius Diocles. I haven't heard of this cat. He was
someone who was likely one of the most rich people
in ancient Rome that was not a member of you know,
(10:11):
royalty or whatever. He raced from the eighteen to the
age of forty two, close to races, and I was
trying to find out some sort of some kind of
ballpark conversion of their money compared to our money today,
and most everyone with a brain on the internet and
(10:31):
internet said no, don't even bother, although some people were like,
it's really just like a one to one ratio, So
I don't buy that. But supposedly he amassed a wealth
of thirty six million whatever you however, you pronounced that
sesster cs. I haven't seen that word before. Ever, that
was their money. I don't know s E S T
(10:53):
E r c E s. Yeah, I've never seen that.
So I mean, let's say it is a dollar then
about thirty six million bucks, which made him one of
the richest people. Yeah, it is. It is impossible that
the ratio or the conversion is a dollar to like
one to one, I would think, so right, Yeah, that's
(11:14):
totally impossible. Yeah, that was just some dummy on answer
this dot com or something. Yeah, I'm tired of thinking
about this. Just say it's wonder why. I think it
was from the webs website take a stab at it
dot com. But that guy raised from eight to two
huh eighteen years old, and apparently he not only was
super rich, but he kept a lot of records of
(11:34):
his races. So he's one of the only people we
can look back on and say, you know, he raced this.
I mean he only one about a third of his
races to it looked like so. But even still just
surviving that many races as boggling, like this is really dangerous.
You know, like if you're if your chariot basically exploded,
you had lashed the reins to your horses around your
waist to stabilize yourself better, and you were still connected
(11:57):
to your horses by your waist and now they were dry.
I give you possibly to death. So most most most
racers carried a knife on them to cut themselves loose
in case they weren't always quick enough with it. Yeah,
and then you had to get your knife out while
you're being drug at however many miles an hour or
whatever they used to distinguish speed. Plus there's always like
(12:20):
a bad guy villain like in the ban Her race,
who was trying to like chop up your chariot and
whip you. Yeah. I didn't see rules as far as
that went, is like were they clean races or was
it you could you know, stick a a staff through
somebody's wheel and flip them over. I did not see.
I thought there was a range of activities. Yeah, that'd
(12:41):
be my guess. You want to take a break. We
already I mean that chariot race took up a lot
more time than I thought. This is gonna be like
a three hour episode. Uh, yeah, let's take a break
and we'll do what four more? Yes, didn't take another break?
Sounds good. Alright, we're back Chuck with another old job
(13:23):
that's not around anymore. This one's armorer, Yes, which is
hard to say. It really strains the back necks, the
back neck muscles. Yeah, I mean, there is a modern
job called an armorer, but we're talking about the dudes
in the Middle Ages who would build your body armor,
which was I mean extraordinarily skilled craft like you couldn't
(13:47):
go to school to learn how to be an armorer.
You basically had to be born the son of an
armorer because the skill was passed along from father to son,
and secrets of how to make these these suits of
armor were kept very closely secret by um by the
people who knew what they were doing, because they had
(14:08):
a lot of competition, and so as a result, historians
and I guess armor specialists of today still have questions
about how some of these guys made some of these
amazing suits of armor because they didn't leave any evidence
of exactly how they did it. Yeah. I mean the
process would start as just like a we are the
(14:30):
people that make suits, uh Taylor Taylor, like a tailor
might today. So you would lumber up, you would uh,
you would strip down to your linen's and they would
take your measurements and then make a replica of your body,
uh if they so had the time out of wood
(14:51):
or something. Because it would take a long time, Like
you couldn't if you wanted a quality suit of armor,
you couldn't go in there and say turn it around
in a week, like sometimes it would take months and
even more than a year. Yeah, I saw years in
some cases. Yeah, because if you want the good stuff,
you gotta go. And these people made a lot of money.
They they were like a subset of the smithies, like
(15:11):
you said, like it was not something that everyone was
good at. So they would spend a lot of time
with wealthy people. They made a lot of money themselves,
and so they had kind of a much higher standing
as opposed to like a regular smithy might yeah, and
and the suits of armor that we see today, um,
the ones you think of usually like a British night
(15:33):
or something like that wearing it, those were made of
like high quality steel. But steal back then this is
like fairly fairly early after we really figured out how
to make steal reliably. And um, it was a real
bear to work with because you would have to you'd
hammer it and then you'd have to heat it up
again and hammer it some more, and it would cool
(15:55):
as you were hammering it and you have to heat
it up again. So it was really tough to work with,
but it was pretty strong. Um. The thing is, because
steel was rare, it was also very expensive to work with.
And so the suits of armor we see today, like
in museums and things, usually come from the sixteenth century.
And even though they were making suits of armor similar
(16:15):
to that and as far back as like the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, you don't see those because they reused
that old steel from the old suits of armor into
the new ones. And then they finally ended in the
sixteenth century when they stopped making suits of armor. But
that's why you only see almost exclusively sixteenth century suits
of armor that makes sense. Also saw that, um they
(16:37):
tried to set up shop near the materials, so instead
of having the transport stuff long distances and and it
sounds like it was in pretty high demand if like
you know, let's say someone died in battle and then
they would say they wouldn't just leave that stuff out there.
Somebody would go and gather up all this stuff. UM.
So I think just living near the product or the
(16:59):
base materials was a big advantage if you were an armorer. Yeah,
and armors kept up their trade. I mean eventually the
the so muskets came along well. At first it made
armor even better. It like pushed the development of armor
plating along even further. But then it outpaced musket development,
(17:22):
outpaced armor development, and then there was no reason to
have um armor any longer because you could just shoot
right through it. But but up to that point, the
armor plating got better, but then people stopped wearing as
much of it, until you basically had a chess plate
in a backplate and you would see people battling still.
I think even uh Napoleon's troops wore chest and backplate
(17:44):
armor and in the American Civil War and that's it,
they were naked right, like, it's so cool, but the well,
no one more thing. In the American Civil War, there
were people who sold chess plates. Yeah, and I think
that was about as as late as it went, late
nineteenth early twentieth century, you could still find an army
(18:06):
here they're wearing a breastplate. Maybe. Yeah. I imagine that
even later on with the advent of muskets, uh, something
that could stop an arrow or or a sword, like,
you would probably still feel pretty good about wearing that.
It wasn't too heavy. One thing I saw that I
thought was pretty ridiculous was that one of the reasons
(18:29):
soldiers didn't didn't wear a more widespread in the Civil
War in America was one it was tough to to
lug around. They got heavy, so when you're on the march,
I don't really want to carry that. But then secondly,
like they would be chided as cowards by their by
their fellow soldiers, which is like, are you a coward
just for taking an extra step of protection and extra
(18:52):
measure of protection when you're out there on the battlefield.
I'm wondering if I'm missing something. I don't know. I mean,
maybe back then it was just getting that time where
they were like old Sally backplate over there, right, he
didn't want to take an arrow to the back. Or
if you were richie rich, because you could afford a
breastplate and everybody else couldn't. So they just kind of
(19:12):
peer pressured you into dying along with them. Maybe maybe
peer pressure you into dying pressure. It's pretty bad. You
don't want to succumb to that peer pressure. So in
this case, the armorer, and we didn't say in the
last one, the chariot racers went away with the fall
of the Roman Empire. This job armor went away basically
(19:35):
when when muskets became capable of piercing steel. Yeah, and
after that, like I said, it may help with the
odd arrow or knife thrust, but maybe a throwing star,
the famous throwing stars of the Civil War. Uh, shall
we move on? Yeah, man, moving along, We're gonna stick around.
(19:56):
In the Middle Ages, it just kind of head on
over to the court jester. Yeah. I think this is
one where there's a lot of misconceptions because while in
the Middle Ages there were court jesters who would dance
around with the colored cloths and the and the little
hat with the bells on it and stuff like that
(20:19):
that did occur, but from what I gathered, the general
court jester didn't really wear that that often. No. And
I think one of the other misconceptions too, is that
they were kind of lunkheads or dummies or just simpletons
who knows, however you want to put it, when actually
they were extraordinarily stu usually among the highest educated people
(20:44):
in in any given country, certainly in a court. Um.
And that they were less fools and more satirists. Yeah, alright,
so let's let's break this down. There were a few
different types. The type you're talking about is the the
legit court jester who would generally perform at the behest
(21:05):
of the court. Uh. And those are the ones that
were sometimes some of the only people who could speak
ill of the king or queen as a satirist. Uh.
You know, but you still would run a risk, you know,
if you took it too far. Imagine there was more
than one court jester who found their their head on
a stake at some point, for sure. Actually, I think
the last one known to have lived, um Dicky Pierce,
(21:27):
who was the fool to the Earl of Earl of Suffolk,
fell to his death from a pulpit and they think
they The official line is that he slipped, but um,
somebody thinks that he may have actually been pushed by
somebody who didn't like his little shove his stick. Yeah.
So uh, it says in this one article, I found
(21:48):
that three types of fool emerged, and that one was
the official court jester. Uh. A lot of times they
would just wear normal clothes rather than that little outfit
that we all know is the court ester. But then
there were definitely noble families and wealthy people who would
adopt men and women who had mental illness or some
(22:09):
sort of physical deformity, and they were a little more
They called them innocent fools, and they weren't paid. They
were just kept around, almost like amusing pets, like wild
Peter from the Feral episode the Fear of Feareral Children episode. Yeah,
and they would get like food and clothes and lodging
and stuff like that, which I think was saying quite
(22:30):
a bit, yeah, because that was that value, you know. Uh.
And then they said the third class was were people
of the members of the fool societies that were big
in France. And I think these were more of like
what we would consider now like a rin fair performing yea,
and they would definitely wear those outfits and really played up.
(22:53):
So um the the type of fool that that belonged
to a court that um they actually had like a
really important position in the kingdom because like you said,
they were satirists, um, and they could satirize at their
own peril. But they were also capable I think of
surviving by bringing it right up to the line, by
(23:15):
knowing just how how far you could press the king
or the queen um or the court. But in doing
this you could you could you you provided a service
to your fellow countrymen, and that you could keep the
king from getting bored and maybe going off to war
um uh inadvisable, or coming up with some terrible new laws.
(23:36):
Or if there were some terrible new laws, the gesture
was in a position to make fun of them satirically
and maybe make the king rethink these policies, to help
out your fellow your fellow people. So it was a
very important position because you were basically the only person
in the entire court who had the ability to speak freely.
And again it was at your own peril to an extent,
(23:58):
but for the most part it was accepted that you
could poke fun at the king and the court and
policy and the state of affairs. Imagine it was a
bit of a nerve wracking job. You would also do
other things. Sometimes you would have other jobs like keeper
of the hounds. Sometimes they would buy the livestock for
the family. Uh. And then during times of war they
(24:19):
would actually function, um almost as like a us O might.
Like they would be brought to the front lines to entertain,
uh well to to to do two things. They would
entertain their own troops to kind of try and ease
them before battle, or they would mock the other side
uh and try and like try and actually thwart their
(24:39):
plan because they would get so mad at the jester
they would not be thinking clearly and like make some
kind of mistake because the haunting. Yeah, because the jester
farted in their general direction. Well, it's funny you mentioned that,
because I did see a lot of times they would
be rewarded with land at the end of their tenure.
And King Henry the Second gave his jest your thirty
(25:00):
acres upon retirement as long as he came back every
Christmas to leap, whistle and fart. That's it. He's like
you get one leap, one whistle, and one far and
if your fart sounds like a whistle, then he just
knocked out two birds of once. Nice. So this with
this job, I'm not entirely sure why it went away.
I think we need gestures more than ever. Um. But
(25:22):
the last one, like I said, was Dickie Pierce, who
was full to the Earl of Suffolk, and he died
in seventy of misadventure. Really well, yeah, he felt that
maybe shoved. Yeah, possible homicide. I guess the closest thing
we have now are either political cartoonists or the White
House correspondence dinner or the Onion or the onion. Who. Man,
(25:46):
they've just been killing it since day one. Still, after
all this time and an evolution, the onion is still
just doing great stuff. Agreed. Um, Moving on. Yeah, So
we're gonna advanced forward a little bit. Lulu new to
the Victorian England to the late nineteenth century. And I
(26:08):
had never heard of this job before. You no, but
we have talked a lot in the past about the
sheer build up of horse manure before cars weren't invented.
I can't remember the stat in New York City but
it's astounding. I found one in London that there were
a thousand tons of horsepoop generated a day in London streets,
(26:29):
a thousand tons, and like this stuff would just be
right there in the middle of the street. There was
also trash, there was also human waste. There was just
all sorts of stuff, terrible stuff everywhere. And part of
the problem was that the Victorian era was really big
on pomp and overdoing fashion. Um. There were long trains, addresses,
(26:50):
lots of skirts over skirts and all this stuff. So
the idea of walking through horsepoop was not not very
pleasing to the upper echelons of English society at the time. No,
they would mean one of their many employees would have
to clean that up later, exactly right. But apparently they
were very big with um appearances, so they didn't want
(27:11):
to even go a second without with getting like any
horsepooper or any trash or anything on them. So thus
evolved a job from this, uh this era called crossing sweepers. Yeah,
and this I saw a lot of different reactions to
this from various historical websites that I went into. Some
people saw this as a pretty valuable job, um, and
(27:33):
then most people I saw found it a bit of
an annoyance in that it was if you had any
skill or were physically able, you would not be a
crossing sweeper. It was what they called a last chance job.
I saw, I saw both, I saw a combination of those.
Read an article by a woman named Jerry Walton, who
I think did pretty good um his historical research on it,
(27:57):
and she seemed to come up with the idea that
you're right on both counts. There were some people who
had who dedicated themselves to this. They were regular crossing sweepers,
and they had like posts like there, They had a
corner that was their corner, and over time they became
kind of a fixture of the neighborhood, maybe the eyes
and ears in the neighborhood. I read of one um
(28:19):
crossing sweeper who actually helped apprehend a murderer by by
going to the cops and telling him what telling them
what he saw. UM. But I also saw that there
were that this was basically the the last stop before Baker,
but but much more respectable than just being an outright beggar.
At least you were providing a service. You could also
(28:39):
very easily become a nuisance though too if you held
your hand out afterward, or pestred people who are just
trying to cross the street. Yeah, I mean they like
in it in this article maybe a little insensitively to
people who will clean your windshield at a stoplight today. Uh.
But again even with that have seen a range of
(29:00):
window cleaning services that range from like nice work, here's
a good tip, to like, let me spit on your
wind shield and rub it with my sleeve. And I
think it was kind of probably similar back then. Sometimes
there were little kids who would do it, or super
old people, or you might be disabled and that is
your last chance to make money. Uh. And people like
(29:22):
you said I had had one of two attitudes. Either
you're doing it right and this is a good service,
or this is sort of a glorified begging. Yeah. And
I saw that for the most part it was kids.
The proclaimed king of the crossing sweeps was eleven years
old and eleven year old boy, and that they would
also add some acrobatics in on the side to really
(29:44):
to really drive home just how great what they were
doing was. Well, it's like what like little flips and
like probably probably what we would call parkour here there
today something like that. But you know this little nimble
like kids who were able to just hop around, do
some some quick acrobatics and then probably hold their cap
(30:04):
out and say thanks, have a good day, what time? Yeah?
So um. One thing though, that was good about this
is that it was something that anybody could start as
a business and take seriously with just the investment of
a broom. That's all you needed. Low barrier to entry
is what they call that, exactly right. And then eventually
(30:24):
it's like sanitation improved and fashions change. The crossing sweeper
was less and less necessary, and they evolved into the
grocery store bagger. You were playing them that one. It
just rolled off on my tongue. Yeah, alright, good And
as I was saying, I was like, man, this is
(30:46):
gonna offend the baggers, and I don't mean it like that.
That's right, all right, especially public baggers who bagged delicious
cake all the time. Thank you for what you do.
Should we break now or do the last for or
do one and then three? Let's do one and then three.
I'm I'm I'm feeling good about things all right. Well
(31:07):
we'll move on to the lamplighters. No way, I changed
my mind. Okay, well we're gonna take a break. Okay,
we'll get too lamp lighters right after this. Okay, okay, Chuck,
(31:37):
thanks for rolling with me on that one. So you
said lamplighters were doing next. I mean, I guess we're
doing all this chronologically, right, Well, that sort of is
in a way, yeah, because we started with cheritots and
now we're up we're still in the late nineteenth century. Yeah,
and this is, man, this is something. I had a
gas lamp growing up at my house, and I really,
(31:59):
really I would like to get a gas lamp put
in on the front porch of my house. You know
that can happen. Yeah, I mean you just gotta run
gas to it, right, Yeah, that's it, and then come
and pay a lamp lighter to come lighted every every
evening and cut it off every every morning. Yeah. I
just love to look like there's a few in our neighborhood,
and every time I see one, I pine for it.
(32:22):
I think you should treat yourself to a gas lamp. Yeah.
It really says a lot, you know, it does. It
says I have conquered fossil fuels in my very own house.
I wonder how wasteful that is compared to electricity. I
don't know, I really don't know. Yeah, I think you
should find out and just do it. I think you
(32:44):
should do it and report back on Okay, I can
always buy carbon offsets, right, totally, alright, So lamp lighters,
like we said, in the days in the nineteenth century
of gas lamps lighting up all of of let's say London. Again,
someone had to light these and there were a lot
of them. So it's not like I mean this was
(33:05):
there were a lot of people doing this job. Yeah,
usually you would have something like under a hundred, but
over fifty lamps I saw, um, at least for Lowell, Massachusetts.
But um, I think Lowe was a midsize city at
the time, said seventy thousand people in the like I
think eighteen eighty census, So that's decent size for the
(33:26):
nineteenth century, you know. Um, but it's certainly nothing like
what London had at the time. They had tens of
thousands of lamps, right, right, But I imagine that that
they probably didn't overtax their lamp lighters more than say
low did, so say, say somewhere around seventy to eighty
lamps um is what one lamp lighter would be responsible for.
They'd have a beat. Yeah, I mean that's a I
(33:47):
don't know how far apart their position, but that's a
that's a full day's work. I would imagine her full evening. Well, yeah,
it could. It lasted for a while, and I didn't
get the impression of what you do in between, but
you would wait around until dusk came, and then you
would start your your route and start lighting the lamps.
And then after any respectable person was asleep, you would
(34:12):
go out and extinguish them, or before daybreaker, around daybreak
you go extinguish them, and then you would eat your breakfast,
and then you set about repairing the lamps, refilling them
as need be, and like getting it rid of any
soot and smudge, and maybe if the lamp got knocked over,
you'd have to set it back up again. So it
sounded like it was, you know, there's a decent amount
(34:32):
of work to it, but supposed it was a very
safe job from whatever. And yeah, I mean they do
mention ladders in here, but I also saw that many
of them were uh lit from below with a long
lighter or and extinguisher that was all kind of in
on one pole. Very ingenious. Yes, I don't know that
they were climbing ladders all over town. No, you could
(34:55):
just raise it up. It would be easier to walk
with just that long staff than to walk with the
lad her. So yeah, because you could also stab somebody
in the eye with it, right any master comes at you,
bam Bamuh. Mainly men held these job, but there were
some women apparently in London that did so. And like
you said, it was pretty safe. It's not like these
(35:17):
things weren't running on gasoline, you know, like whale blubber.
I don't think is the most combustible thing in the world. No, um.
And then I think there were there was also natural guests.
They eventually laid gas lines to these things too, so
all you had to do is walk around with a
like a whale probably whale blubber torch on the end
(35:37):
of your staff and just touch touch the lamp wick
and there you go. And then I think they made
something like two dollars a day for this, at least
in Lowell, mass It's not bad King's ransom. I did
see that there are still some people that do this today.
There are certain parts of England where they still light
(35:58):
the lamps, and I'm sure it's a bit of a novelty.
But um, I don't know that it's necessarily like like
Colonial Williamsburg or anything. I think it's not like it
has to be an old relic themed town, just one
that's involved in being charming. Yea, yeah, lamplighter and if
(36:19):
you see a lamplighter, give him a little how do
you do? Yeah? Off your cap? Yeah, So it's not extinct.
It really doesn't belong on this list at all, though.
A couple of pints their ways, their ways Tuppins. Remember
that song from Mary Poppins so depressing. No, but I
have high hopes for that reboot. Oh, I hadn't heard
(36:40):
anything about that. Please do tell well there's a new
movie coming out they're redoing, uh, Mary Poppins, and and
Emily Blunt is Mary Poppins, which I think it's fine casting.
And I think what's his name? Lynn? Manuel Miranda himself
is in the ABU say the Dick Cabitt part. But
that wasn't Dick van van Dyke, the chimney sweep Dick Abbott.
(37:03):
That would have been a much different role. Yeah, tell me, Mary,
tell me about your life. Shall we move on to
ice cutting? Yeah? This one I love. It's fascinating. You
know my grandmother Bryant said, ice box. Yeah, yeah, I
would imagine that that was like part of her jam, right,
like an actual like something you would point to and say,
(37:25):
that's a refrigerator. But no, no, no, friend, there's no
refrigeration going on whatsoever. It's just an insulated wooden box
that you jam a block of ice into the top
of and let it cool the rest of it down. Yeah.
I mean if she she loved to be a hundred
and she passed away probably I don't know, like eight
or ten years ago, so she was definitely rocking the
(37:46):
ice box when she was a kid for sure, and
into her probably like um married life, I would guess,
the early married life. Yeah, I mean, she told me
a story one time about when she was like twelve
or thirteen, she and her two friends stole the uh,
the horse and carriage that delivered the mail and rode
it around town for a joy ride. That sounds awesome,
(38:09):
so that she was definitely a link to the past.
It was great hearing those stories. The male horse hats
off to you. Granny Bryant. Yeah, hats off Granny Bryant.
So she had an ice box. I just described an
ice box. But the question is this, chuck, Let's say,
where was Granny Bryant born and raised? I didn't know
(38:30):
where she was born, but she generally lived in most
of her life in Tennessee. Okay, in Tennessee. So it's
the middle of the summer and it's super hot, but
you have an ice box. What are you gonna do
for ice? Well, Fortunately, the good folks up in Illinois
and Wisconsin and Minnesota spent the winter harvesting ice. And
(38:51):
that was a job you could have, was an ice harvester,
because before there was the advent of making mechanical ice
and mechanical refrigeration, we got ice by literally harvesting it
from frozen ponds and lakes and rivers during the winter,
packing it away just so, and then come summertime it
would be distributed throughout the country and delivered two homes
(39:12):
by again horse and carriage like the mail. Apparently amazing.
So here's how it would work. You would uh, sometimes
they could use a pond, but generally very slow moving
water was best because it formed really good clear ice.
I saw something about ponds weren't great because the ice
could become kind of stagnant and not not super great. Gross. Yeah,
(39:36):
so maybe a very slow moving uh river would be great.
And the first thing that you want to do is
is probably use a horse drawn plow because you don't
want that thing packed up with snow on top of it. No,
because the snow actually keeps the ice from freezing as
as well, because you want cold wind on it, not
cold snow. Right, right, So you got the horse keeping
(39:58):
the the snow clear. That's one, one step one and
that's what they would call these ice farms. And like
you would have an ice farm, like if somebody came
and tried to poach your ice, you had a legal
dispute going on, like this is a big deal. And
during the summer it was just like a river or
a an aer raided pond or something like that. But
(40:20):
come come wintertime it became like big business. You'd have
whole crewise and operations going on. Right, So you've got
this the horses clearing the snow, and every once in
a while a horse would fall through the ice. It
is sad and you would think, well, so long horse,
But Apparently somebody figured out that you could strap a
rope around a horse's neck and it would be struggling
(40:41):
under the water, and if you pulled the neck tight,
I guess you kind of cut off its air enough
to get it to quit struggling. It does and then
other horses would pull that horse out of the water
and giving it a fighting chance to survive. So that
was a big hazard, not just for horses, but for
the people working there too, and they would wear special
horse shoes that would prevent them from slipping and breaking
(41:05):
through as much as possible. But yeah, I would imagine
a horse drawn plow on ice is just an accident
waiting to happen. I remember growing up in Toledo, we
were allowed to ice skate on some of the ponds
on the golf course, like across the street from US
and UM, but not until Dad went out with his
(41:25):
work boots on stomped around the pond to make sure
that it didn't crack. And it was like, that was
really great that he was doing that for uce, but
it was also not the best technique you could think of,
although it's the only technique I can think of, really,
But hats off to Dad. Too, for stomping on the
pond ice for us to make sure we didn't fall through.
(41:47):
Your dad would do that, Oh yeah, every every winter,
some sometimes a couple of times in winter, depending on
whether the ice had started all or not. Yeah, I've
seen too many movies that just scares me. Yeah, yeah,
I guess. Uh, well I didn't. You don't really think
much about your mortality as a youngster, you know, no
kind of invincible. Uh So, all right, so they're clearing
(42:08):
the snow, but it gets super frozen when there's no snow,
like really frozen, and then you would come in and
score the ice because just cutting it is is too
tough by that point, so you score it by cutting
into it I guess a few inches and getting it
going depending on your operation, dependent on the kind of
(42:30):
size of an ice block you want. But they said
in our article maybe two ft by six ft was
pretty standard. And then you would cut it all the
way through with another horse drawn device, a horse drawn saw,
I think, almost all the way through, and then humans
would saw it the rest of the way, and then
(42:50):
you've got like a floating two ft by six ft
by However thick the ice was chunk of ice, right,
and that's heavy. That's a very heavy thing. So you
would kind of push it with sticks through a channel
that you had to carve out to the shoreline, and um,
then you had to figure out a way to raise
it out of the water onto like a cart or
(43:12):
something like that, and then take it to the ice house,
which was a probably a cement like cinder block building
that um you would pack with sawdust so that this
ice wouldn't melt onto one another or melt at all
during the summer, and then just wait for summer to
come and then bam, start charge of people money, yep I.
(43:32):
And this was a job through like the nineteen thirties
until you know, refrigeration became a thing, and then people
like my grandmother, they couldn't You couldn't stop saying ice
box or tinfoil, Yeah, tin foil. I hadn't thought about that.
I mean, I'd still say tinfoils. Seat and olio she
(43:53):
said olio instead of butter. That's that's growdy. How could
you eat that if you call it olio? You know,
I don't know she never I don't know why she
said that because she didn't use butter. She used the
big bell jar bacon grease that she collected sitting on
the stove, like even on bread. No, no, no no, just
for cooking. I got you. But she was old school man.
(44:14):
It's kind of neat when you have a link to
the past like that. One more thing about ice cutting. Um,
one of the best three stooges ever was called an
Ache and every Steak, and they were ice delivery men.
I think I remember that. Yeah. They had a lot
of trouble with it, as as you can expect. There
were probably some tongs placed in the wrong area at
(44:34):
one point where Mo yeah and Curly Yeah. I think
they both got it. Probably Curly did it first accidentally
to Mo, and then Mo retaliated on purpose, I remember correctly.
All Right, two more to go. Yeah, we really are
doing eight this time? Huh. I think so so, Chuck.
When you go to a bowling alley, right um, and
(44:56):
you roll the ball, I'm gonna go ahead and give
you the benefit of the out. You would hit a strike,
Thank you, Steve ruck In the how you say, I
don't think so. Um, When you knock all his pins
down an awesome machine comes down, well, there wouldn't be
any pins left. But if there was one standing, a
machine would come down, grab it, raise it, and then
(45:18):
a sweeper would come and push all of the knockdown
pins that you hit, which are called deadwood by the way,
back into a little pit, and then a new set
would come down and reset and your ball would shoot out.
And the whole thing is a marvel of mechanical engineering.
It's all mechanical. But there was a time where if
(45:39):
you went bowling, there were little boys back there who
did all the jobs that I just said that machine did.
They were known as pin setters. That's right, and we
have Mr Gottfried Freddie Schmidt to thank for the automatic
pin spotter, where he debuted this thing at the American
(45:59):
Bowling con Grits Tournament. But like you said, previous to that,
they had little pin boys who would for about what
ten cents per game, per bowl or per games. So
if you had like six bowlers bowling in a in
a game, you would you'd make sixty cents a game. Technically.
Oh really, Hi, Yeah, you could make some dough if
you really hustled. Wow. That's not bad for a ten
(46:21):
year old at the time, not at all. But here's
the thing too, I mean, I guess it's the great
way to the best way to pay them for a
bowling alley. But because you don't want to pay them
while there's no one bowling. No, no, it's like per
bowl or per per game. So yeah, if you're just
standing around, you're not making any money. Yeah, So they
would they would set the pins up. They would uh,
(46:44):
they would wipe the pins away by means of carrying them.
And they actually had pinbars that they would step on
to raise these little metal spikes and that's how they
would align the pins. They just didn't eyeball it right.
And I read an account by a former or pin
pin setter. Um, and so you're hanging out there where
(47:04):
people are throwing the bowling ball where it hits the back,
like you're hanging out back there. So there's a couple
of things going on. Um. Apparently teenagers would love to
take aim, sometimes drunken adults, so you had to watch
out for people bowling at you. Pins sometimes would get
knocked to the back and hit you in the shin
or the head or something like that. But this account
(47:25):
that I read was, Um, this guy, this kid was
saying like there was no better way to like secretly
enter the world of adults than to be a pin setter,
because adults would go bowl and get drunk and you
were in the back basically invisible, but you're hearing everything.
You're seeing everything. You could hear something from way down there. Yeah,
from way back there. From what this guy said, at
the very least you can watch their their physical behavior
(47:47):
or whatever. But um, yeah, he said he learned quite
a bit about human nature by being a pin setter. Yeah.
I guess the the equivalent of trying to throw your
ball at the pin setter is when you go to
a golf driving range. Slightly dude comes out in the
in the sixty Volkswagen Beetle with a ball trough on
(48:07):
the front of it, and everybody on that driving range
tries to hit that car. In Unison, it's just I
think one of the things you do. I haven't been
to a driving range and forever, but when that car
comes out, there's one objective, see if you can hit it,
and then that guy driving or the girl driving to
screams at the top of their lug stop stop. I'm
(48:29):
a human being. Well, and for the for people who
don't understand these these old cars are heavily caged, so
it's not like you're gonna hit anybody or breakthrough a
window or anything like that. Sure you're not. But they
also electrify the cage so that the person can't get out.
It's pretty fun. I've always wanted to drive one of those.
I've never seen a beetle. I've always seen like some
(48:50):
sort of like a lawn tractor or something like that
with a pokemobile top on it. Oh see back, I
don't know. I've been by golfing a long time, but
all the courses I went to you had just old gelopes. Yeah,
it sounds like the people running the courses you went
to were smoking grass, growing grass and smoking grass. Right,
Uh so what else about these people? Basically overnight they vanished.
(49:16):
The first moment those automatic pin setters came about. That
was that was that? But the that kid whose account
I read or the man whose account I read as
a kid, No, that still doesn't work, you know what
I'm saying. Yeah, I'm not gonna say it a third way. Um.
He said that it took him about two months to
realize that you set set the pins and then you
(49:38):
roll the ball back to give yourself time to get
out of the way. If you roll the ball back
and set the pins. By that time the person's got
their ball ready and they take aim for you. Jerks. Jerks, indeed,
bowler's notorious jerks. Hmm some of them, sure, Like John Leguizamo, No,
John Toturo, Oh, Jeseus. Yeah, like Tsus you did huh well,
(50:02):
except for the fact that he was a petterist. He
was a bit of a jerk too. Yeah, he was
a better and I forgot about that part. Uh. Yeah, okay,
so pin setters, Uh, the last one. This is my
favorite of all time. Yeah. Party line operator. Not to
be confused with the party line operators from the party
(50:23):
lines of the eighties and nineties. These are the much
more innocent party lines of the early twentieth century. Yeah. So,
here's how telephoning used to work back in the old days.
If you lived out in the sticks, uh, and imagine
even in certain city blocks, but if you lived out
in the rural areas, you would have a shared telephone
line between sometimes ten or twenty houses. Uh, and you
(50:49):
would have your own special ring that you would be
able to recognize. And when someone calls all twenty houses,
the phone rings and you have to know your ring
to answer, or you're gonna pick up and be listening
to your neighbor's conversation, which which happened a lot. Yeah,
apparently that was called rubbering. You have no idea why,
(51:12):
but it's what you were doing, your eaves dropping on
your neighbor. And it's called a party line. Yeah, and
so the party line. Um, they they had party lines
because this is at a time when running telephone line
and operating and maintaining it was very, very expensive because
it was early in the telephones infancy. Right, So you
(51:34):
rural Nebraskan should just thank your lucky stars that you
even have a telephone. Don't don't try to get all
fancy and ask for just your own line. That would
come later. But um, when you had this party line,
you you could ring your own neighbor on the same
party line if you knew their ring. Like when you
look at the old telephones where you have the receiver
(51:56):
that you hold up to your ear and you speak
into the mouthpiece, you see people crank it. Sometimes what
they're doing is they're actually turning a magnet inside a
spool of copper coil um. So that and there's they're
turning it in a way that it's mimicking the ring
of the family on their party line they're trying to reach.
So if the family's ring is a long, short long,
(52:19):
they're like ring, ring, ring, that's how they're they're spinning.
The magnet creates a current which translates into the ring
on all of the other phones in the party line.
So you could call people yourself, but if you wanted
to call outside of your party line, you had to
dial the operator, yes, which was a long ring. Uh.
And you would call central what they called Central, which
(52:41):
is where the switch board was, and they were you know,
someone was there twenty four hours a day, lived there. Yeah,
and like in their little apartment that they would they
would have set up for them. And uh, if you
if you needed an emergency, it was generally agreed upon
that the longest ring possible was an emergency. So if
you're on a party line of like let's say fifteen
(53:01):
houses and there's a tornado coming through, you're the first
one to see it. You would do a long, long, long,
long ring, and everybody on that party line would either
just know that's a warning or they would know to
pick up all, everyone could pick up the phone at
once and Elmer could say we got a tornado come in,
and then it was like the origins of pretty much. Yeah. Yeah,
(53:25):
it was a good way to communicate quickly with your neighbors.
It was. It was a lifesaver. Yeah, another reason you
should just be happy to have any kind of phone line,
you hay seed. So this rubbering thing was was like
you said, it was quite a as you can imagine,
since there have been neighbors, there have been neighbors trying
to get another neighbor's business, So, uh, it was. It
(53:47):
was a big deal. Like sometimes they even said in
here you could kind of fashion a speaker phone if
you just wanted to listen in but not stay in
there by just letting the earpiece drop into like a
bucket or something ooops, and it would just you know,
to amplify the sound and you could go about cleaning
your house and listening in on your neighbor's conversation. Yeah.
And something Granny Bryant knew but took to her grave
(54:09):
and never share with anybody is that if you hung it,
dangled it into a croc a bacon fat, it would
really amplify it. That's I'm sure she had a party line.
There's no way she lived in Tennessee. Starting in the
nineteen d and part yeah for sure. And this actually,
I mean party lines went on for a while, as
(54:31):
you know, in the city, um where you know, people
demanded respect from phone companies. You you got your own
line sooner than later. But out in the rural areas
they continued on quite a while. And there's actually a
movie called Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
Pretty great, cute little romcom from the late fifties, but
(54:52):
it was from nineteen fifty nine and the whole basis
of the plot revolved around a party line. Oh yeah,
like a mix up and it tensional mix of he
toyed with her a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that's a
good one. I like it. Well that's it man. Oh yeah,
party line operators they went the way of the dinosaur
(55:12):
when everybody started getting their own line and you didn't
need the party line operator. Nope, So long, get out
of get out of this office that you live in.
And now we've evolved to the point where everyone has
their own WiFi that's locked down by password and nobody
couldn't use it. Yeah, think about it. Do you remember
the times when you would call a number and you
(55:37):
you you could get any one of a number of
family members at the same number. And now it's like
you call somebody and you're calling that person. Everyone has
a phone number. It's like the next evolution from a
party from party lines to individual household lines. And now
individual people have lines. Because you would call and say,
(55:57):
can I speak to Josh, and then Mom would say,
Josh phone, and then after a couple of minutes, you'd
hear Mom hang up, stop rubbering, and then Mom would
fake it because she needed to know about all your
AH cigarette activities. Yeah, that's right. She'd be like, I
didn't know he switched to men thal. That's it, all right,
(56:22):
I got nothing else? All right? Extinct jobs? Will yours
be next? We'll find out in ten years. If you
want to know more about extinct jobs, there's a there's
an article we didn't cover two of them on the
site at how stuff works dot com. And since I
said that, it's time for a listener, mayo, I'm gonna
call this uh Christiania m follow up. We heard from
(56:46):
quite a few people that have been to this little
idyllic or is it a dyllic village in uh near
Copenhagen in Denmark? Yeah, Denmark, which is where Copenhagen is, right. Hey,
I's been an Abod listener for about five years. I
do not live in Christiania. Is that it's pronounced Christie?
(57:07):
I think Christianna. All right, you may have misspelled it,
but I did visit about five years ago. My cousin
lives in Copenhagen. I live in Ireland, and he took
me on a trip there after dark, in the middle
of winter. It is a beautiful place, filled with arts,
crafts in striking architecture. When we first entered, my cousin
was quick to point out the sign that said have fun,
(57:28):
don't run no photos. Asked him why, and he said,
due to the nature of the site, like the sale
of cannabis and other soft drugs that are otherwise illegal. Uh.
And in fact, I'm adding this part myself, they're illegal
there as well. Um. Because apparently other people said the
cops will rate it sometimes uh. And in fact she
says occasionally it is rated by police and running is
(57:49):
seen as a threat of danger and as his photography
for the same reasons. So apparently you don't run there, brother, No,
you just chill. Yeah, just take its low man. At
just nineteen, I was pretty intimidated. But why what I
saw is lawlessness? Until my cousin mentioned we go for
dinner there. He took me up a stairway covered in
graffiti and artwork, only two open heavy doors into what
(58:13):
remained my favorite restaurant of all time. Yeah, this sounds
pretty amazing. Low wooden beam ceilings, white table cloths, and
a simple, gorgeous, entirely in Danish menu that my cousin
kindly translated. What followed was the most beautiful and memorable
meal I've ever had, and it changed my idea that
this place was lawless and scary. Since then, I've urged
any friends to visit Denmark to stop by. Next time
(58:34):
I visit my cousin, I'll be sure to go during
the day and taking the beautiful murals in the sun
between you guys and the mcelroys. Hope to never run
out of informative and entertaining podcasts. You never will. Lots
of love your Irish Pal. Thanks a lot, Irish Pal.
That was a great story man. The idea of going
to the best restaurant you've ever been to in an
(58:54):
anarchist project in Denmark is pretty awesome. Yeah, and other
people's you I should point out just that went during
the day talked about how just insane some of these
houses were because at one point, I think there was
a a contest or something and all of these houses
or a lot of these houses were built during that
time frame, and you know, they just range from these
(59:16):
crazy art looking homes to just very modest things. But
it just sounds like some people did send a few
pictures like decorating your cubicle around a holiday or something,
which no either do you know. So if you want
to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can
follow us on social you can go to stuff you
(59:38):
Should Know dot com and all of our links are there.
You're gonna love it, And you can also send us
an email, right, Chuck, that's right. Send it to stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com.
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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